The museum will appear on Valovaya Street, near the Raduni Canal - in a picturesque and uncrowded corner of the Old Town. This place is extremely significant for both Polish and European history. Near the pre-war period, when Gdansk bore the name of the "Free City of Danzig" and was a neutral territory under the control of the League of Nations, there is the Polish Post Office. In the interwar period, it was one of two Polish state institutions within the city (the second was the Military Transit Depot on the Westerplatte Peninsula). Therefore, on September 1, 1939, on the first day of World War II, the post office became one of the main goals for the Nazi troops, and, despite the heroic resistance of the postal employees (some of them died in battle or later died of wounds, the rest were executed by the Nazis), was captured by them. Now the building, along with the post office, houses a museum, and the nearby square is named after the Defenders of the Polish Post Office. The Museum of the Second World War, which is scheduled to open in 2014, the year of the 75th anniversary of its beginning, will complement this memorial site.
The decision on which project of the museum is worthy of implementation was made by the chairman of the jury, Vice-Mayor of Gdansk Wieslaw Bielawski, Polish architects Grzegorz Bucek, Wieslaw Chabanski and Wieslaw Gruszkowski, representatives of the international architectural community Daniel Libeskind, Hans Stiman and George Ferguson, and the historian Wojciech Duda, Director of the Museum of London, British Polish origin Jack Lohman and designer Andrzej Pongowski. The jury members reviewed a total of 240 projects from 33 countries.
The prizes were awarded to seven participants who shared a prize fund of 200 thousand euros. Three main prizes were taken by the Kwadrat bureau (its project will be implemented), the Polish workshop Piotr Płaskowicki & partnerzy and the Greek architects Betaplan, respectively. Also Bulgarian, Turkish and two Polish bureaus received cash prizes.
In the spring of 2010, the official website of the future museum posted an appeal by Donald Tusk to the competing architects. The Polish Prime Minister suggested that "the concept of the museum and its further development will largely depend on the architectural form." And so it happened: Jacek Droszcz, the head of the Kwadrat studio, really managed to partially predetermine the decision of the museum exposition in his work. In an interview with the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza Trojmiasto, he spoke about the symbolism of his version of the museum: future visitors will inspect the exhibition, starting from the underground part (“it's like a hell generated by war”) and ending with a tower overlooking the panorama of the renewed city of Gdansk. Time and space are fundamental categories here. The scary time travel begins in a dungeon; the visitor to the museum returns to modernity only after rising to ground level. The tower at the end of the exhibition symbolizes the future replacing the past and the present.
The jury noted that the building, designed by the Kwadrat studio, makes the visitor feel the horror of the war, but, at the same time, does not take away his hope for the future. A complex topic, according to experts, is correctly disclosed. The value of the building is enhanced by its versatility; so, the tower of the museum is a completely constructive invention: it will become a wonderful observation deck. The space of the museum was created not only to tell about the past, but also, in equal measure, to become a place of leisure for residents and guests of modern Gdansk.
It is interesting to note that the very fact of the construction of the museum was initially regarded ambiguously. For example, the representative of the regional protection of monuments, Marian Kwapiński, expressed concerns about the protection of the historical zone of the city, but a successful project was able to dispel all doubts.
The runner-up architects Piotr Plaskowicki & partnerzy said their museum was more of an "anti-building". According to their project, on the bank of the canal there is a massive deep red wall with sharp teeth at the top, next to it is a parallelepiped pavilion contrasting with it. These two elements are separated from each other by a covered space - a pedestrian walkway. This project is no less symbolic than the winner of the first place. The jury saw in him a roll-over of historical periods - military and modern, a story of destruction and revival.
The idea of the Betaplan workshop is based on a rectangle divided into several fragments. They made up a new shape, placing parts of the original rectangle in random order at a distance from each other. The result is the buildings, connected by a common overlap, forming a platform: visitors can climb it. The Museum of the Greek Bureau was highly appreciated by the jury for the fact that its authors managed to "feel" Gdansk and successfully fit the building into the cityscape. But this turned out to be insufficient, since this option reached only an urban scale, and the organizers want to make the future museum a truly national and even all-European institution.
According to Gazeta Wyborcza Trojmiasto, on January 4, 2011, a resolution was adopted to finance the project of the Museum of the Second World War. 358 million zlotys (about 120 million dollars) will be spent on its construction and arrangement. Today, the museum is regarded as a priority building: this means that even in a difficult post-crisis time, it will be given priority attention, since a museum dedicated to the war will still be associated with overcoming obstacles in any way and revival.
