A box of artistic delights

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw [Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie] was founded in 2005 and since 2008 has been situated on ul. Pańska, across the other side of pl. Defilad. For many years, the museum used the gallery in the neighbouring Emilia pavilion and when this was demolished the main exhibition was moved to a building on the riverside – the Museum on the Vistula. Construction work began in 2019 on the new building between the Palace of Culture and Science and the Wars Sawa Junior department store – a project that has often been described as “iconic”. US architectural studio Thomas Phifer and Partners was commissioned to design it and came up with a minimalist external form: a four-storey building with two underground levels that had a length of 100m and a width of 26m. “But how on earth can this be iconic?” has been the response of many dumbfounded residents and visitors to the city.

“You have to remember that from the outset the plan was to erect two buildings at the same time and not just the museum,” points out Robert Pawlak, who until this April was the president of Portico and remains a member of the board. The company is one of the engineering firms working on the contract. “The two buildings of the project are meant to complement each other, as the gallery is white and the TR theatre will be black. Due to the ownership issues related to the pl. Defilad site, at first we only received a building permit for the gallery,” he explains. For this reason, the development of the TR theatre is most likely to begin in 2025, so we will have to wait to see the final effect.”

But it’s worthwhile taking some time to appreciate the form of the museum. Why is it apparently so exceptional? “Basic geometric forms have been employed to evoke an architecture of rationalism,” explain representatives of the museum (we spoke to Małgorzata Ludwisiak, Agnieszka Tarasiuk-Sutryk, Marta Bartkowska and Tomek Fudala). “Timeless contemporary architecture like that of the Wars Sawa Junior department store on the other side of the street and the hyper-modern design of the museum often involves the use of architectural forms that in their simplicity resemble matchboxes. For this reason, contemporary museums sometimes look like simple warehouses. They are buildings whose main purpose is to store art safely and display it, and whose façades have simple forms in defiance of the postmodernist architecture that was fashionable a few decades ago,” they claim.

However, the simplicity of the exterior is not mirrored inside the building. “Even though its exterior might resemble an industrial building, the interiors are divided up into ‘art rooms’. Each has a different size, layout, area, height and type of lighting. The Phifer building could also be called a museum of daylight. The architectural concept was for the four galleries of the museum to differ from each other in terms of natural light, which can come from above or the side or it can even be absent altogether,” explains one of the team members of the museum.

A team effort

The APA Wojciechowski studio is also involved in the development of the new museum in a consortium with ECM and Portico, who are acting as the contract engineers. “We started working with MSN back in 2017 to prepare the development of the project. We carried out the managerial work required for the application of the building permit with Thomas Phifer, the APA Wojciechowski studio and Buro Happold,” reveals Robert Pawlak. “Our work included the preliminary preparation of the contract for the general contractor as well as organising the tender. We then undertook value engineering (optimising the investment costs) to bring the project within its assigned budget. During the development we are responsible for coordinating the investment process,’ he explains.

The development preparation period ended with a contract being signed with general contractor Warbud. “Due to its complexity and location, the project had to involve many people and institutions – including the city authorities, the Warsaw Metro, researchers from the Warsaw University of Technology and suppliers of custom-built systems. There is no way I could mention them all, but without their patience, critical assessment of the project and consultation and without our superb construction team, the museum could not have been built in its current form,” insists Maciej Urbański, the contract manager at Warbud. Robert Pawlak adds to this that: “When it comes to the museum, we have a superb public partner in the city. But there are also those people who were assigned to the Museum of Modern Art’s technical department,” he says.

A museum with a metro underneath

It’s always a challenge to build in the centre of a major city – and this project has been no exception, as the constructors have had to adopt a unique approach. “Pl. Defilad is an exceptionally built-up square and underneath it there is a dense network of infrastructure. It’s not just that the buildings neighbour each other – there are also underground structures from previous constructions,” points out Maciej Urbański.

According to the Warbud representative, underneath the project lie a network of fibre optic cables, high and medium voltage cabling, ventilation shafts for the nearby metro station and, even more serious than all that, the existing ventilation system for the transformer substation that provides electricity to Warsaw’s Śródmieście district. “The foundations of the museum itself are an entirely different issue and quite a big one. More than half of the building stands directly over the underground railway. A concrete structure has been partially placed over the top of the Centrum metro station and also rests on foundation columns that go 30m into the ground,” explains the contract manager.

Crises? What crises?

The museum was originally scheduled for completion in 2022, but then the war in Ukraine broke out resulting in a labour shortage. Prior to that there was the pandemic, but during that time the work was not delayed for even a moment. “Just imagine the architectural overseers from New York having to use apps like Teams – and that took place for half a year. Even today we have to review certain things, although the Americans come to the building site much more often than was possible during the pandemic,” says Robert Pawlak.

A whiter shade of concrete

According to Maciej Urbański, the Museum of Modern Art is one of the most complex buildings currently under construction in Poland. “It is highly demanding in terms of the technology, materials and quality. The bar for its development has been set very high,” he claims and points out that the unique way the façade is being constructed combines the construction methods used on buildings and on bridges. “We erected the façade independently of the main building. Each giant section of the external façade, measuring 40m by 10m and weighing almost 300 tonnes, had to be lowered by exactly 55 mm and there was no room for error,” explains the engineer.

The museum has a bright white colour, but not because of paint. “Concrete is a crucial building material and our special mixture is now one of whitest in the world. We optimised the gravel content and created our own blend. We tried almost one hundred variants. In the end, we prepared mock-up walls by hand on a scale of 1:1. After many months of tests, two mixtures were used on the building site. The joints between the concrete blocks were sanded down by hand and are now almost invisible,” says Maciej Urbański with some pride.

The collection and the cinema

A museum is not just a building but also its contents and how it’s used. “The museum curators had a unique opportunity to create a museum collection from scratch according to their own guidelines and to participate in the design of the building that was to exhibit this collection,” explains a representative of the museum. “In our new building, there will be around 20,000 sqm to exhibit art divided into different sized areas, which will allow for the display of both small delicate items as well as large-scale installations the size of a small aeroplane,” they say.

According to the museum, a small exhibition room will be used for a permanent installation of the work of the KwieKulik artistic duo, while other archival works will be available in the reading room open to the public. A cinema room will screen the museum’s collection of films. “Around the building and throughout the grounds a sound system has been installed allowing visitors to interact with the audio art. The collection will be stored on 1,000 sqm on the -1 and -2 levels. These levels will also have preservation workshops and a digitisation of the collection,” the museum’s staff reveal.

But the exhibits won’t have the chance to gather dust. “The museum’s programme is focused on continuously changing the exhibitions in reaction to the latest trends in art and contemporary social issues. The museum’s collection will be in a state of constant flux and recombined with works loaned from other collections with the aim of studying and reinterpreting them. Our goal is for the works in the museum’s collection to spend as little time in storage as possible,” explains the museum’s team.

The official opening of The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw will take place on October 25th 2024