MoMA Warsaw: Rethinking the White Cube

Established in 2005, MSN Warsaw has spent the last two decades operating as a nomadic institution, moving in 2008, 2012 and 2017, before the opening of its permanent site in Plac Defilad (Parade Square – the largest public square in Europe) in 2024. Designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners, the museum is bookended by the Stalinist Palace of Culture and Science (the eighth tallest building in world when it was completed in 1955) and a contemporary shopping center that includes global brands like Zara and UNIQLO. Such siting means that the museum is suggestively poised between polar cultural models – a condition that is somewhat unique to Poland, which has historically served as the far Eastern outpost of Western Europe, and whose history has in different periods adopted Eastern and Western cultural antecedents amid various waves of expansion, occupation and transition.

The building itself stands in a dialectical relationship to the hulking, ideologically laden Palace of Culture and Science. Ascending only four floors, it adopts a minimalistic aesthetic that formally harkens back to high modernism and embraces the symbolic silence cultivated in this style of architecture. In this regard, the building has been compared to a tabula rasa in which a distinctly Polish voice might find full articulation.

The piers of the set-back, glass-enclosed ground floor read like Corbusian pilotis creating a rhythm of solid/void, light/shadow that belies their mass, while the clerestory ribbon is evocative of the Villa Savoye and other residences from this period. Meanwhile, the deep-set windows create forced-perspective penetrations in the pure white concrete exterior, echoing the play of depth seen in the facades of Richard Meyers’s Saltzman and Weinstein Houses. The carving of volume from the façade helps alleviate the force of the overall form, enlivening the design through the contrast of shimmering concrete and recessed void, a play that is inverted at night when the façade allows almost surreal (if not also somewhat voyeuristic) views into the interior.

The severity of the building’s formal vocabulary requires a degree of precision that highlights the exquisite craftsmanship of the masons and carpenters whose work the building ultimately celebrates. This is even more evident in the interior, where the play of beams, coffers and circulation coalesce in a large double staircase that serves as the building’s core aesthetic articulation. A large skylight allows natural daylight to cascade down the stairs, grazing beams and creating form out of the subtle modulations of light in its interaction with pristine concrete geometries, resulting in Escher-like effects.

Physically and metaphorically, the space functions as the traditional modernist white cube, with the interaction of light and mass embodying the emersion of point, line, plane, solid and simulacra articulated in classical Pythagorean philosophy:

The Pythagoreans of Plato's day, including Plato himself, held that the beginning was a blank where there appeared inexplicably a spot which stretched into a line, which flowed into a plane, which folded into a solid, which cast a shadow, which is what we see. This set of elements - point, line, surface, solid, simulacrum - conceived as contentless except in their own nature, is the primary equipment of much of modem art. The white cube represents the blank ultimate face of light from which, in the Platonic myth, these elements unspeakably evolve. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of Gallery Space, Brian O’Doherty, The Palis Press, San Francisco 1979, p. 11-12

The few works on exhibition before the main opening in February evince the charged potential of this type of presentation, with large-scale brightly colored works like Sandra Mujinga’s Ghosting set off against the immaculate white floors, ceilings and walls of the galleries.

As Phifer explained to The Guardian during the museum’s opening, light plays a central role in the building’s design, “Light to me is enlightenment It is the opening of ideas. It is a cleansing in a way.” These are traditional modernist interpretations of light, and typical raisons d'être for privileging white surfaces. It will be interesting to see how the museum contends with more post-modern and contemporary practices that might challenge the white cube gallery, but whatever that contention looks like, the works on display will be amply provisioned by the versatile lighting environment.

In addition to the abundance of natural light that is brought in through skylights, selectively placed windows and a clerestory that wraps the building, Arup also implemented an incredibly robust artificial lighting infrastructure. Litelab worked with Arup to develop a modular light-beam system that integrates seamlessly within the ubiquitous coffers that define the ceiling condition throughout the galleries. These beams glow the coffers providing the sense of natural lighting even when there is none, and lightening the space through a process of dematerialization that also provides gentle indirect lighting.

The light-beams include linear wallwashers, as well as custom LED object and wallwash luminaires, and are deployed in eight different configurations based on their location within the galleries and their relation to the ceiling infrastructure. Most permutations include linear lighting, track for moveable art lighting and a Unistrut channel for hanging large scale artworks (like the aforementioned Ghosting).

The museum is the cornerstone of a burgeoning cultural hub at Plac Defilad, with a sister building by Phifer for the TR Warszawa theater opening in five years, and a planned park with two ponds and a jazz bar currently in development. The ground floor of the museum gestures to these future public programs, and includes lecture halls, temporary exhibition space, a store and a café, and does not require admission. These programs anchor the public role that museums have historically claimed as educators and social condensers, roles that they are increasingly embracing post pandemic to drive visitation, and perhaps soften cultural rifts.

In many ways, MSN Warsaw synthesizes multiple contradictions, bridging past and present, communism and global capitalism, light and mass. Its minimalist vocabulary encapsulates incredible complexity, holding opposites in tension without comment, much like the stoic silence of its white walls allows the artworks that it houses free and full articulation in space.