Museum of Architecture

Contemporary Museum – The Negative of the Cloister Garden The cloister garden, the heart of the former monastery, is a space of profound symbolism. An enclosed garden, organized around silence and light, represents withdrawal from the noise of the external world. Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, describes enclosed places as shelters of the soul – the cloister garden is such a refuge, embodying intimacy, meditation, and separation from external chaos. It is a space that is rather than acts. Within it, time slows down and life turns into reflection. In the context of the new pavilion of the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław, the “soul” is not an abstraction but a collection of valuable exhibits, artifacts, and ideas that require protection. The new pavilion becomes a contemporary shelter for these material and immaterial testimonies of the past. Its structure is a modern interpretation of the cloister garden, where enclosed interior spaces serve as guardians of memory. Martin Heidegger, in Building, Dwelling, Thinking, notes that space does not exist in itself but through relationships and the way it is inhabited. The pavilion, as the negative of the cloister garden, is a space that does not close itself off from the world but opens to relations with its surroundings. The cloisters that once embraced the garden are replaced by the street and the park – dynamic, fluid spaces where movement and encounter become a new form of contemplation. This is a place where the everyday life of the city intertwines with history, and the monastery’s past does not vanish but flows into a new, open narrative.