Competition for the Museum of Polish History

The Museum is not just another monumental building on the embankment. It forms a “bridge” linking the Ujazdów and Botanic gardens intersected by Trasa Łazienkowska. The eastern elevation of the museum is set diagonally to the embankment line, following the park composition logic inspired by the historically evolving axes and directions. This manoeuvre makes it possible to reduce the scale of the structure and treat it as a component belonging to the landscape / garden world.

The form of the museum building is based on frames stretching over Trasa Łazienkowska. Their dense layout, with spacing on two-metre centres, will make it possible to achieve fairly filigree sections of structural components, which, seen at different angles, create forms with different degrees of openwork character, interpenetrating with the vertical lines of trees in the park environment. “Bored” within those frames are the museum spaces, display runs, stairs, galleries, external arcades and loggias. The geometry of the structural bays of the building is a consequence of the main composition lines, both in the urban planning scale and in the internal logic of museum space arrangement. The radial layout produces an effect of planes and rhythms with an organic expression, overlapping at different angles. When seen in parts, the building gives the viewer an idea of the whole, allowing the scale of the concept to be grasped.  When in the Forum – the centre of the radial layout – you can read the whole functional arrangement of the museum. Insights into the narrowing and vanishing hall perspectives – “cuts” of the successive frame modules – make it possible to confront the physical dimension of the building.