Muzeum Architektury, Wrocław

Muzeum Architektury is Poland’s only museum devoted to architecture, housed in a fifteenth-century former Bernardine religious complex. The church building and the cloistered courtyard with its garden make the setting part of the museum’s subject: architecture preserved inside architecture. Founded in nineteen sixty-five in the restored former monastery and church, it became an independent institution in nineteen seventy-one.

Its holdings run to about twenty-five thousand objects, though roughly five hundred are displayed at any one time. The collection ranges from plans, maps, drawings, models and photographs to fragments rescued from war-damaged buildings and recovered by archaeologists. Among those fragments are carved house emblems, window tracery and keystones—the central locking stones of masonry arches.

The stained-glass collection is the largest in Poland. Its standout survivor is a panel of the prophet Ezekiel, made around the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the oldest surviving stained glass in Poland. This former church still has another life: its main nave also serves as a concert and theatre hall.