Tender to be held soon for the museum’s new home on Defilad Square

By the end of February the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw will announce a restricted tender to select a construction firm to build the institution’s new headquarters on Defilad Square.

This is a historic moment bringing to an end the preparations for the first of a number of public projects in the heart of the Polish capital. The building permit for the museum became legally final this week, opening the way to the construction process. The contractor selected in the tender will erect a museum building with a total area of almost 20,000 m2 designed by the New York architectural studio Thomas Phifer and Partners. The museum’s new building will include exhibition halls of 4,000 m2, educational rooms, a library, an auditorium, a cinema, a café, and a reconstruction of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio from the late 1950s using the original fittings from that unique facility, a legend of modern Polish culture. The underground portions will include areas for conservation and storage of artworks.

The site of the museum’s new home posed a big challenge for the designers, as the building will be constructed above the Centrum metro station, utility tunnels, and a huge transformer supplying power to most of the central Śródmieście district. Due to the difficulties posed by the site, participation in the tender will be limited to firms with great experience suited to the scale of such a complex project.
The tender is to be decided in October 2018. The museum anticipates great interest among construction firms and a fierce battle to win this prestigious contract. The new building is scheduled to open in December 2021.

The museum construction on Defilad Square is the first in a number of major projects in this part of the city, which will be transformed into a “central square” for Warsaw. The other projects are planned so that each of them can be constructed without interfering with the others. The further projects will be the western portion of the complex designed by Thomas Phifer, which is the TR Warszawa theatre, as well as technical infrastructure, access roads around the buildings, underground parking, and the central square itself, the design competition for which has now entered the final phase.