On the occasion of the inauguration of the new building of the Museum of Modern Art (MSN)
/6
Deyan Sudjic
No matter how much experience you have looking at drawings or models, it’s only when you see something taking physical shape that you really understand its scale and the quality of light, which are so important here. It’s interesting to look at how a building shapes an institution, and an institution shapes a building. I guess the painful early history of this project has inoculated it against some of the possible difficulties. I found it an uplifting experience to see what a container can do to shape what will happen inside it. It’s still an adolescent building in the sense that it’s got to be tested, trained, and put to work, but you can see those spaces have so much potential.
Joanna Mytkowska
It started with a rather bombastic idea, based not on an institution’s experience, but on analyzing the city plan. That’s why such a big shape and so many square meters were proposed. The failures suffered in the course of the project led us to the idea that the building should be much smaller, more focused, and proceed separately from the TR Warszawa theater building. We were lucky to have so much time; this was probably the greatest advantage of a complex and not always pleasant situation.
DS During that time, you had the chance to experiment and try curatorial
ideas, which is very important. Too many projects begin with a committee
and an architectural idea, but without that sense of leadership and continuity
that takes it from the stage of planning to that of working, functioning, living.
JM Absolutely. The late urbanist Michał Borowski, who was very supportive of the Museum project, invented an empty shell, not the concept of the institution. But that’s not why the process failed. Its failure resulted from ownership claims to land on Parade Square, which no one was fully aware of when we started. There was also no reflection on how a museum in a relatively small country with no tradition of
contemporary art museums can fill a building of that size.
DS “Museum” is a loaded word. You seem to use the acronym MSN more than the word “museum” itself.
JM Yes—which is now on the façade.
Michał Murawski
So you’re not going to be MoMA Warsaw or something?
JM No. At the start, I thought we wanted to be Tate Modern, but I was thirty-five and had no idea what it meant for Warsaw. The Tate was a new institution then, enjoying
enormous success. We thought that’s what we should follow. But years later, we decided to go with the name created by the inhabitants of Warsaw. We never called it that ourselves. We call it “the museum,” but they started to call it MSN, which became a nice brand with much more resonance.
DS 400,000 visitors a year that you plan in the new building is quite a lot.
JM The National Museum in Warsaw has twice that, and that was the basis for our calculation of expected yearly visits. This is the deal with the city. The minimum they expect is 400,000, and the capacity of the building is 800,000 per year. In the
beginning, there will of course be interest in the building. We’ll start with the exhibition of our collection, and other shows that will be relevant for the general public. One of them tells the iconographic history of women’s art from the sixteenth century until today, concluding with a focus on women’s protests, which were particularly powerful in Poland lately. Our monographic shows attracted a bigger public, but the maximum we reached is 50,000 visitors.
DS The Louvre is planning on 7,500,000 people a year; just imagine that experience and the destruction that comes with it. I think what’s special here in the Museum in Warsaw is the chance to have authenticity. The building itself has a unity. It’s got the same tone throughout. It’s a great frame. I suppose it will make everything look beautiful, which can sometimes be difficult. It will also make Alina Szapocznikow’s Friendship sculpture look beautiful, perhaps inappropriately.
JM Somehow, I don’t really see things in terms of the contemplation of beauty, and I doubt our audience will either. Warsaw’s artistic milieu is extremely active, activism-based, and they are already very critical. Our survey of the history of women’s protests will probably be perceived as not enough, and we might be accused of turning something authentic into a canon. I’m sure there will be a lot of changes, discussions, and tension, because this building is very special.
DS It’s interesting how it reflects the tension too. You were talking about how the earlier project could not overcome the tensions of land ownership. The structure of
this building reflects what’s underneath in terms of the subway tunnels.
Thomas Phifer
The Museum’s structural pillars are not on a regular grid. There’s a Soviet-era subway right underneath us. I’m not sure the geotechnical investigators had any accurate drawings of the subway, so they had to excavate.
JM There is one space in the cellar where we can step onto the roof of the station.
TP Well, it wasn’t so long ago that there was a little piece of property that was in the way of construction of the theater, even after the Museum issue was solved. And that piece of property was just twice the size of this room.
