Architecture

Architecture

The Finnish firm Lahdelma & Mahlamäki won the international competition for the architectural design of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in the summer of 2005, the first competition of its kind in Poland. Lahdelma & Mahlamäki’s winning design is a stunning 138,000 square-foot building with a unique glass and copper façade, undulating walls, and the largest glass window in Poland. The museum’s gleaming glass and copper exterior has already become a symbol of the new Poland—vibrant, modern, inspiring, and culturally significant. The building received the prestigious Chicago Athenaeum International Architecture Award while still under construction in 2008.

Prof. Mahlamäki, a professor in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Oulu, recalled his inspiration for the main hall: the parting of the Red Sea and escape of Jews from Egypt, as told in the Book of Exodus. From the center of the lobby visitors will see the Monument to Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto through the glass curtain above the main entrance. The monument is a symbol of remembrance and a key element of Prof. Mahlamäki’s spatial design of the building.

Rainer Mahlamäki, Chief Architect    
It is not a museum of the Holocaust. I want the building to express beauty; it should symbolize the future and hope.

Architectural Record
In the Warsaw Square that is laden with the history of the 1943 Ghetto Uprising, the Finnish firm of Lahdelma & Mahlamäki Architects has designed a muscular yet sleek enclosure for a surprising organic and undulating interior.

CNN Reports
It’s what architecture aspires to, seamlessly molding form and function into profound meaning.

Prof. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Core Exhibition Program Director,
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews  
On the inside there’s a huge chasm down the middle, and for me that chasm says rupture, it says break, it says wound. But at the same time there is a series of bridges that stand for the mission of the museum, which is to create a bridge, a bridge across time, a bridge across continents, and a bridge across people.