Guided tour of the home of Sofia and Oscar Hansen

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw invites you to Saturday guided tours of the House of Zofia and Oskar Hansen in Szumin — a unique place on the map of Polish architecture of the 20th century. It is a small summer house built on a plot on the Bug, which combines the features of a family refuge and spatial experiment.

Saturdays from May 9 to September 12, 2026 are the only opportunity this season to visit the House of Zofia and Oskar Hansen in Shumin. They are guided by people from the team of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. During the visit you will learn about the history of the house, its unique solutions and the personal dimension of this architecture.

A joint walk around the house lasts about 45-60 minutes, after which there is time for additional questions and rest in the house and garden. For the youngest participants throughout the event, a small corner with cards, crayons and a proposal of tasks to be completed under the supervision of adults will be waiting on the terrace of the house.

Zofia and Oskar Hansen — a couple of architects associated with the Warsaw Housing Cooperative, creators of the concept of Open Form — designed this house as a space for living, working and teaching. They spent their holidays here, received guests and students. The house in Szumina was their plot, garden, studio, sometimes a year-round house, but also — in all its modest scale — a manifesto of their architectural ideas. Together they created residential estates in Warsaw (Rakowiec, Przyczółek Grochowski) and in Lublin (LSM os. Słowacki). Oskar Hansen also designed exhibitions and exhibition pavilions in Izmir (1955) and São Paulo (1959). Hansens' work combined design practice with didactic and theoretical activities.
According to the Open Form concept, architecture should not impose a rigid structure, but create a framework open to variability, interaction and individual needs of users. The house in Shumin was to fulfill these principles, responding to life, developing with it, being open to people and to relationships between them.

Since 2014, the house in Shumin is a branch of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The interior has preserved the original equipment, the layout of the space and numerous didactic instruments that allow us to understand how architecture can shape everyday life. The special atmosphere of this place is made up of traces of activity and passion of its former inhabitants — didactic instruments placed around the house for learning the basics of composition and a wooden dovecote, which, as Zofia Hansen joked, was the most perfect work of her husband.