Masters and teachers, housing innovations in designs of the professors of the Faculty of Architecture in the Warsaw University of Technology at the beginning of the 20th century

Abstract

The Faculty of Architecture in the Warsaw University of Technology (FA WUT) was established in the first quarter of the 20th century, when in European architecture and art, traditional trends were intertwined with new ideas, which inspired building´s creativity. In 1915, the Society of Science Courses and the Association of Technicians attempted to create a Polish university and polytechnic in Warsaw. Finally, at the newly created technical university, an independent architectural faculty was established. The members of the Organizing Committee and future professors represented the diversity of the architectural environment, both thanks to the education in various European schools (polytechnics, military schools and art academies), as well as the different aesthetic interests. This diversity was fully reflected in the architectural creativity of that period. At the beginning of the 20th century, the traditional craft thinking turned into the scientific interpretation of spatial activities, which stimulated the interest in novelty. The innovation was understood as in humanistic disciplines -like the ability to discover and test the solutions which deviate from the standard and which induce a rapid change in quality. Innovations of this period took the form of abstract and realistic ideas, methods based on alternative sets of criteria and technologies. They concerned the urban and architectural scale as well as the detail. In the particularly demanding living environment design, they manifested themselves in many objectively new values, such as functionalism, social housing, extensive typology of dwelling layouts, innovative reinforced concrete constructions of open plans, new standards of insolation, ventilation and many others. The paper is a summary of analyses regarding modern thoughts about living, present in selected projects and realizations of FA WUT professors, 1918-1939. We discuss the project of an extremely minimalist villa in Gdynia designed by Bohdan Lachert and Józef Szanajca (1926), Barbara and Stanisław Brukalski house at Niegolewski Street in Warsaw (1928), considered the first implementation of avant-garde architecture in Poland, the sanatorium house in Konstancin (Skolimów) by Helena and Szymon Syrkus (1930-1931) or the housing estate of the Warsaw Housing Cooperative. The aim of the analyses is to define innovative solutions: more functional, efficient and human-friendly, spatial and technical innovations, in the scale of the building, housing estate and a wider urban and social environment.