Warsaw, Poland

Museum Of Modern Art

The concept of 3-Dimensional WEAVING

as the metaphor of a Modern Art Museum

and Warsaw City Center.

Warsaw City Center an interwoven network of various functions in search of identity.

The new Museum of Modern Art needs to address the role and function of Art in the very city center of Warsaw. It is a very symbolic role, since it will become the place for the interpretation of both the historical and contemporary reality through art. Since the end of WW II, Warsaw City Center has been in the process of spatial creation and redefinition. The old cityscape was destroyed in the war. In the 1950s, the city center was marked by the dominant Palace of Culture. Since the year 1989, this area around the Palace of Culture has experienced a rapid growth. The new MOMA has the challenge of creating a new identity in a contextually loaded site. On one hand is the dominant Palace of Culture with its direct connotation as unwanted present, the prominent symbol of postwar Soviet domination in the country. On the other hand is the vigorous growth of Marszalkowska Street which is redefining the scale of Warsaw through the development of commercial buildings, high rise apartment buildings and office buildings. The MOMA building must work within the regulations of the scale of Marszalkowska Street and the base buildings of the Palace of Culture. It must fit within the street zone and remain an intensive knot of various functions, activities and forms entangled in the center of Warsaw in its quest for a new identity. The new Museum of Modern Art must become the new icon for Warsaw.

Urban strategy

The museum site borders on ul.Marszalkowsk, one of the main streets of Warsaw with heavy car traffic. Since the role of the museum is to create spaces suitable for encouraging a delicate relationship between art and its preceptors, the urban strategy has been focused on creating a barrier wall along Marszalkowska street. Thus the commercial functions of the museum program were placed along Marszalkowska Street, in form of a long horizontal building of a scale relevant to the Sciana Wschodnia . Behind it we create a pedestrian zone – an enclosure of relatively isolated and calm public space, interwoven between the plaza and the park, between three exits from the subway. This new spatial order underlines the importance of the pedestrian access and visual opening from plaza towards the park. This is a new pedestrian route, along which we can place a semi-isolated entrance to the Museum. The allowable street wall height along ul.Marszalkowska and around the site is 26 m., locally the building can rise up to 36 m. This gives the building an overall horizontal flat character. Since it cannot compete with the scale and the axial static composition of the Palace of Culture, we focused our attention on creating a contrasting and dynamic form that is open along the south-north axis linking the plaza and the park. The Museum therefore does not serve as a barrier between the park and plaza but actively links the two, visually, spatially, and physically. The complex spatial structure of interwoven functional threads of the building are carefully designed to form enclosed and semi open courtyards and resting areas extending in every direction from the main foyer up to the sky, and from the upper galleries to the park and plaza. Also the views from the roof top functions, as restaurant, amphitheater and the roof garden, are directed south north, in order to heighten the connection and unity park, museum and plaza.

Concept of WEAVING

Multidirectional WEAVING of function, direction, space and light is the underlying concept for our proposal for The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw Poland. Traditionally, one thinks of the weaving of fabric, the supple strands of the warp and weft coming together to make fabrics of various colors, patterns, and materials. The strong lengthwise warps are the fixed strands on the loom around which the horizontal strands of the weft weave over and under. The variety of yarn, colors, and the coming together of different strands yields an entire world of color and beauty explored by every culture over thousands of years. 　The process of weaving strands to make fabric translates to an interlacing of strips to make baskets, a three dimensional surface, a stiffened fabric creating a skin in three dimensions.

For our proposal, we strove to extend the weave beyond a two dimensional skin to a three dimensional weave along x, y, and z axes. Gallery spaces weave with back of house and educational spaces, commercial program interlaces with museum program to create unexpected adjacencies, voids, and views. Importantly, the weave extends beyond the building into the park, plaza, and city beyond. Water is a strand weaving from the park between commercial and museum program and into the plaza. A strand of park and trees weaves through the heart of the museum creating a lobby entrance of green. The strands of the museum extend into both the park and plaza as strands of different trees and groundscapes.

A program analysis of the museum requirements allowed a programmatic separation into different functional clusters or strands. The most prominent strand is the strand incorporating all of the galleries light levels vary along the length of the strand creating galleries of different characteristics. The gallery strand is a band of formed concrete that loops over and under two horizontal strands housing educational spaces and museum office spaces. At the ends, the gallery strand is shielded by wooden louvers lending warmth and modulating the light within. The horizontal strands of the offices and educational spaces are minimal bands of glass characterized by prints of different colors. All three of these strands project through the commercial band which fronts on ul. Marszalkowska. The commercial band is a box of glass printed with the sky. The glass box of sky disappears as it reflects the sky of Warsaw – prominent are the projecting gallery strand faced with a projecting screen of the exhibit within and the glass bands of educational and museum offices that advertise the current exhibitions on display.

Europaconcorsi Beta

Museum Of Modern Art