JM We had to actively fight for this and, in fact, we have temporary ownership of that piece of land. Because the Museum and the TR Warszawa theater started together,
and officially this investment is run by the Museum, we are obliged to start building by January 2027. Otherwise, it goes back to the former owner.
DS This is the product of pre-communist ownership?
JM Yes—the descendants.
MM In theory, because the claims were brought up by gangsters, effectively, in the 1990s, who later claimed they have the legal rights to be the descendants.
JM When Tom started, the land for the Museum was free from claims. However, we’d been discussing that very important issue for years.
TP Well it was clear, except for this small parcel on the footprint of the theater. I think it’s curious how the context of the Museum is going to be affected by the construction of the theater.
JM The ownership claims were the only reason they were not built together. Now I see it was a good decision, if we’d waited, we would have overlapped with the populist government and construction would never have happened. Tom, what is your impression? You’ve met several people here.
TP Yeah, they’ve all been generous and welcoming. I’ve had nothing but an amazing experience here, particularly with the artists.
MM Did these conversations have some impact on the design?
TP Yes, speaking to local artists influenced how we developed the internal expression of the galleries and public spaces.
JM Maybe we should collect these different phases. In the early stage, Tom was thinking about a façade made of fabric. Still, there are traces of experimenting with a double layer on the façade.
DS So the fabric version would be like dressing the building.
MM Like Christo?
TP Yeah, it was like a Christo. It was white. Then soon, we began to investigate the white concrete and having this double layer, which added to the sense of the thickness and presence in the city.
JM I love what we have, but when we started, it was common for museums and contemporary art galleries to have a huge generic space to build on. The pavilion by the Vistula River designed by Adolf Krischanitz, which we are using now, is like that—one huge space. We thought rooms were more effective for artists, they’re confronted with architecture instead of designing the space together with their works. This may be something very local, since our point of reference is Muzeum Sztuki in Łodź, situated in the same bourgeois palace since the 1930s, with its collection, which we grew up with, always in the same rooms.
TP There are no two rooms that are the same size.
JM With curatorial experience, I thought how we could construct a thematic show in equal boxes. It would look a bit like an art fair. But, with Eastern European art, I feel that the specificity is in the materiality. So that’s why we thought rooms, somewhat more “domestic” spaces, would be better for us. The original idea behind the white Museum was perhaps to calm the cityscape down. This is what Oskar Hansen meant by “architecture of the background.”
TP The first conceptual rendering was made along the boulevard. We took a white strip of paper and put it in perspective not as a building, but as a mirage or an abstraction, a white abstraction that could co-exist with the Palace and the commercial buildings along Marszałkowska Street.
MM Like the Palace?
TP Yes, or with a thin glass skin. At the same time, we were looking at the foundations, at the archaeology and the rhythm of structure. The Museum began to take shape as a concrete building through and through.
JM I should mention that the process of selecting the architect was very special. After two unsuccessful competitions, another failure was out of the question. Of course, with Christian Kerez, that was not the architect’s fault, but the City of
Warsaw’s, which we always clearly state. Anyway, this time the competition was not for the concept—we were not expecting renderings. We wanted it to be based on dialog: we were looking for someone we could collaborate with, who would listen to us, to our needs, to the function of the building. That’s why, for Tom, the concept phase started after the selection.
TP To compliment your committee, you were patient, because it took a long time to work through alternatives, to understand the organization of the Museum, to understand Warsaw a little bit better.
DS Were you cautious about coming to Warsaw to do this project?
TP The whole process was curious because in the very beginning, I received this letter, and it just said: “Will you please fill this form out and send it back to us?” Several months later, I got another note that said: “Well, can you send us some work that you’ve done?” More months went by, and then: “Would you like to come to Warsaw to meet us?” I’d never been to Warsaw. I had only planned to stay for a couple of days, but I ended up staying for a week and went around everywhere.
