The Museum as an Active Observatory: Protecting and Shaping the Landscape

The Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów is located in Warsaw. Wilanów district has been experiencing growing urbanization pressure for over 20 years. As a result, an historical old big-scale Polish farm was changed into townscape due to intensive housing development. Despite applying measures of nature and monument protection, these are now in a degraded condition and stand as proof of the ineffectiveness of Polish law in the field of landscape protection. The following article briefly discusses the main landscape threats identified by the Museum. It also presents a model of activities, as well as examples of tools for a Museum institution to serve as an observatory. The conducted analyses have proven that museums and landscape observatories largely share the same tasks. The SWOT analyses compiled for the Wilanów landscape and a prospective landscape observatory justify the need to introduce a local landscape observatory which would coexist with the Museum. The presented diagram clearly shows the interconnectedness of the opportunities and the growing threats to, i.e., loss of, spatial, cultural and natural values arising in the absence of such coexisting units. Unfortunately, Poland has yet to regulate the establishment of landscape observatories. Perhaps, the Museum’s initiative and this article will change that.