Excerpt from the competition brief:
Concept
Building a cultural institution is always a challenge. Building an opera house for a high-caliber ensemble of artists is an extraordinary challenge in itself. How might one describe the challenge facing the architects of the new opera house for world-class artists in Łazienki Park in Warsaw?
In Łazienki Park, everything is of the utmost importance: the composition of greenery and water, the architecture of the folies—pavilions and buildings, trees, and open public and semi-private spaces. Architectural structures contribute to this composition. In such a place, the new building cannot flaunt its size, either symbolically or physically. This applies both to the potential length of its monumental facades and to the height of its individual elements. This calls for an appropriate definition of the structure, skillfully situated amidst the greenery, in an existing forest clearing within a landscape-style, English, romantic garden.
In our design for the Polish Royal Opera House, the undulating terrain of this wooded park clearing contributes to the landscape concept of both the surroundings and the Opera House itself. The landscape in which the sculptural form of the opera house is situated complements and expands upon the composition of the existing English-style park, with its planned classical architectural elements, drawing almost directly from the experiences and building philosophies of the ancients and the creators of the Enlightenment era.
In 1764, the year of King Stanisław August Poniatowski’s accession to the throne, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, in his work *History of Ancient Art*, inaugurated the Classical period and declared, among other things, that the pinnacle of art is the attainment of beauty through noble simplicity and serene grandeur. The creators of Łazienki Park, together with the last King of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, followed this path in the 18th century, and the goal of our work is to continue this same philosophy today.
At the same time, we aim to “present a concept for a building that meets contemporary requirements for theater and opera functions, designed with respect for the landscape and urban context, modern in style, and reflecting the timelessness of opera in its architectural expression.” We propose a design for a contemporary building featuring state-of-the-art technology, which simultaneously serves as another modern element of the romantic forest park’s landscape. In accordance with the philosophy and tradition of Classicism and the art of opera, the Opera House design also continues the transcendental and symbolic fusion of cosmic energy with the elements, the earth, and nature, drawing on the semantics of astronomy and the spacetime of planetary systems. It seeks the sources of its philosophy in the discoveries of Galileo and Copernicus or the works of Johannes Hevelius, so revered by the Classical era, as well as through King Stanisław August Poniatowski himself, his architects, and their contemporaries.