The competition for the building of the WWII Museum in Gdansk was announced in early 2010; the results were summed up in September (read more about the results here). The museum is planned to be located on a large triangular area near the northern border of the tourist center of the city: the sharp "nose" of the triangle points to the Olowianka Island in the middle of the Motlawa River, and only the port canal separates the territory of the future museum from the historical quarters with intricate spiers of brick churches and rows of characteristic Hanseatic houses with sharp triangular roofs.
The choice of a place in the historical center, burdened with restrictions and therefore difficult to accommodate a modern building, is not at all accidental: a post office building is located a stone's throw from it, the defense of which is considered the first battle of World War II. On September 1, 1939, the employees of this post office fought on their own with the SS for 15 hours. The creation of a museum of World War II in the place where it actually began, and in the city that became the formal reason for its beginning, is entirely fair. The concept of the museum's exposition has already been developed, and an open international competition with a representative jury was held for the design of the building: in addition to Polish experts, the star builder of museums Daniel Libeskind and the urbanist Hans Stiman, the chief architect of the last reconstruction of Berlin, took part in its work. The competition was attended by 240 architectural bureaus, about a fifth of them are foreign (that is, not Polish), and only one bureau from Russia - the workshop of Alexei Bavykin. The project was not among the winners, but the experience of participating in an open international competition and designing a museum building of this class is certainly interesting.
At first glance, the composition of the museum ensemble in Bavykna's project resembles the famous poster by El Lissitzky "Hit the Whites with a Red Wedge." There, a sharp red triangle cuts into a white circle; small triangles split off from the main one and scatter, wounding the white circle like splinters. Here, instead of a red wedge, there is a giant copper blade-blade piercing a light stone cube with a metal finger, crowned, like a crown, with a forest of thin crosses.
Blade is the museum's service building, which houses the offices of employees, classrooms and cafes. It has many windows, and all of them are tilted forward, embedded in the oblique lines of the copper plates, emphasizing the "falling" direction of movement. It looks like a Teutonic hand in a metal glove, like a commissar's Mauser, like an unexploded shell and a ship crashing into a white rock mass with its nose. Although there are no direct allusions here, this is a collective image of the modern, dynamic, energetic. As stated in the author's description of the project, the shape of the copper case symbolizes the "forces of aggression."
But the main volume is the second here, it is a stone cube pierced by an aggressive copper nose. The architects named it "White Body"; it symbolizes the "Spirit and Body of the Polish Republic". This is the main building of the museum, it houses all the exhibition halls. It looks like a church (this could well be the building of a modern church), a cemetery (because of the many white crosses), a Gothic crown (how can you not remember that 200 years ago, the offspring of European monarchies hunted for the Polish crown), and to the fortress tower - the keep of the medieval castle.
A hint of fortification (or even a fortified area) is the squat opening of the entrance portal; the similarity is enhanced by the fact that the ground level in front of the museum entrance is lowered, buried in the landscape. The imaginary visitor, therefore, will first have to descend an open staircase to an extended plaza. At the same time, city views hide behind earthen slopes, and a person finds himself alone with a stone wall and a single opening - a brass console hangs threateningly from above, the one that pierced the stone building, and the entrance to the museum turns out to be (figuratively, of course) the only shelter.
Inside, the museum is also built like a fortress: the exhibition halls are strung on the square well of the atrium located in the center. The space of this covered courtyard is the semantic and, if I may say so, the light rod of the building: there are no windows in the outer walls (in the museum business, they only interfere), and the vertical of the atrium becomes a place where diffused daylight is concentrated. The verticalism of the courtyard space is strengthened in every possible way: the visitor, according to the architects' plan, should enter the atrium from the deepening of the square, which means that its floor is in the minus-first level. The top of the atrium, catching the light with its sloping ceiling, protrudes above the roof of the museum halls (just like the tower of a Catholic basilica or the head of a Byzantine church), hiding behind the stone fringe of crosses. Thus, a vertical space appears inside the squat cube, a column of light - a symbol of hope (materialized in three crane silhouettes under the ceiling) and a semantic guarantee of the stability of the "White Body".
