The museum was built near the Raduni canal, on the border of the Old Town and the port, on the site of the Vyadrovnia district, which was completely destroyed during the war (the name is from the craftsmen who lived there in the old days, making wooden buckets). The post office is located 200 meters from the new building, and the Military Transit Warehouse on the Westerplatte Peninsula is three kilometers away. These two sites were the only Polish state institutions in the neutral Gdansk-Danzig of the 1930s, and the Second World War began with the attack on them by Nazi Germany on September 1, 1939.
Design
the museum is very ambitious: to show not only the Polish experience of the war years, but also the all-European and global experience; There are practically no such museums in the world, since even the largest institutions of this type focus on the regional and national history of World War II. However, during the creation of the Gdansk Museum (the architectural competition was held in 2010, construction began in 2012, and it opened on March 23, 2017), the “rightists” came to power in Poland, who expressed dissatisfaction with the “cosmopolitan” nature of the exposition (its design was made by the Belgian studio Tempora; as conceived by the then director of the museum, historian Pavel Makhtsevich, the main emphasis was placed on real exhibits, there are about 2000 of them, including T-34 and Junkers Ju-87 "Stuka", although there are also 250 multimedia screens, the work of the Nolabel studio in Krakow) There was a plan to merge the WWII museum with the newly created Westerplatte Museum into a more "patriotic" education, in April 2017 Makhtsevich was fired, and now it is planned to correct or even replace the 11 million euro exposition with an exhibition "in the right way." You can read more about the museum and the political struggle around it, which fits well into the final section of its exposition entitled "The Long Shadow of War", here and here.
Kwadrat architects deliberately abandoned specific forms: their project can be interpreted in different ways, but the structure turned out to be emotionally intense. The exhibition space is located deep underground, this is a zone of the past, where visitors descend for a long time, while tuning in to the perception of, by definition, very heavy content. However, they are constantly accompanied by a ray of sunlight - the underground part is cut through by the "gorge", from the outside, designed as a glazed strip between two walls of gabions, the main axis of the complex. Gabions are filled with broken stone and bricks from the Gdansk wartime ruins - a metaphor for building a new life. Also, the future is an observation deck at the top of an asymmetric tower (40.5 m), from where views of the revived city open up. The vast area around the museum is the present day.
The tower (educational center, library, scientific departments, restaurant) and the low building of the administrative premises are covered with red concrete panels and partly glazed, and black steel is also used. Rough concrete, black steel, oak are widely used in the interior, which was designed by the Loft bureau, and copper is also used in the museum shop.
The red color of the facades is a reference to the brick of the Church of the Virgin Mary: after all, the museum is tactfully, but nevertheless, built into the panorama of the city and is visible from its center. Now there are wastelands around the building, but soon a new area will appear there: Gdansk, like many other port cities, is transforming its industrial harbor into a mixed development zone.
