Art Stations Poznań – Museum of Modern Art with TAA (TADAO ANDO Architect&Associates)
This is a museum for contemporary art planned in the downtown area of the city of Poznan, in Poland.
The site for this museum is located in an urban park with rich nature, surrounded by the Old Brewery, a former industrial brick building converted into an important cultural and commercial center for Poznan, and Polwiejska, a main pedestrian street with many retail stores. The site, due to its location, functions as an important node and public space in the configuration of downtown’ s urban fabric. In order to preserve this verdant landscape of the park, we propose a scheme where the entire building volume is completely buried underground. Due to the existence in the site of big trees with stems of more than 1 meter in diameter, we configured the building’ s structure as to carefully avoid and preserve these valuable existing trees.
The architectural composition of the museum consists of an oval peripheral walkway at ground level, a fan-shaped sunken court, a large rectangular event space (Tool Box) and galleries with simple geometrical forms. The fan-shaped sunken court, which functions as one of the main entrance for the museum, intents to integrate and serve as buffer zone between the two distinct realms of the ground level’ s park and the underground museum. An impressive waterfall in this sunken court, more than ten meters in height and sixty-five meters in length, aims to express and emphasize the contrasting tension between the calmness of the park and the dynamic nature of a museum.
We also envision that through this sunken court, the natural light, reflected in the surface of the pond, will shine towards the interior spaces of the museum. Through this architectural manipulation, we aim to give visitors the feeling of the park’ s atmosphere even while they are in the museum underground. The museum’ s program consists of galleries for the Grazyna Kulczyk Collection, as well as for the commission works of two artists, a spacious temporary exhibition gallery, Tool Box suitable for a variety of events, back spaces, a café and a diagonal entrance path from Polwiejska.
We feel certain that, with the new use as museum, the park will continue to function as an important urban recreation element within the context of Poznan’ s city center, and it will become an exiting center of art and culture.