The light vertical inside is the second theme and the second vector of movement in the ensemble. The copper plate cuts into the stone object, but the object is protected, completely enclosed by the windowless walls around the perimeter; his body confidently holds the blow (however, came on a tangent), stands, does not even bend over. Like a house with an unexploded shell stuck in it. The deaf volume does not outwardly react, it is open in the other direction and keeps in itself another movement - in a straight line directly to the sky (the openness is indicated not so much by the glass of the atrium as by the whimsical top line). You might think that in response to aggression in the stone mass, a portal opened up, and made the stone completely invulnerable. It looks like the screensaver of some famous film company, where rays of light are beating from the ground. But the theme is eternal, in this supernatural stability there is something from the Christian righteous man, St. Anthony, tormented by demons, but completely defiant; or from a burning candle.
The light rod of the building should become the main impression for the person entering the museum - the visitor enters the atrium almost immediately. If the main impression from the outside is the clash of two masses, the struggle of giants and an unreliable shelter for the little men in the recess in front of the entrance, then as soon as we get inside, the aggression ends. The strengthening is reliable, bright and somehow even joyful; like a temple, not like a creepy bomb shelter.
In addition to the glass ceiling of the atrium overlooking the sky, there is another smaller window. It ends with the second copper console (a small fragment that came out of the white volume from the opposite side), looking towards the old Gdansk, and by the way, at the very post office from which the war began. The view of the city becomes the second positive emotion, not as large and majestic, but not as abstract as the view of the sky at the top of the courtyard. More earthly and human. The platform overlooking Gdansk, suspended in the air in a stone pipe above the canal, ends on the other side with an open balcony overlooking the atrium - so that the two themes, sky view and city view, are linked.
This is a clean, beautiful and finely honed project. The theme of the collision, begun by Bavykin in the arch-house on the Mozhaisk highway, unfolded here in full, finding a suitable theme and ground for thought. But the point is not only in another plastic plot that has found a form for itself, although this is also important. Here we got a rather unexpected image of war. Much has been filmed, molded, built about the war, this is the closest global tragedy to us. The language, familiar and recognizable, has long been worked out - its signs are also in this project, the shape of the projectile blade, the dugout entrance; the cranes under the ceiling, finally. But in addition to these signs of tragedy-hope, there is something else, a string of meanings and implications that form the image of the shelter, which is also the image of Poland. In the project of Alexei Bavykin, the task was set and solved to find such an image, to sew it from a number of historical associations. It turned out, and, as is often the case with Bavykin, this image balances on the brink of depiction, without crossing it. That is, none of the many associations we have named outweighs the others, but they merge, forming something new. It's fun, story-driven, context-oriented, but not very popular architecture right now; now more abstract things are relevant, affecting directly and only on emotions. All the more so for such a complex and still wounding matter like war. The light temple-castle growing out of the ground in the path of the projectile is good, but not quite politically correct.
There is one more peculiarity: it is a very positive, optimistic museum. There is no absorbing horror in it, which was a lot in other projects about the war, including at this competition, and which, of course, really well reflects the nightmare of military events. The project, which won the competition, turned the entire lower tier, spread over the site, into a museum of the horrors of war; there is also among the contestants (who received nothing) the project "Dark Forest", consisting of black pillars emitting smoke. The architects seem to want to amplify the horror as much as possible, to scare people so that they no longer dare. This, perhaps, is true, education is such a thing, you will not scare you will not get through. Bavykin's project is the opposite of the idea of intimidation. Firstly, we can say that he captures the first moment of the war, the first hit, which actually happened in Gdansk. Secondly, the main thing in him is not horror, but salvation. This is probably important.
