Museum of Modern Art breathes new life into downtown Warsaw
- 28 Oct 2024
Warsaw’s new Modern Art Museum building opened on Friday, a minimalist white concrete structure meant to revitalise an abandoned area of the Polish capital long-defined by an imposing Stalin-era palace. Warsaw, a city of 1.8 million people, did not until now have a proper site for its Modern Art Museum. Instead, the cultural institution showcased its collections at various temporary locations. Compared by some to a shoebox, shipping container or bunker, the new museum building designed by US architect Thomas Phifer has been hailed by others as a pearl of minimalism. Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski called the opening “a historical event” for both Polish art and the city. “Warsaw has been changing very dynamically, but the city’s centre had kept its look from a few decades ago,” he told reporters on Thursday.
The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw sits like a bright white box on a major city street. Inside, a monumental staircase with geometric lines rises to upper floors, where large windows flood the gallery rooms with light. City and museum officials say the light and open spaces are meant to attract meetings and debate — and become a symbol of the democratic era that Poland embraced when it threw off authoritarian communist rule 35 years ago.
Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski said the museum’s opening is a “historic moment for warsaw” and that the project, which will later include a theater, will help to create a new city center no longer dominated by a communist symbol. “This place will change beyond recognition, it will be a completely new centre,” he said on Thursday. “There has not been a place like this in Warsaw for decades, a place that would be created from scratch precisely to promote Polish art, which is spectacular in itself.”
During the communist era, the palace served as the site of mass political gatherings. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the large empty square in front of the building became a street market, then a large rundown parking lot — all cut off from urban life by a wide avenue. The square was until now “anything and everything”, a ramshackle spot with no clear purpose, according to architectural historian Anna Cymer. She said “Warsaw still hasn’t been able to shed its heavy historical legacy” and “break the spell cast by Stalin”.
“We are finally on track to bring life back to this part of the city for everyone’s benefit,” Cymer added. “The museum marks a big step towards the creation of a real downtown area and a revitalisation of the neighbourhood.”
For the architect of the nearly 20,000-square-metre museum, the choice of location was significant and “courageous”. “They could have picked any other site in Warsaw” yet they decided to make it “the first thing built that is next to the palace, with all of its history,” Phifer told reporters.
“This will be the new voice and the new home, the new town square, the new forum, the new place to meet, to encounter art and to encounter each other.”
The museum, which cost 700 million zloty ($170 million) to build, has floor-to-ceiling glass on its ground floor as an invitation to all to enter.
Inside, a double staircase leads visitors to the exhibition rooms — for now, mostly empty, with only a dozen works shown before the permanent exhibition opens in February. Over the next two weeks, the museum will celebrate its opening with various events, concerts, dance shows and workshops. The building’s whole interior is bathed in natural light, which Phifer said was intentional. “The light of Warsaw, this light that defines this place, is beginning to weave into the experience of the art,” he said.
“The museum is what I would call a magic box. There is a bit of mystery to it,” he said. “You don’t really understand this work until you come inside and experience it with the art.” Trzaskowski, the mayor, said all ambitious architectural projects are bound to stir up emotions.
“Every large project that has been built from scratch in the world, such as the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Guggenheim in Bilbao or the pyramid in the Louvre, has stirred up controversy,” Trzaskowski said. The real controversies, he added, are yet to come when the avant-garde museum starts staging its exhibitions.
Phifer’s New York-based practice is known in the United States for projects including the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Corning Museum of Glass and the Glenstone Museum expansion in Potomac, Maryland. Asked by a reporter if he viewed the warsaw museum as his masterpiece, the 71-year-old did not hesitate with his answer. “Of course,” he said. He said from the time he began working on the museum 10 years ago, he was aware that his work was part of warsaw’s “remarkable renaissance.”
The city financed the 700,000 million zloty ($175 million) project. In the first weeks it will hold performances and present several large-scale sculptures and installation pieces by female artists, including Magdalena Abakanowicz, Alina Szapocznikow, Sandra Mujinga and Cecilia Vicuña. The full opening with its larger collection is scheduled for February.
The area around the building is still under construction and will eventually become what the architect calls a “forum space,” including a garden and a theater with a black facade, also designed by Phifer.
Not everyone loves the new museum’s austerity, and some residents have compared it to a concrete bunker.
Phifer said he believes the critics will feel differently when they enter the building and see its design and how the white background gives space for the art “to come alive.”
Agencies