CONSERVATION AND STORAGE CENTRE OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM IN WARSAW

New opening of the museum

The building of the National Museum in Warsaw is a beautiful, historic and of great importance for Polish art and architecture. The icon of modernist Polish architecture expresses the highest quality of exhibiting and caring for the collections. The museum takes up the subject of art in all its manifestations and versions, entering into a dialogue with works and their creators, outstanding artists from different eras. Its new version is to continue and strengthen this image.  The proposed project offers a modern vision of communing with national heritage, which is expressed in its landscape form. The image created by the designed building together with the existing building emphasizes such values as: openness, accessibility, turning to nature, wise management of resources, coexistence of culture with nature.

The museum is an inspiration to search for a vision of an institution in which the care of collections can outline and encourage reflection on the key problems of today’s world. Culture as a source of this inspiration can help shape a better future, manifest the active participation of the National Museum in Warsaw in the current global phenomenon of turning towards nature. The proposed solution is a kind of manifesto of how our understanding of the goals pursued by such institutions is developing – presenting culture as a living, active participant in the life of society, building its awareness and identity setting and shaping the directions of public discourse.

The designed building finds a new way of expressing these goals, realizes the vision of a new opening of the National Museum in Warsaw towards the park, shows this beautiful historic form, giving it a new contemporary face. Immersed in the park, the horizontal body of the pavilion with a centrally located entrance in the form of an oval, landscape opening allows the existing museum to exist in the surrounding greenery, without distorting its relationship with the historical park and the majestic image. The designed complex places the historic building in the accompanying natural garden, while creating a completely new quality of space.

This allows the museum to be opened to a wider audience, presented as an open, inviting institution animating the cultural life of the city and actively participating in it. An expressive gesture of opening and inviting allows us to enter the cultural landscape, but also the recreational, educational and entertainment landscape, being presented as a modern, accessible institution with a dynamic, diverse offer addressed to various groups of recipients.