Museum on the Vistula

Adolf Krischanitz has completed a new movable and reusable modern art exhibition center on the riverside of the Vistula in Warsaw.

A new temporary contemporary art space has opened along the Vistula River in Powiśle, one of Warsaw’s most historic neighborhoods. Designed by the Austrian architect Adolf Krischanitz, the pavilion was born from a collaboration with the Vienna-based Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) Foundation. The Museum on the Vistula will host exhibitions and events, providing a meeting point for everyone until the completion of the Museum’s new building in Plac Defilad, which will open in 2020.

Slawomir Pawszak, concept for the museum's facade, Warsaw, 2017

Conceived as a movable and reusable structure, the Museum on the Vistula features a 600 square-meter exhibition space, with an opportunity for artists to design the building’s facade. First installed in the center of Berlin at the former site of the Palace of the Republic, the pavilion offered a provisional space for the Temporäre Kunsthalle, a contemporary art installation that hosted events and exhibitions for two years between 2008 and 2010. 

Adolf Krischanitz, Museum on the Vistula, Warsaw, 2017

The time restrictions for this interim exhibition space were reflected in Krischanitz’s clear design, which emphasizes a range of possibilities for quick transformations, elasticity, and functionality. The main hall is conceived as a wooden construction with open-web girders, while the surrounding strip foundations form a stable basis for the wooden elements that emerge from them. The surfaces of the exterior skin and the inner walls are made from fiber-cement panels.

Adolf Krischanitz, Museum on the Vistula, Warsaw, 2017


Museum on the Vistula, Warsaw, Poland
Program: museum
Architect: Adolf Krischanitz
Area: 600 sqm
Completion: 2017