Description

The Gdynia City Museum is a place to showcase Gdynia’s past and to exchange ideas, experiences and dreams between generations. Dozens of thousands of items: photographs, postcards, documents on public life, posters, plans, maps and works of art in the Museum’ collection are a source of knowledge about the past and present life of the city and its people that invariably fascinates visitors and is a source of pride to the people of Gdynia. The Gdynia City Museum puts special emphasis on up-to-date education and an out-of-the-box approach to present history, not just in its local aspect. Design, art, people’s stories, in-house books and records are excellent reasons to return again and again to learn about the fascinating history of the City of Sea and Dreams.

Gdynia is a unique city in Polish history. It is Poland’s dream of access to the sea come true as well as the most spectacular outcome of Poles’ 20th century modernization efforts. Therefore, it is a city in which modernity and everyday life are intertwined with myths – the myth of the sea, the myth of modernity, the myth of entrepreneurship, the myth of Polishness, the myth of the interwar, the myth of the city. We want to explore the ordinary, everyday history and modernity of the city as well as its mythology, or, more precisely, its various mythologies.

Gdynia is modernity – modern politics, economics and architecture or modern transport. As a part of its activity, the Museum explores and presents modernity in its diversity – its good and bad aspects or the relevant and obsolete ones as well as the spectacular and the ordinary, which may be barely noticeable. Gdynia is a modernist city. Modernism and design are closely intertwined. The modern world is largely a designed world. We are surrounded by completed design projects: buildings, vehicles, objects, prints.