The book ‘MSN. Building the Museum / Building the Museum” by Marta Ejsmont has just been published by the MSN Publishing House. It is a photo-album which documents the construction of the new headquarters of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The creation of the new headquarters is of great importance due to its location in the very centre of Warsaw. The building has a chance to become one of the new architectural landmarks of the capital.
The Museum of Modern Art opened on 25 October. During the opening weekend, the place was visited by 50,000 people! The white edifice has attracted the attention of art and architecture lovers as well as Warsaw residents, who have been following the progress of construction work for almost five years. Marta Ejsmont in her photo-album ‘MSN. Building the Museum / Building the Museum” immortalised the process.
My archive contains tens of thousands of photographs: working in the investment department of the MSN, I had the opportunity and privilege to document every stage of the creation of the museum’s new headquarters. This process proved to be a multidimensional and very non-obvious journey for me. Entering it without any technical knowledge, I was able to discover and define its individual elements in my own way,’ Marta Ejsmont writes in the introduction.
The new publication is a visual narrative of the process of building the edifice designed by Thomas Phifer. The author accompanied the process throughout. The album is filled with artistic photographs and discusses the gradually emerging architecture. It also captures the essence of the creative process and the shared hope of the highly anticipated building. The photographs are accompanied by a short personal statement by the author and an essay on the city-forming role of the new Museum building by Tomasz Fudala. The book is co-published by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
Another publication worth noting is Michał Murawski ‘s book ‘The Form of Friendship. Museum on the Square’, which addresses the location of the building, the historical context of the site and its relationship with the surroundings. The Palace of Culture was for decades the centre of life of the communist state, and then the arena for the formation of Polish capitalism. A bazaar trade flourished in its vicinity, and years later a forest of skyscrapers grew up. It is in the shadow of the Palace of Culture that the fiercest disputes over land reprivatisation take place, and that thousands of underground, rail or bus passengers pass by every day. Michał Murawski weaves these threads together in an attempt to capture, as he writes, the ‘spatio-temporal, infrastructural junction’ on which the Museum rises and to ‘distil’ the resulting ‘ideology’ of the institution.
There are interesting architectural threads in Murawski’s publication, including a conversation with Zygmunt Borawski, the architect of Central Square, Thomas Phifer, Deyan Sudjic and Marlena Happach. The guide to this history is Alina Szapocznikow’s sculpture Friendship from 1954, which for almost 40 years greeted those entering the Palace of Culture, only to later disappear from view and now return, albeit in mutilated form, to the Square – to the Museum of Modern Art.
Both books by Marta Ejsmont and Michał Murawski have been published thanks to funding from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Both books can be purchased at: https://sklep.artmuseum.pl.
Marta Ejsmont is a photographer associated with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Since 2018, she has documented the construction of the Museum’s new headquarters and the urban transformation of the New Centre of Warsaw. In photography, the relationship between man and architecture is particularly important to her.
Michał Murawski – anthropologist of architecture and the city. Lecturer in Critical Area Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Author of The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw and a City Transfixed (Indiana University Press, 2019; published as The Palace Complex. The Social Life of a Stalinist Skyscraper in Capitalist Warsaw by the Museum of Warsaw, 2015) and Only to Hell: architecture, nature and violence in recolonial Russia (MIT, 2025); co-editor of the volumes Anti-Atlas: Critical Area Studies from the East of the West (with Wendy Bracewell and Tim Beasley-Murray, UCL Press, 2025) and Re-Centring the City: Global Mutations of Socialist Modernity (with Jonathan Bach, UCL Press 2020). Founder of the PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics) research group at University College London.
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Fans of not only architecture, but also positions treating contemporary art and culture should be interested in publications published by MSN Publishing. Examples include “Asylums, niches and enclaves, or a catalogue of small utopias” by Jakub Szczęsny, “Hidden Modernism. Warsaw according to Christian Kerez” by Nicolas Grospierre and Jan Strumiłło or “Spór o odbudowę Warszawy. From rubble to reprivatisation’, edited by Tomasz Fudala. And in the near future, Anna Walewska’s book ‘Koleżanki i koledzy. Inżynierska 3’.
source: Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
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