‘Green City of Music’ breaks ground — the new Academy of Music campus in Kraków

Konior Studio, the Katowice-based practice of Tomasz Konior, is one of those firms whose name alone is a guarantee — associated above all with acoustics and architecture for music, with the NOSPR concert hall in Katowice at the forefront. The practice is now entering a key phase of one of the country’s most important cultural projects: the new campus of the Music Academy in Kraków, for which it has prepared the complete technical design. The first works — demolitions and clearance — began in 2026, and the project has also reached a financial breakthrough.

A city of music, not a building

The concept is described with the phrase 'green city of music' — and that is not just a slogan. Instead of a single monumental building, Konior Studio proposes a layout resembling a fragment of a city: nine structures with around a hundred practice, rehearsal and concert rooms, linked by shared spaces and greenery, on a site of nearly four hectares in Grzegórzki by the Vistula, which the university received as a donation from the Military Property Agency.

This structure has a deep functional logic. An individual practice room, a chamber rehearsal room and a concert hall each have entirely different acoustic requirements, and placing them directly next to one another is often a source of conflict — sound from one must not bleed into another. Spreading them out in an 'urban' layout, with buffers of greenery and shared spaces, makes it possible to reconcile the university’s scale with the acoustic isolation of each interior. It is a response to a real problem: until now, the academy has operated in a historic building that was never designed for music — with cramped, scarce practice rooms and dark corridors.

Breakthrough: a pledge of nearly PLN 800m

The biggest barrier to projects like this is not the design but the money. This is where the breakthrough came: the Music Academy in Kraków has received a pledge of nearly PLN 800m from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Ministry of Finance to build its new premises. The university already holds a building permit, and completion of the whole project is scheduled for 2033. It is one of the largest public cultural projects in Poland over the next decade.

The competition that confirmed its position

Konior Studio won the right to design the campus in an architectural competition settled in 2022, beating the likes of JSK Architekci and WXCA — the strongest names in Polish architecture. For the Katowice practice, it is confirmation that it now plays in the top league of designing for music. For us at Method Press, it is an example of a project whose narrative stretches across an entire decade — from the competition, through funding and demolitions, to completion in 2033 — where a consistent story of successive stages matters as much as the architecture itself.