It feels like this building is happening at a critical moment in the city and the country. Looking at it from the outside as an observer, I hear all of the discussions about what’s going on in the world, in the art world, and the debates right now about what that building means, I am thrilled to be involved with this frothy creative process. The same thing with the theater—both buildings are rising at a pivotal time.
https://artmuseum.pl/en
September 2025
No matter how much experience you have looking at drawings or models, it’s only when you see something taking physical shape that you really understand its scale and the quality of light, which are so important here. It’s interesting to look at how a building shapes an institution, and an institution shapes a building. I guess the painful early history of this project has inoculated it against some of the possible difficulties. I found it an uplifting experience to see what a container can do to shape what will happen inside it. It’s still an adolescent building in the sense that it’s got to be tested, trained, and put to work, but you can see those spaces have so much potential.
Joanna Mytkowska
It started with a rather bombastic idea, based not on an institution’s experience, but on analyzing the city plan. That’s why such a big shape and so many square meters were proposed. The failures suffered in the course of the project led us to the idea that the building should be much smaller, more focused, and proceed separately from the TR Warszawa theater building. We were lucky to have so much time; this was probably the greatest advantage of a complex and not always pleasant situation.
DS During that time, you had the chance to experiment and try curatorial
ideas, which is very important. Too many projects begin with a committee
and an architectural idea, but without that sense of leadership and continuity
that takes it from the stage of planning to that of working, functioning, living.
JM Absolutely. The late urbanist Michał Borowski, who was very supportive of the Museum project, invented an empty shell, not the concept of the institution. But that’s not why the process failed. Its failure resulted from ownership claims to land on Parade Square, which no one was fully aware of when we started. There was also no reflection on how a museum in a relatively small country with no tradition of
contemporary art museums can fill a building of that size.
DS “Museum” is a loaded word. You seem to use the acronym MSN more than the word “museum” itself.
JM Yes—which is now on the façade.
Michał Murawski
So you’re not going to be MoMA Warsaw or something?
JM No. At the start, I thought we wanted to be Tate Modern, but I was thirty-five and had no idea what it meant for Warsaw. The Tate was a new institution then, enjoying
enormous success. We thought that’s what we should follow. But years later, we decided to go with the name created by the inhabitants of Warsaw. We never called it that ourselves. We call it “the museum,” but they started to call it MSN, which became a nice brand with much more resonance.
DS 400,000 visitors a year that you plan in the new building is quite a lot.
JM The National Museum in Warsaw has twice that, and that was the basis for our calculation of expected yearly visits. This is the deal with the city. The minimum they expect is 400,000, and the capacity of the building is 800,000 per year. In the
beginning, there will of course be interest in the building. We’ll start with the exhibition of our collection, and other shows that will be relevant for the general public. One of them tells the iconographic history of women’s art from the sixteenth century until today, concluding with a focus on women’s protests, which were particularly powerful in Poland lately. Our monographic shows attracted a bigger public, but the maximum we reached is 50,000 visitors.
DS The Louvre is planning on 7,500,000 people a year; just imagine that experience and the destruction that comes with it. I think what’s special here in the Museum in Warsaw is the chance to have authenticity. The building itself has a unity. It’s got the same tone throughout. It’s a great frame. I suppose it will make everything look beautiful, which can sometimes be difficult. It will also make Alina Szapocznikow’s Friendship sculpture look beautiful, perhaps inappropriately.
JM Somehow, I don’t really see things in terms of the contemplation of beauty, and I doubt our audience will either. Warsaw’s artistic milieu is extremely active, activism-based, and they are already very critical. Our survey of the history of women’s protests will probably be perceived as not enough, and we might be accused of turning something authentic into a canon. I’m sure there will be a lot of changes, discussions, and tension, because this building is very special.
DS It’s interesting how it reflects the tension too. You were talking about how the earlier project could not overcome the tensions of land ownership. The structure of
this building reflects what’s underneath in terms of the subway tunnels.
Thomas Phifer
The Museum’s structural pillars are not on a regular grid. There’s a Soviet-era subway right underneath us. I’m not sure the geotechnical investigators had any accurate drawings of the subway, so they had to excavate.
JM There is one space in the cellar where we can step onto the roof of the station.
TP Well, it wasn’t so long ago that there was a little piece of property that was in the way of construction of the theater, even after the Museum issue was solved. And that piece of property was just twice the size of this room.
