Construction is underway in Warsaw on a new complex for the Polish History Museum and Polish Army Museum, designed by the Warsaw-based architectural design studio WXCA.

Located at the Warsaw Citadel, on the site of former 19th-century fortifications, the museum and an associated park are intended to create “a place of culture, remembrance, and recreation.”

Three structures are to be built on the site: the headquarters of the Polish History Museum, and two buildings for the Polish Army Museum. When combined with the already-existing Museum of the 10th Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel and the Katyń Museum, the “park of museums” is expected to become one of the largest museum complexes in Europe.

For the Polish History Museum, WXCA imagined the scheme as a monolithic body expressed through a minimalist stone form. Within the structure, motifs from the Polish architectural tradition have been incorporated to represent “archaeological remnants from different periods.” Inside, exhibition areas and storage and conservation rooms will be complemented by a 600-seat concert hall, a screening and theater room, a library, conference and education rooms, and a terrace.

“The façade of the Polish History Museum has been laid with marble slabs of varying grain,” WXCA’s Krzysztof Budzisz explained. “They are arranged in horizontal strips, emphasizing the layered, stratigraphic structure. It is a structure inherent to geological matter but also to our archaeology — to the natural, social, and cultural processes occurring one after the other. That's why we opted for marble, which is a stone with a very distinctive grain. Each of the marble slabs is different, unique, just as all history consists of unique, individual events.”

Meanwhile, the Polish Army Museum will comprise two buildings sitting opposite one another to create a central square. The complex has been arranged to reference the original urban layout of the barracks of the Polish Crown Guard Infantry, which predates the existing Citadel. To contrast with the history museum, the army museum features colored architectural concrete with a chevron pattern. Inside, the museum features what the design team calls a “spatial tension” between the blocks that comprise the museum functions.

“There are glass facades between the bodies of functional blocks,” WXCA’s Paweł Wolanin explained. “Thanks to them, the boundary between inside and outside is blurred. The museum also communicates with the park in other ways — among the green areas, there will be spaces for open-air exhibitions, and some of the historic buildings of the Warsaw Citadel will be adapted for provision of services. We have treated the architectural structures of the entire complex and the park space as an inseparable whole. This is what we mean by the term ‘park of museums,’ which transcends the traditional way of thinking about museum space.”

The first stage of the museum complex is expected to be completed in the coming year.

The development is one of several from Poland to recently feature in our editorial. Earlier this year, we covered the completion of a timber-clad home by Mobius Architekci Studio in a Polish forest, while late last year, Foster + Partners completed the EU’s tallest building, located in Warsaw.