Polish museum in the race for EU Architecture Prize
PR dla Zagranicy
Victoria Bieniek
02.02.2017 11:27
The Katyń Museum in Warsaw is among forty projects shortlisted for the 2017 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Adrian Grycuk.
The Katyń Museum, a tribute to over 20 thousand Polish officers murdered by the Soviet NKVD police in the Katyń Forest, in eastern Russia, in 1940, was designed by the Warsaw-based BBGK Architekci studio.
It is located at the site of Warsaw’s citadel, a 19th-century fortress erected on the orders of Tsar Nicolas I after the fall of the anti-Tsarist November Uprising in 1831.
The main exhibition features a collection of some of the Katyń victims’ personal belongings displayed in wooden army boxes instead of standard display cases.
The forty shortlisted projects were narrowed down from a total of 355 nominated designs.
Five finalists will be named in March, and the overall winner will be announced on 26 May.
The prize, awarded once every two years, is also known as the Mies van der Rohe Award, named after German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969).
In 2015 the prize was given to the Philharmonic Hall in Szczecin, in north-western Poland. (mk/vb)