Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN Warsaw) with Palace of Culture and Science in background.
Photo: Maja Wirkus, Courtesy MSN Warsaw.
These walls can talk.
When Thomas Phifer introduced his latest project, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw–MSN Warsaw–to the media on February 20, 2025, one day ahead of its full opening to the public, he said the building has become a “voice.”
What does that voice say?
“I would like to have that voice be a voice that would speak to the inclusion of everyone,” Phifer, Principal Architect, Thomas Phifer and Partners, told Forbes.com. “That it’s open to all. I even think that the (building’s) whiteness has a metaphoric meaning of cleansing, and it has a metaphoric meaning of holding the light of Warsaw and honoring the art and framing the art.”
When asked what she thinks the new museum says, MSN Warsaw director Joanna Mytkowska attached to it an even bolder declaration.
“Time for future. Enough of history,” she told Forbes.com.
That’s a bold statement, especially in Warsaw, where the past is never further away than a glance at the city’s hulking, 44-story Palace of Culture and Science–Poland’s tallest building upon completion.
The behemoth was completed in 1955 as a “gift” to Warsaw from Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Varsovians would have preferred housing, or the ultimate gift–for Stalin and the Soviet Union to end its brutal, shadow occupation of Poland via a puppet government–but when one of history’s most murderous butchers gives you a gift, you don’t ask a lot of questions.
Alina Szapocznikow’s Friendship (Monument to Polish-Soviet Friendship) sculpture from 1954 with the torn off arms once displayed in the Palace and now found on MSN Warsaw’s second floor says all that need be said about that relationship.
Alina Szapocznikow’s ‘Friendship (Monument to Polish-Soviet Friendship),’ 1954, on view at MSN Warsaw.
Chadd Scott
The Palace lorded over Warsaw like a prison guard until the Poles shook off the shackles of communism in 1989. Today, it houses office space, restaurants and shops, theaters, museums, cinemas, libraries, a swimming pool, and schools. Tours are available and there’s a viewing terrace on the 30th floor.
From that platform, unmistakably glistening in white barely 200 yards from the Palace steps across Plac Defilad (Parade Square), the largest public square in Europe, now stands MSN Warsaw. Any discussion of this building must begin with that building. That’s on purpose.
“The city, a long time ago, agreed that (MSN Warsaw) wouldn’t go in a park, it wouldn’t go next to the river, it wouldn’t go in an urban condition, it was going to go at the base of the Palace,” Phifer said. “This building sits next to the palace, and so we wanted to give this building a sense of presence, a real sense of presence, and a sense of permanence for the institution. A sense of permanence and a sense of metaphoric and physical weight.”
MSN Warsaw confronts, literally and figuratively, the most visible reminder of Poland’s most recent subjugation at gunpoint by one of history’s greatest villains. Prior to Stalin, it was Hitler, and an even more murderous and infamous occupation. The Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth of tyrants, back-to-back.
While MSN Warsaw is a forward-looking institution, with the city’s DNA such as it is, the building needed to express a weight and heft and gravity in instantly recognizable ways most new art museums aren’t concerned with. In Poland, if you’re not stout, history has shown you’ll be shoved over, either by the German bully to the west or the Russian bully to the east.
This building is a bulldog. An elegant bulldog, but a bulldog none the less. Enormous steel doors frame entries throughout–fantastical, giant’s castle, three-inch-thick, 20-feet-high in places. Its boxy exterior belies a light-filled, roomy, exquisite interior.
Phifer returned again and again in his comments to notions of “weight,” “presence,” “permanence.”
MSN Warsaw’s architecture says culture is not going anywhere. The arts fight back. Dictators, fascists, and tyrants have all come and gone through Warsaw and Poland, they may again–they’re knocking at the door–but progress and ideas have reclaimed what was once a military parade ground, on the very edge of what was once the scene of one of history’s most notorious human slaughter pens, the Warsaw Ghetto–the former boundary is 50-feet from the side of the museum facing the Palace.
