Museum of Architecture

Museum of Architecture

You can never expect what you can encounter in museum of architeture. Looking from the outside, the Museum of Architecture is an old, beautiful gothic building in Wroclaw. It was an old monastery building. For non-Polish tourists, please buy you tickets from the lady next to the staircase,who is also with a lot of books. When I arrive, I struggled to find the ticket office. If you are smart enough to choose to visit the museum on Wednesday – Congratulations! You don't have to buy a tickets. Free admission on every Wednesdays. As most of the staff in the museum cannot speak English, I here recommend you ,tourists, to get a leaflet which contains a brief introduction of the museum in English as well as a map, from the lady next to the staircase. Do it before you visit the exhibitions or else you will be completely lost during the visit, like me.

Before visiting the exhibitions, you should visit the paradise yard in the middle of building. Seeing a green garden with a sculpture in the middle of the town centre, I felt calm and peace. Sometimes the door to the garden is closed but you can always open the door and get inside.

There are two permanent exhibitions showing you the foundation of building in 13^th Century in Poland and the interior design of building from 12^th century to 20^th century respectively. The largest area of this Museum is the main nave of the church and it is always used for temporary exhibition. The current theme of the temporary exhibition is „Architecture Institutes and Medical Clinics” as 2011 is the bicentenary of Wroclaw Medical University. This exhibition is the largest exhibition in the museum. Actually I cannot think of the connection between Clinics and Architecture. What I found in the exhibition are the draft of the structure of the building of the university and some old-styled medical equippments – a bit unrelated, isn't it? However, it is fresh to visit this type of exhibitions. The old-styled medical equippments shown in the exhibition were those appeared in the thriller movies which cut people into pieces! That's the reason why I stated in the begining of the article that you can never expect what you discover in this museum – having cinematic sense in the museum of architecture!

Last thing to remind you, English description are only available in permanent exhibitions, excluding the temporary ones. So if you visit temporary exhibitions, what you can only do is appreciating the pictures. Be aware of this!