JM We had to actively fight for this and, in fact, we have temporary ownership of that piece of land. Because the Museum and the TR Warszawa theater started together,
and officially this investment is run by the Museum, we are obliged to start building by January 2027. Otherwise, it goes back to the former owner.
DS This is the product of pre-communist ownership?
JM Yes—the descendants.
MM In theory, because the claims were brought up by gangsters, effectively, in the 1990s, who later claimed they have the legal rights to be the descendants.
JM When Tom started, the land for the Museum was free from claims. However, we’d been discussing that very important issue for years.
TP Well it was clear, except for this small parcel on the footprint of the theater. I think it’s curious how the context of the Museum is going to be affected by the construction of the theater.
JM The ownership claims were the only reason they were not built together. Now I see it was a good decision, if we’d waited, we would have overlapped with the populist government and construction would never have happened. Tom, what is your impression? You’ve met several people here.
TP Yeah, they’ve all been generous and welcoming. I’ve had nothing but an amazing experience here, particularly with the artists.
MM Did these conversations have some impact on the design?
TP Yes, speaking to local artists influenced how we developed the internal expression of the galleries and public spaces.
JM Maybe we should collect these different phases. In the early stage, Tom was thinking about a façade made of fabric. Still, there are traces of experimenting with a double layer on the façade.
DS So the fabric version would be like dressing the building.
MM Like Christo?
TP Yeah, it was like a Christo. It was white. Then soon, we began to investigate the white concrete and having this double layer, which added to the sense of the thickness and presence in the city.
JM I love what we have, but when we started, it was common for museums and contemporary art galleries to have a huge generic space to build on. The pavilion by the Vistula River designed by Adolf Krischanitz, which we are using now, is like that—one huge space. We thought rooms were more effective for artists, they’re confronted with architecture instead of designing the space together with their works. This may be something very local, since our point of reference is Muzeum Sztuki in Łodź, situated in the same bourgeois palace since the 1930s, with its collection, which we grew up with, always in the same rooms.
TP There are no two rooms that are the same size.
JM With curatorial experience, I thought how we could construct a thematic show in equal boxes. It would look a bit like an art fair. But, with Eastern European art, I feel that the specificity is in the materiality. So that’s why we thought rooms, somewhat more “domestic” spaces, would be better for us. The original idea behind the white Museum was perhaps to calm the cityscape down. This is what Oskar Hansen meant by “architecture of the background.”
TP The first conceptual rendering was made along the boulevard. We took a white strip of paper and put it in perspective not as a building, but as a mirage or an abstraction, a white abstraction that could co-exist with the Palace and the commercial buildings along Marszałkowska Street.
MM Like the Palace?
TP Yes, or with a thin glass skin. At the same time, we were looking at the foundations, at the archaeology and the rhythm of structure. The Museum began to take shape as a concrete building through and through.
JM I should mention that the process of selecting the architect was very special. After two unsuccessful competitions, another failure was out of the question. Of course, with Christian Kerez, that was not the architect’s fault, but the City of
Warsaw’s, which we always clearly state. Anyway, this time the competition was not for the concept—we were not expecting renderings. We wanted it to be based on dialog: we were looking for someone we could collaborate with, who would listen to us, to our needs, to the function of the building. That’s why, for Tom, the concept phase started after the selection.
TP To compliment your committee, you were patient, because it took a long time to work through alternatives, to understand the organization of the Museum, to understand Warsaw a little bit better.
DS Were you cautious about coming to Warsaw to do this project?
TP The whole process was curious because in the very beginning, I received this letter, and it just said: “Will you please fill this form out and send it back to us?” Several months later, I got another note that said: “Well, can you send us some work that you’ve done?” More months went by, and then: “Would you like to come to Warsaw to meet us?” I’d never been to Warsaw. I had only planned to stay for a couple of days, but I ended up staying for a week and went around everywhere.
It feels like this building is happening at a critical moment in the city and the country. Looking at it from the outside as an observer, I hear all of the discussions about what’s going on in the world, in the art world, and the debates right now about what that building means, I am thrilled to be involved with this frothy creative process. The same thing with the theater—both buildings are rising at a pivotal time.
https://artmuseum.pl/en
September 2025