Barbarism will not go uncontested by enlightenment.
“I think the reason they put this building here is because, as contemporary art is, this is not art from centuries ago. This is the voice of the artist speaking about what they believe at this moment in time. That voice that’s contained in this building is a real voice,” Phifer said. “These rooms will offer this voice that will get debated, there’ll be conversation, and it sits here next to the Palace with its history, some, not so great.”
This building is a resistance in the architectural language this part of the world understands. A delicate and dainty museum featuring sails, and moveable parts, and filigree, and fantastical ornamentation would not do here. Not in Warsaw. Not in Poland. Not with these neighbors and fascism on the rise again around Europe and the world.
Standing ground was important enough to Mytkowska that she went so far as instructing Phifer to design the gallery spaces as fixed, bucking the global art museum trend for flexible, movable walls and spaces.
MSN Warsaw is not movable.
The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN Warsaw) gleams in white beside the Palace of Culture and Science.
Marcin Czechowicz. Courtesy Thomas Phifer and Partners.
None of which makes the building unwelcoming or guarded. All of MSN Warsaw’s light-suffused ground floor spaces including a café, book shop, event space, mini-exhibition, and views up and out onto the city are open to the public and free of charge.
“This place had to be a place for people, it had to be a place to encounter the art and encounter each other,” Phifer said. “I see most people coming here to be here, to meet their friends, to wander around the public spaces, to wander up the stairs, to look out the window and see the Palace. (People) come here just to be.”
An inseparable modern feature for an ancient city.
“In five, 10 years, inhabitants of Warsaw, it will be impossible for them to imagine that this building is not here,” Mytkowska said. “It will become a part of the life of this city.”
Made In Poland
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN Warsaw) interior staircases.
Filip Bramorski, Courtesy Thomas Phifer and Partners.
Thomas Phifer and Partners may be headquartered in New York, but MSN Warsaw was made in Poland. Crafted would be a better description. Extraordinary craftsmanship that amazed even the architect.
“I’ve never worked on a project where I haven’t had them knock down concrete walls to get them to be better–we were just scraping the bottom of the barrel, and you wanted the concrete contractor to wake up–but here, they set up a tent outside the construction site and these (concrete) forms were made by these older men with beards and they were cabinet makers, and they made these forms with beautiful precision, like they would make a piece of cabinet work,” Phifer explained.
Even to an amateur’s eye, the crisp, exacting corners and lines of the concrete walls prove noticeable. Their smoothness. Their whiteness. More like fine marble than rough concrete.
“The forms were placed with great precision,” Phifer continued. “The concrete was mixed with this amazing mix–(I’ve) never seen anything like it–this kind of whiteness. Not sure how, some recipe, and they poured it, and they vibrated it, so the concrete is handmade. These wood (city) rooms were built by carpenters and cabinet makers here in Warsaw. The stainless-steel doors were made in Poland.”
“City Rooms” wood-lined with European ash in every suite of galleries feature windows oriented to particular scenes framing the city. Beautiful. One debuts with a sound art installation replicating the whistling from Scorpions’ “Wind of Change” (1990), an anthem to the Cold War era.
The museum has more windows, more light, and more views into the city than can be appreciated from the outside. So many windows, so much light; Phifer refers to the building as, “a vitrine of light; a container of light.”
This building in this place, the significance was never lost on the Varsovians who made Phifer’s vision a reality.
“There was one gentleman who was in charge of the concrete who poured the entire building. He was responsible for the workshop drawings all the way through to the final inspection,” Phifer remembers. “As I was leaving (the construction) tent one day, he put his arm around me–one of these moments as an architect that brings one to tears–he put his arm around me and he said, ‘You know, this building is a matter of pride for us. It’s a matter of pride for us.’ That was all he said, and that was all he needed to say. They knew this building meant something, that it was a symbol.”
That it would be talking to the generations, a voice for progress and light and equality and freedom and ideas and culture come what may.
