Article taken from A&B issue 11|23
Museum of Polish History and Museum of the Polish Army
The area of Warsaw's Citadel is already being compared to Berlin's Museum Island. However, in addition to the creation of important and elegant in its simplicity edifices there, something much more important has happened behind the now open gates of the former fortress.
View from the roof of the Museum of Polish History of the skyline of Warsaw
photo: Aleksander Małachowski © MHP
These are not good times to discuss public investments, because there is little chance to evaluate them fairly today. Architecture has always been created in close connection with politics, but recently the politicization and polarization of the public sphere in Poland has gone so far that objectivity and honest analysis seem virtually impossible. The public schism, further fueled by social media, reduces the debate to black-and-white divisions according to the "whoever is not with us, is against us" rule. The Museum of the Polish Army (MWP) and the Museum of Polish History (MHP) are victims of this situation (project of both: WXCA). Planned for a long time, today they are associated with the current government, they were built with government money and it is the government that decides what version of history will be told in them. And it doesn't matter that the ideas for the construction of both facilities were born during a different political team than the current one, and the museum exhibitions have not yet been created, and even if they were assessed critically, it is not difficult to change or add to them.
elevation from the east side
Photo: Rafał Chmielewski © MHP
But it doesn't stop there. The two mighty edifices have also hit the cogs of another debate: about ecology. On the view of Gwardia Square, which is the centerpiece of the museum's establishment, social media have issued a verdict: concretosis, or crime. Although, with the establishment of the museums, the dozens of hectares of wooded area of the Citadel will be opened and made available as a public park for the first time since the 19th century, the square's stone floor (under which the parking lot was located) has become an object of criticism. Many investments today are evaluated in this rather superficial way: it is easy to pass judgment on the "concretization" of some patch of space, it is much more difficult to undertake, in the context of climate change, a broad debate on the future of building in general.
small architecture and elevation from the east side
Photo: Aleksander Małachowski © MHP
"Let us go down, therefore, and confound their language there, so that one may not understand the other!" one would like to quote Genesis pathetically, describing the quality of the discussion about the latest architecture in Poland. Including the one about two new buildings on the site of Warsaw's Citadel. Some fight against concretism, others against historical politics, admirers of architectural icons criticize the austerity of the forms of the two museums, construction costs and protracted completion times are calculated. Why weren't we talking about this when decisions were made to build the two facilities? It was then that we should have considered whether we needed these facilities, whether we could afford such large investments, and whether the political climate was conducive to creating a narrative about the past. Since the climate catastrophe is a fact, perhaps we should not have decided to build these two, and ultimately three, massive edifices in the first place? The trees in Guards Square would not offset even a tiny fraction of the carbon footprint that the construction, production, import of materials generated and that their maintenance will produce. Superficial opinions about the alleged "concretization" or costliness of construction are easy to preach, but they shallow the debate about what and how we should build today. It's a bit like the way we talk about other challenges whereby we would be deprived of conveniences. We want to keep having new smartphones and laptops, flying on airplanes and buying designer items - but let the energy needed to produce them come from renewable sources. By the same token, let's keep building new huge edifices and demolish those erected thirty years ago, but plant them with trees to stop climate change. This is a simplification, but popular discourse often comes down to this.
small architecture and elevation on the east side
Photo: Rafał Chmielewski © MHP
The idea of the Museum of the Polish Army getting its own headquarters has been discussed for many years, with the National Museum, which has been lending wings of its building to the institution, long ago reporting the need to reclaim it. In 2009 an architectural competition was held for the design of a new building for the MWP. It would stand on the Citadel, on the site of the 19th-century tsarist fortress, which had been occupied by the Polish Army since 1918. The location was not controversial; as early as the 1970s it was considered the right place to house the weapons and arms collection. In 2009 it was also already known that the Citadel would be the site of the Katyn Museum (the BBGK studio's design was completed in 2015), both of which perfectly correspond to each other. The winning design by the WXCA studio also won approval: it assumed the construction of a large building on the axis of Wojska Polskiego Avenue and the Execution Gate, and two smaller pavilions on either side of it. The buildings, referring to the layout of 17th-century foot guard pavilions, were to become the three frontages of the central, representative Guard Square. It was already assumed that the square would take over some of the festivities from Pilsudski Square. In this design, rows of trees are drawn along both side pavilions.
elevation detail
Photo: Aleksander Małachowski © MHP
The year 2009 was rich in competitions. In December, another extremely exciting one was decided on the design of the headquarters of the Museum of Polish History (its patron was the then Minister of Culture Bohdan Zdrojewski). "The international architectural competition for the building of the Polish History Museum was the most important architectural event in Poland in recent years," Robert Kostro, director of the Polish History Museum, which had been established three years earlier, wrote in the pages of the magazine "Warsaw Landscape" (published by the capital's City Hall). The structure was to cover the trench of the Lazienkowska Route, connect Ujazdowski Castle with Jazdow, in addition to the 20,000 square meters of space it was to create a public space described by the authors of the winning proposal as: "The establishment of a vast urban lawn over the expressway, which in summer invites you to bask in the sun, and in winter - to stroll in the snow, on the model of London's Kensington Gardens, Luxembourg Gardens in Paris and the garden arrangements of Topkapi Palace."
