MOCAK (Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow) By CLaudio Nardi Architects
Krakow, Poland
IIDA – Italy International Design Award – Gold Award, category: Commercial Display Design , Milan, Italy – 2020 Edition IDG – International Space Design Awards – Golden-Creativity Award – Beijing, China – 2020 Edition Platinum Drill – Public Construction Award – Warsaw, Poland – 2013 Edition Mies van der Rohe Award – Nomination – Barcelona, Spain – 2011 Edition Philippe Rotthier European Architecture Prize – Brussels, Belgium – 2011 Edition International Biennial “Barbara Capocchin ” – Architecture Award – Padua, Italy – 2011 Edition Dedalo Minosse International Award for Clients in Architecture – Vicenza, Italy – 2011 Edition
The exhibition area unfolds around the existing buildings like an embrace, filling all the available and admissible space available for the project.
This results in an irregular, jagged shape that nevertheless manages to take on the force of a sign, giving visibility to the exhibition route that unfolds between the main entrance on Lipowa Street (next to the old, original factory entrance) and the project plaza at the back, to the north.
Where it appears, the "south wall," bearing the museum's logo, marks the beginning of a new urban route that traverses the museum area and the old pavilions, balancing with its mass the
The prominent and solid presence of the adjacent pre-existing Historical and Memorial Museum.
Seen from the wide open space on Lipowa Street, the new museum appears as a new, contemporary-technology architecture, light and bright, with a shed roof that effortlessly blends and integrates, enveloping it, with the structure of the pre-existing buildings. A long, sloping path leads the visitor to +30cm, the new elevation where the new "internal plaza" is grafted. Along the path, seating and a sparse, delicate treeline overlook, on one side, an exhibition loggia created within one of the shed buildings, overlooked by the glass windows of the artists' residences and studios and the large glass window of the library.
On the opposite side, the museum's full-length entrance hall, the bookshop, and the restaurant.
Architecture, Landscape, Interiors (2010)
In Collaboration with
Architect Leonardo Proli
To be protected, it can also become a trail, a path toward the future.
After all, the stories that unfolded in those places back then already testified to the possibility of hope, of a way out of the horrors. The industrial character of the shed roofs of the existing buildings, taken as the key visual element of the project as a whole, evokes, in this case, the continuity between pre-existing and modern.
