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Rural homestead anew - expansion of the Radom Village Museum in Radom

04 of February '25

How to put up a modern building for an institution dealing with ancient architecture? Such a question has been asked many times, most recently during the competition for the expansion of the Museum of Architecture in Wroclaw. Dresler Studio, which designed the expansion of the Radom Village Museum in Radom, referring to the archetype of a country house, also has its own recipe for solving this problem.

TheRadom Village Museum in Radom was established with the last day of 1976. Already at the beginning of the following year, the first museum establishment in the form of an open-air museum was created on the southern outskirts of the city, whose architectural and urban planning concept was created by Tadeusz Derlatka, then an employee of Radom's miastoprojekt, designer of numerous churches and housing estates in Radom. According to the original assumptions, the 50-hectare site was to include 287 objects of old rural architecture, but reality verified these plans, which were eventually significantly reduced.In 2023, the Radom Village Museum gained a few hectares of land in a different location, in connection with which it is planned to return to the original urban planning concepts developed by Tadeusz Derlatka. That's not all, however, as the Radom Village Museum also plans to build new infrastructure to bring the institution into the 21st century. So what will be created at the Radom Village Museum?

Projekt rozbudowy Muzeum Wsi Radomskiej w Radomiu

Development project for the Radom Village Museum in Radom

design: Dresler Studio © Radom Village Museum

tender to the target

The biggest novelty is to be the construction of an office complex to house the administration of the Radom Village Museum. The building, designed by Krakow-based Dresler Studio, will be located on the site of the current parking lot on Stawowa Street. The investment, for which the Mazovian regional parliament has earmarked more than PLN 89 million, will be financed in three installments - the first of which is for PLN 27 million. In the next stage, a three-story, basement office building will be built, with the end of construction currently expected in the first quarter of 2027. A tender for the construction of the new facilities is currently being solicited, with the deadline for submitting bids being February 17 of this year, so work could begin in the coming months.

Projekt rozbudowy Muzeum Wsi Radomskiej w Radomiu

Project for the expansion of the Radom Village Museum in Radom

design: Dresler Studio © Radom Village Museum

museum in (arche)type of country house

The museum's new spaces will be housed in buildings designed by Dresler Studio, responsible, among other things, for the concept for the new campus of the Faculty of Arts at Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce. The Radom building will be erected on a rectangular plan with an inner courtyard and an additional extended wing on the west side, which will overshadow the existing ticket office building. The inner courtyard will be accessible through three passages, and will feature greenery and small architecture. While the first floor will retain a rectangular outline, the second will take the form of six separate volumes, sited on the first floor. Between the superstructures will be viewing terraces accessible to visitors and museum staff. The whole resembles not a single building, but rather a small complex of rural buildings, placed on a high platform.

Projekt rozbudowy Muzeum Wsi Radomskiej w Radomiu

Project for the expansion of the Radom Village Museum in Radom

design: Dresler Studio © Radom Village Museum

In keeping with the Museum's theme, the new buildings will formally relate to the objects presented in the open-air museum. In addition to the use of wooden facade sheathing, the concept's creators decided to design buildings with triangular gables and sloping roofs, referring to the archetype of a country cottage. However, the aesthetic appeal of the new building does not end with the references to the old buildings - to balance the eclectic form, the architects decided to introduce contemporary accents, including many glazed windows.including a lot of glazing - both large-scale glazing, located mainly at the first floor level, and smaller glazing, in the form of squares of different perimeter lengths, as if disorderly scattered across the wooden facades.

Projekt rozbudowy Muzeum Wsi Radomskiej w Radomiu

Project for the expansion of the Radom Village Museum in Radom

design: Dresler Studio © Radom Village Museum

village homestead a.d. 2027

In designing the layout of the new buildings of the Radom Village Museum, the authors from Dresler Studio referred to what is most important in museums - history:

The partially closed layout of several buildings, with blocks covered by gabled roofs on a common platform, refers to the traditional typology of homestead buildings found in the open-air museum belonging to the Museum

- explain the architects.

Projekt rozbudowy Muzeum Wsi Radomskiej w Radomiu

Design of the extension of the Radom Village Museum in Radom

design: Dresler Studio © Radom Village Museum

radom reductionism

The current ticket office building, located right next to the newly designed volumes, will also be transformed. In this case, the architects have decided to significantly simplify the body - the complex multi-gabled roof will disappear, to be replaced by a gabled canopy, referring to the rest of the buildings in the complex. The facades will also be solved in a similar way, covered with wood and interspersed with square window openings of different lengths of the sides. The body of the building, which currently has an extension on the north side, will also be simplified. Its function, however, will not change - it is still where visitors will purchase tickets to the Radom Village Museum.

Projekt rozbudowy Muzeum Wsi Radomskiej w Radomiu

Development project of the Radom Village Museum in Radom - layout of the new buildings

design: Dresler Studio © Radom Countryside Museum

for a conference at the open-air museum

The new building, above all, means new functions. According to the Radom Village Museum, the planned building will mainly house office and administrative space, to which about 45 employees of the institution will move. That's not all, however - with the expansion, the Radom open-air museum will also offer visitors additional exhibition spaces, a library, a museum store and café, art and photography studios, conference rooms and, above all, collection storage. There is plenty to store, as in addition to some 20 wooden objects still waiting to be assembled and implemented into the layout of the open-air museum, the institution also has some 16,000 movable exhibits, including, among others, agricultural machinery, beekeeping instruments or textiles and folk artwork.

Projekt rozbudowy Muzeum Wsi Radomskiej w Radomiu

Project for the expansion of the Radom Village Museum in Radom - inner courtyard with greenery

design: Dresler Studio © Radom Village Museum

in the shadow of the photovoltaic shed

As mentioned, the new buildings will be built on the site of the current parking lot, right next to the current ticket office building. A few of the parking spaces will remain in the original location, but a new, much larger parking lot is also planned to cater to the needs of visitors - the open-air museum is not at all easy to get to, many of the visitors, including those from Radom, come here by private means of transport. The new parking lot will be located on a plot on Stawowa Street, on the other side of the planned buildings. The area planned for development will have about 150 parking spaces for coaches and cars; some of them will be covered with photovoltaic shelters.

Projekt rozbudowy Muzeum Wsi Radomskiej w Radomiu

Project for the expansion of the Radom Village Museum in Radom

design: Dresler Studio © Radom Village Museum

Retention reservoirs will also be built in the same place, and the water collected in them will be used to water the vegetation located in the open-air museum. The cleanliness of the collected liquid will be taken care of by special oil separators, which will remove any contamination with oil or grease. Unfortunately, the project involves the cutting down of dozens of trees, which is to be compensated by new plantings on the open-air museum grounds.

Projekt rozbudowy Muzeum Wsi Radomskiej w Radomiu

Project for the expansion of the Radom Village Museum in Radom

design: Dresler Studio © Radom Village Museum

a small town in a medium-sized city

Infrastructure expansion is not the only planned investment of the Radom Village Museum. At the end of 2023, the institution acquired a sizable plot of land on Starokrakowska Street, near the eastern border of the open-air museum. As was announced as recently as last year, the site will house a brand new branch of the Museum - a small-town complex, planned since 1975, which will include a market square with three frontages of characteristic arcaded buildings. A number of historical buildings have been acquired for the project, including a homestead, a butcher' s shop, a post office or library from Mogielnica, and a community office from Gozd.

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