facade detail
Photo: Aleksander Małachowski © MHP
The first prize was awarded to the vision of the Paczowski et Fritsch studio from Luxembourg, but it went into a drawer rather quickly. The idea of building a ceiling over the Lazienkowska Route and erecting a glass edifice there (the award-winning project itself was disappointing to some as too simple, modest) was subjected to crushing criticism due to the cost and excessive interference with the urban layout of the area. In 2015, then Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz (the Minister of Culture was Malgorzata Omilanowska) decided to move the MHP headquarters to the Citadel. The idea of covering the Lazienkowska Route had no chance of materializing, and the approaching 100th anniversary of regaining independence was a strong incentive to undertake the construction of the museum after all, and there was no dispute at the time about the legitimacy of such a facility. The construction of the World War II Museum was already underway, the great modernization of the Warsaw Museum's headquarters and mode of operation was nearing completion, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews Polin, which had been operating since 2013, and the Warsaw Uprising Museum, which was almost a decade older - the boom in modern institutions telling stories about the past did not stop. It is worth mentioning that already in November of this year, Law and Justice came to power with Prime Minister Beata Szydło, eager to take over this also politically significant project. The opening of the facility was planned for November 11, 2018.
The architects faced a daunting task: they had to change the existing design, locating in the already drawn buildings a new and with completely different requirements institution. The central building was allocated for the MHP, the military exhibits were distributed to two side pavilions (the first one opened in 2023, the second one is yet to be built). The urban layout of the establishment, the plan to build a pedestrian footbridge over the moat on the axis of Wojska Polskiego Avenue, the location of the underground parking (under the floor of Gwardia Square) and the entrance to it - from Wislostrada, through a cut in the wall and ramparts of the Citadel - have not changed. The most visible change has been made to the facades of the buildings.
elevation detail
photo: Aleksander Małachowski © MHP
The MWP pavilions were decided to be made of colored concrete, the MHP building, as more representative, was clad with marble slabs. It is not only of "prestige" importance, its color, drawing, the way the slabs are worked and arranged have their own significance: "They are arranged in horizontal bands that emphasize the layered, stratigraphic structure of the stone. This is a structure inherent in geological matter, but also in archaeology - natural, social and cultural processes occurring in succession. We decided on marble because of its distinctive drawing. Each marble slab is different, unique, just as all history consists of unique, individual events," the architects explain. For the construction of the Polish History Museum 27 thousand square meters of stone were used, the largest of the slabs used is 2.7 meters high (none of the Polish deposits could provide so much material, the marble was imported from Portugal).
elevation detail
Photo: Aleksander Małachowski © MHP
The two buildings, commissioned in August (MWP) and September 2023 (MHP), hide more content, meaning and aesthetic effects. Although the monolithic masses may appear compact and austere, they are worth a closer look. One cannot underestimate the finesse of the three-dimensional zigzags cast in concrete, inspired by the military chevron on the walls of the Museum of the Polish Army - the perfection of their execution is unparalleled in Polish construction. The brick-dyed concrete in the MWP is juxtaposed with planes of copper plates; the light-colored concrete floor only brings out these sophisticated, minimalist compositions of textures. Although the building of the Museum of Polish History is 180 meters long, it's worth going around it (none of the buildings has a rear, back facade, all of them are as carefully finished), moreover - lifting your head. It is then possible to see "hidden" among the expressive veining of the stone, placed in various places bas-relief friezes, whose graphic forms are a transformation of motifs drawn from important works of Polish architecture: from the decoration of the Sigismund Chapel to the details of the Spodek hall, from Gothic cross vaults to art déco ornaments. The main entrance is crowned by a frieze in which one can find echoes of scenes from the Gniezno Doors. Not all solutions and motifs are easy to spot, but looking for them and reading them can be an interesting journey through history.
interior
photo: Aleksander Małachowski © MHP
Both buildings have been opened with small temporary expositions (although competitions have been held for both permanent exhibitions, it will take time to complete them), but they too allow one to read the simple, thoughtful layout of the buildings' interiors, which have been divided into "blocks." The Polish Army Museum is tighter, with successive halls divided by high corridors; the Polish History Museum opens with a large, impressive, three-story high lobby lit by a glass roof.
Both buildings were conceived as offering more than just permanent and temporary exhibitions. There are cinema, educational and workshop rooms, auditoriums, space for libraries and reading rooms, stores, cafes. There is a public rooftop terrace with views on four sides of the world - both to the Vistula and to downtown skyscrapers. However, one mustn't reduce the description of these great investments to just elegant buildings. For it is not their construction that brings the greatest change to Warsaw. It is undoubtedly the revolutionary decision to open up the Citadel area, a mysterious space that has been virtually inaccessible for almost two hundred years. WXCA architects saved a lot of historic greenery, cleaned up part of the area (there is a playground, seating areas, etc.), and left part in a more "natural" state with old trees and historical relics. A beautiful park has been created, which has a chance to detach this place from its association only with the invader and the prison (where Jozef Pilsudski, Roman Dmowski, Fr. Piotr Ściegienny, Ludwik Waryński, Rosa Luxemburg, and murdered at the Execution Gate were Romuald Traugutt, Stefan Okrzeja, Marcin Kasprzak, among others), whose historical content, however, cannot be forgotten thanks to three new and pre-existing (like the 10th Pavilion Museum) establishments here. The "concretized" Gwardia Square will more than once become the site of outdoor events of an arguably different nature (one may take offense at reality, but military shows are very popular), but the park will never be politically characterized. The transformation of the Citadel into an accessible place, let it be, as the media describe it, "the Polish Museum Island," is an event of great importance for the development of Warsaw, a new look at its history and space. A positive, joyful, equal look.
interior
Photo: Aleksander Małachowski © MHP
Anna Cymer
Illustrations courtesy of the Museum of Polish History.
