In the capital city of Poland, WXCA won a competition to design one of the largest museums completed in Europe today. The museum is now under construction at the Warsaw Citadel. The development is a combination of the Polish History Museum and the Polish Army Museum. Located on the site of a former fortification, the complex will become a culture hub rooted in remembrance.
The Warsaw Citadel is a distinctive location on the map of Poland's capital city and is nearby from the city center. The Tsarist fortification dates back to the 19th century and commemorates the Polish freedom wars, holding great symbolic, material, and architectural worth. However, the Citadel has remained isolated from the urban structure and from the city as a living organism for the past 200 years. In fact, the city's citizens have been prohibited from entering. A vast green space of more than 30 hectares is preserved behind the fortress's high brick walls, now encircled by a modernist residential neighborhood constructed before the Second World War.
The location is currently undergoing an impressive transformation as the museum complex is being constructed there. It is made up of two buildings: the Polish Army Museum and the Polish History Museum's administrative center. The complex has been incorporated into the Warsaw Citadel's historic urban design and the main city plaza. This space will grow into a place of culture and remembrance, a kind of "park of museums," as well as a place for the everyday activities of the residents of Warsaw. It will be combined with an expansive city park, the Museum of the 10th Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel, and the Katy Museum, both of which are already located on the site. WXCA designed the project by focusing on the social and natural context while incorporating a solid materiality element to the skin of the museum.
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The façade of the Polish History Museum has been laid with marble slabs of varying grain. They are arranged in horizontal strips, emphasising the layered, stratigraphic structure. It is a structure inherent to geological matter, but also to our archaeology – to the natural, social and cultural processes occurring one after the other. That's why we opted for marble, which is a stone with a very distinctive grain. Each of the marble slabs is different, unique, just as all history consists of unique, individual events.
--Krzysztof Budzisz, architect WXCA architectural design studio.
The Polish Army Museum's building, positioned across from one another and surrounding the emblematic Gwardii Square, is also included in the spatial design Similar to the Polish History Museum, the physical and changeable characteristics of the materials used influence the architectural expression of the Polish Army Museum proposal. In this scheme, the architects chose colored architectural concrete, which has a color resembling the Warsaw Citadel's brick walls. A specially created spatial pattern imprinted on the plane of the vast blocks of the museum's body served to evoke military themes.
Its spatial form was designed to act as a canvas for a sculpture-like interplay of light and shadow that varies with the time of day and affects how the building is perceived as a whole. The WXCA designers based the size of the individual ornamental modules on the scale of a human being, specifically the human hand, allowing the visitor to experience a gradual aesthetic experience as they get closer to the monumental, orderly body and become more aware of the façade's details.
In 2021, WXCA designed the Polish Pavilion for Expo 2020 Dubai, showcasing the country’s natural landscapes. The structure was enveloped by a kinetic sculpture resembling a flock of birds, symbolizing the natural connection established by bird migration between Poland and the UAE. Additionally, WXCA Architects were chosen to design the Muzeum Książąt Lubomirskich in Wroclaw, Poland. The building was also made of stone, balancing classical with contemporary elements.
