International Architectural Design Competition | Museum of the Second World War | Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam Architects

In human experience there is no greater contrast than the conditions of peace and war. The architecture of the museum building and its landscapes posits the conditions of contrast that invoke contemplation of the contradictions that war overlays onto human endeavor. Ultimately, the magnification and illumination of the museum’s message is the project of the architecture and the landscape. The Primordial Forest The museum landscape is suspended between a calm refuge and a tumultuous history—an archetype of the symbolic Polish forest transported to Gdansk. Like the landscape Adam Mickiewicz describes in “Pan Taduesz,” the Polish forest has been a refuge maintaining the continuity of Polish identity in times of political turmoil. Monumental trees symbolize the fatherland, and ancientness is felt everywhere........more