Copernicus Science Centre, Warsaw, Poland

On the banks of the Vistula River near Warsaw's Old Town stands a building which fascinates its visitors with different amazing scientific experiments – the Copernicus Science Centre (Centrum Nauki Kopernik). The official website of museum notes, that the Museum’s main mission is to encourage personal engagement of its visitors in discovering and understanding the world. From this point of the view, without any doubt, the mission is fully succeeded. The visitors of the museum can feel how it is to walk on the moon, can understand what a human is afraid from and why, can create themselves a tornado or a lightening, can even use their minds to move a ball.

The idea of creating this museum dates back to 1997. However, only seven years later, in 2004, the mayor of Warsaw, the Polish Minister of Science and Minister of Education agreed on the construction of the museum. In 2005 an architectural competition for the building of the future museum was announced. The competition won a small Polish architectural firm led by Jan Kubec and Magdalena Gilder. Copernicus Science Centre officially opened in 2010.

The main building of the museum has the form of the Latin letter "L". Its area comprises 15,000 square meters. The building is housing permanent and temporary exhibitions of different machines, laboratories and office rooms, as well as cafes, restaurants and a rooftop garden. Architects of the building used all possible methods to create an environmentally friendly building. Thanks to the numerous windows, the building is naturally lit throughout the whole day. Rooftop garden also has ecological role - it isolates from noise and also keeps the building warm in winter and cool in the summer.

The museum complex also includes a multimedia planetarium, which has a shape of boulder, is covered with reddish glass and located right next to the main building. In the outdoor garden next to the museum, you can also make experiments; visit an open-air art gallery and an open-air amphitheater.

Copernicus Center is the largest science museum in Eastern Europe and one of the most popular places in Warsaw. The most exciting in this museum is that you are allowed to touch and use every exhibit.

By Anna Pambukhchyan, www.building.am