My first stop in Krakow was the Home Army Museum (Museum AK): a museum dedicated to commemorating the efforts of the Polish underground state and Armia Krajowa (“Home Army”) throughout the 20th century. The Polish underground army was the largest resistance force of any occupied nation during WWII, and whose existence was not publicly commemorated until the museum was founded in 2000. The museum reuses a 19th-century barracks building, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire’s Krakow Fortress complex.
The renovation is very simple, modernizing the first floor of the building and creating infrastructure for vertical circulation, but featuring the original brick walls of the barracks throughout, recollecting the building’s original state. The centerpiece is the courtyard, now covered by a steel and glass canopy - both a refreshing interlude in one’s movement through the building, and a strategy to modernize the courtyard without stripping it of its original facade. I think this method of adaptive reuse is very successful in this situation: the building’s original context and presence is acknowledged and showcased, while not only meeting the program needs, but updating the interior in a way that creates new focal points throughout.
The installation itself is exhaustive and informative, chronicling the German occupation of Poland and its ramifications, setting the stage for and then closely following the efforts of the Home Army and Underground State. I was very interested to learn so much about Poland’s perspective during this time. I didn’t realize, for example, that the Nazis considered the Poles inferior to the Aryan race, and though not quite placing them on the ‘subhuman’ level of Jews and Romani people, made concerted efforts to exploit and eliminate Polish people in German-occupied territory. Poland lost 20% of its population during the war, more than any other occupied nation. There was a distinct feeling from the exhibition that the Polish collective memory of the war is not only that they were victimized by the Germans (and then the Soviets), but that the Polish people were betrayed by the allies in the aftermath of WWII, their bids for independence unheard.
In all, I thought this was a compelling adaptive reuse project, successful in its acknowledgement of the original building and prioritization of new programming.
Next, I visited the Cricoteka museum, which has adapted the site of a former power plant into a museum of the film artist Tadeusz Kantor. This building employs a mode of adaptive reuse in which a completely new volume is introduced to the site, reacting to the existing building, but maintaining its own distinct materiality and vocabulary of form. These two elements of the building are connected on the lower level, but appear on the surface to be two entirely separate structures.
The new portion of the building is clad in what appear to be prefabricated, perforated corten steel panels. Though modern, I thought the color and texture of the facade reacted well to the materiality of the original building, rather than creating a super high contrast (i.e. the colors go together, and the weathered texture speaks to the age of the original building and materials). The perforations also create really lovely light and shadow effects on the interior, resulting in movement throughout the day, or as the trees outside sway in the wind. This texture and motion may or may not have been a reference to Kantor’s video art, but I think it feels appropriate.
The information pamphlet referenced the building’s original use as a power plant and apparent later uses as a homeless shelter, but I could find no other acknowledgement of this on the site. Though this doesn’t quite fulfill my hopes for a project to address the historical context of the site, I was interested to learn that the permanent exhibit of Kantor’s work reveals that his interests were somewhat aligned with adaptive reuse: The action of wrapping (and of concealing and manipulating objects in general) was central to Kantor’s work. The exhibit “Spectres,” on the upper level, also states the artist’s intent through this work to address the role of various events impacting human history: “reading, in the concatenations of form, the forces governing our age.”
I think the connection between this artistic pursuit and the project’s architectural motifs is probably not evident to the average visitor (and is possibly just something I’m projecting) but I can’t help but feel like it fits. I’m interested in this idea that in the case of museums, the design of the building plays one role, and the design of the exhibition plays another. They can react to one another, or remain totally detached. I am most interested in these examples where the building’s history and design inform the exhibit within, and vice versa.
