The Warsaw Ghetto Museum is currently a nomadic institution - it still hasn't arranged its permanent headquarters, although thanks to the resilient activities of its team it doesn't let itself be forgotten. However, it looks like the nomadic model of the Museum's activities will change in the coming years, and the institution will finally move into a new facility. The Krakow-based KB - Projekty Konstrukcyjne studio is responsible for the project.
The Warsaw Ghetto Museum is a relatively young institution - it was established in 2018 by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, giving it the mission to promote knowledge about life in the Warsaw Ghetto and other closed Jewish quarters in Poland. Later that year, the Marshal of the Mazowieckie Voivodeship leased the museum a post-hospital building on Sleiska Street, and the preparation of the museum's program began, collecting collections, conducting research and organizing outdoor and virtual exhibitions. However, the most important goal of the museum at the moment is the adaptation of the building in which its headquarters will be located - the institution's authorities hope that in as little as two years the Warsaw Ghetto Museum will be able to receive visitors in its new space within the buildings of the Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital. In recent days, the institution has reminded visitors of its venture.
The former Bersohn and Bauman Hospital in Warsaw
Photo: Adrian Grycuk © CC BY SA 3.0 | Wikimedia Commons
warsaw ghetto hospital
The Warsaw Ghetto Museum, almost from the beginning of its existence, was associated with the plot of land on which the buildings of the Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital still stand. Its eclectic body was built in 1878 according to a design by Artur Goebel (he was also the author of the concept for a similar hospital on Czysta Street, the Krasinski Tenement House in Warsaw and the palace in Wieniec). During World War II, the hospital was located within the Warsaw Ghetto, serving as the main treatment center for children who were ill as a consequence of the dramatic conditions that prevailed in the closed Jewish quarter. As a result of these events, the Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital building became permanently intertwined with the tragic history of the Jewish community in Warsaw. It is also one of its few material witnesses, as it largely managed to survive the war, even despite the bombings and arson carried out by the Nazis in 1943.
After the war, the building was used for its original purpose - it housed a children's infectious disease hospital. In 2014, the wards were moved to Dziekanow Leśny, leaving the building deserted. Faced with problems in selling the property and establishing the institution of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, the Marshall of the Mazowieckie Voivodeship leased the plot of land with the buildings to the latter in 2018, and then sold it to the Museum for just under 23 million zlotys. At the same time, the hospital building and the plot's pre-war buildings were added to the register of historical monuments. In 2021, the results of a tender for the development of design documentation for the expansion, modernization and interior arrangement of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum were announced. The proceeding was won by Krakow-based KB - Projekty Konstrukcyjne, and the construction will cost 320 million zlotys.
Concept for the construction of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum
Design: KB Projekty Konstrukcyjne in cooperation with APP Jerzy Wowczak and ARTFM © Warsaw Ghetto Museum.
new with old hand in hand
As announced at the press conference, the project to expand and modernize the Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital for the Warsaw Ghetto Museum involves the revitalization and adaptation of two post-hospital buildings and the erection of new volumes. In the case of the first task, work is planned on the main hospital building, where spaces for a permanent exhibition will be located, as well as on the former laboratory building, where educational spaces will be located. The new volumes will be built on two sides of the plot, flanking the previous buildings. On the south side will be a five-story, cuboid building with an elevation solved in the form of massive light breakers, stretching from the base of the building to its top. The building will include spaces for visitors (lobby, cafeteria or conference rooms) and laboratories and research studios. The building will be topped with a green roof. The second above-ground structure to rise on the land owned by the Warsaw Ghetto Museum will be a small building with technical functions. Importantly, underground structures will also be built on a significant part of the plot - spaces for the permanent exhibition, visitor service infrastructure, a mediatheque or conservation studios and a recording studio have been planned on three floors.
