EXHIBITION: Architektura-Murator’s Collection for The Museum of Modern Art (WARSAW)

Situated just few minutes' walk from the Warsaw Central Station, the Museum of Modern Art (MSN) is a spot hard to miss - both if you're a local, a tourist or a by passer. Today I was it all. My plan was to revisit the "Private Settings - Art After the Internet" exhibition and see the new, architectural show Architektura - Murator's Collection for the Museum of Modern Art, the latter promising a unique view on Polish architecture after 1989, the only extensive record of the history of our country's post-communist architecture. As one can read on artmuseum.pl:

The collection includes mock-ups of well-known and frequently awarded buildings constructed in Poland in the last 25 years: Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, New Silesian Museum, Museum of Tadeusz Kantor in Krakow, Scientific Information Centre and Academic Library in Katowice or PGE Arena in Gdansk. Visitors will have a chance to see the works of best Polish architects, among others, Stefan Kuryłowicz (Nautilius, Vitkac) and Robert Konieczny (Aatrial House, Safe House) as well as eminent foreign architects such as Helmut Jahn (Cosmopolitan Tower) or Fernando Menis.

Most mock-ups presented at the Museum of Modern Art have been created especially for this exhibition, with the designing and financial involvement of particular architects and studios. Owing to this – in line with the central idea of the collection – the exhibition focuses on an individual expression of most important features of buildings and treats a model as a sculpture, model or expression of designing processes. Therefore, it may lead to a better understanding of a phenomenon of working out a concept and in consequence, to the emergence of outstanding architectural designs – said Ewa P. Porębska, the initiator of the collection.

Big words. So has the MSN delivered what it promised?

Architectura is an exhibition full of fun. If you're acknowledged with buildings on display, you'll enjoy seeing their maiden counterparts, if not - curators provided for more than enough introduction, extensive texts and mock-ups (of mixed quality) included. A peek through a wall here, a new perspective on familiar there… Thanks to the right balance of sartorial / textual content Architektura draws one in and will be amusing for both professionals and amateurs.

Regardless of where you stand, there's a space for reflection too. With Polish architectural environment being nothing short of a mess, good design is about as hard to appreciate as a beauty of diamond encrusted brooch… thrown on a pile of trash. Instead of benefiting from the ugly, it blends in - a diamond stone being reduced to a plastic counterfeit, all of its magic gone.

Krakow's Manggha museum opened its door in 1994. The design, donated to Poland by a celebrated Japanese architect Arata Izosaki, has been executed across the Wawel castle, right by Wistula Boulevard. Controversial at a time, ten years later it merely represents what it stood for. The architect's attempt to harmonize his project with surrounding failed - tangled in the maze of laud highways and dirty bridge walls, Manggha is nothing but a symbol of longing for visual unity and silent elegance - a quality limited to those privileged to built outside towns or, as in the case of great European Krzysztod Penderecki Center for Music - in the middle of nowhere (or, to be more specific, in the middle of the cornfield). Staying in the city raises new, socially and environmentally conscious  challenges for designers - predicting future urban (un)planning politics being the hardest one of all.

The exhibition runs until 14.12.2014. Admission: free