The former Bersohn and Bauman Hospital in Warsaw
Photo: Txemai Argazki ©CC00 | WIkimedia Commons
difficult neighborhood
The architects designing the buildings for the Warsaw Ghetto Museum faced quite a task. The difficulties can be roughly divided into three main issues. The first was certainly the chaotic surroundings of the building. The plot is located in the center of Śródmieście district, between Sienna and Śliska Streets. In the immediate vicinity of the former hospital are five-story townhouses, ten-story blocks of flats and a thirteen-story office building. Immediately behind the Museum, a perspective opens up to the blue silhouette of Varso Tower. The impression of chaos is heightened by the fact that on the museum's plot the development is low-intensity and surrounded by plenty of greenery. The architectural expression of the surrounding buildings, which were built over several decades, is also very diverse. The solution that the design team proposed became to densify the development in this place by adding modern pavilions, located at the shorter sides of the hospital building.
Work on the former Hospital building
Photo: Marcin Czechowicz © Warsaw Ghetto Museum
conservation confusion
The second problem the architects had to face was the historic substance of the Behrson and Bauman Children's Hospital. The building is one of the few architectural monuments from the Warsaw Ghetto area that survived World War II. Its pre-war buildings became the subject of a listing in 2018. KB - Projekty Konstrukcyjne is a design group with extensive experience in conducting construction activities within the historic substance - they have developed expert opinions for, among others, the Warsaw Museum or the possibility of adapting the former Cracovia Hotel building for museum purposes.
Despite the approval of the Mazovian Regional Monument Conservator, some controversy arose over the work after construction began - as pointed out by those running the Facebook profile "Stone and What? We save Warsaw's monuments", during the construction work it was decided to demolish the one-story west wing and the sunbathing terrace, which were considered to be later reconstructions from the post-war period.
As Michal Krasucki, the Capital's Historic Preservation Officer, tried to prove at the time, this was an untrue claim - after all, the demolished buildings were supposed to have come from an expansion that took place according to Henryk Stifelman's design back in the 1930s. This is all the more surprising, since the designers' goal was to restore the body of the Bersohn and Bauman Hospital to its pre-war form. The walls were demolished, and the caravan goes on.
Visualization of the balcony adaptation for the Warsaw Ghetto Museum
proj: KB Projekty Konstrukcyjne in cooperation with APP Jerzy Wowczak and ARTFM. © Warsaw Ghetto Museum
chronology of the holocaust
The third major problem was to adequately address the difficult history of the site and the events presented at the Museum. This is what the designers tackled, first of all, by designing the interiors of the building that will house the exhibitions.
The permanent exhibition will be arranged on seven floors of the building and divided into nine sections. The chronological and problematic layout of the exhibition will begin with a section devoted to the pre-war history of Jews in Warsaw. Further sections of the exhibition will include rooms with titles such as "Ghettoization," "Life Behind the Wall," "Großaktion Warschau 1942" and "Never Again." Some of the exhibition will be located in the underground section, located under the surface of the hospital courtyard.
Works on the top floor
Photo: Marcin Czechowicz © Warsaw Ghetto Museum
museum without competition
The concept for the expansion and modernization of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum was selected through a bidding process. It is a pity that the institution's director, Albert Stankowski, did not take advantage of the experience he gained while working on the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The building created for the institution has won numerous international awards, and its concept, developed by the Lahdelma & Mahlamäki studio, was selected in a well-prepared international competition. Although the conditions, both locational (the plot of land located in the very center of the city, built over with buildings under conservation protection) and financial (the cost of building the Polin Museum also amounted to about 300 million zlotys, but it wasmore than 10 years ago), are unlikely to allow the creation of architecture as iconic as that of the museum in Muranow, but experience shows that concepts selected in well-prepared competition procedures are characterized by higher quality. It is a pity that the Warsaw Ghetto Museum did not get this chance.
Work on the former Hospital building
photo: Marcin Czechowicz © Warsaw Ghetto Museum
Funds for the construction come in part from the EU's FENIKS program. This is not the first project that will be built in Poland in the coming years thanks to funds obtained in this way - the expansion of the Polish Sculpture Center in Orońsko and the headquarters of the Mazurskie cos tam cos tam have recently been announced. Both projects do not impress, and the procedure for their selection leaves some doubt. The availability of funds from the European Union does not slow down the fight for good construction - high-quality urban space, although difficult to define with numbers and graphs, is also a capital that we should properly care for and effectively expand.
