Faculty of Architecture at Warsaw University of Technology

Warsaw Faculty of Architecture – the first modern university School of Architecture in Poland, was founded in 1915, as one of the new faculties for the already existing Warsaw University of Technology. Since the very beginning the main aim was to give the future architects practical knowledge based upon the integration of art and technical as well as human – especially historic – sciences. This idea has been defined by the founders of the Faculty – graduates of the leading European technical schools and universities – and later formed the foundations of the „Warsaw School of Architecture”. It is the Professors at the Faculty – also the best designers, who during the period between the First and Second World War have created edifices comparable with the leading European achievements of those times. Such names as Józef Dziekoński – the first dean of the Faculty and senior of the 19th and 20th Polish Architecture , Stanisław Noakowski – a visionary of the Polish Historic Architecture, and later Rudolf Świerczyński, Karol Jankowski, Marian Lalewicz, Jan Heurich, Czesław Przybylski, Lech Niemojewski, Barbara and Stanisław Brukalski, Helena Syrkus – fill up the best pages of the Polish Architecture of 1920-ies

The foundations for the contemporary Polish urban planning was created right at the Faculty by Tadeusz Tołwiński and Jan Olaf Chmielewski. Continued until the present free hand drawing style had been shaped by Zygmunt Kamiński. A new school of landscape design was introduced by Franciszek Krzywda-Polkowski, and the Team of Polish Architecture was started by Oskar Sosnowski – died 24th September 1939, shot in the faculty’s courtyard while saving the priceless inventory archives of the best examples of the Polish edifices.

Stefan Bryła was a symbol of the leading structural engineer sciences and their integration with Architecture. During the second World War he was the dean of the undercover faculty and was killed by the Nazis on one of the Warsaw’s a streets. Second World War was a test for all the people connected with the Faculty. The building of Faculty became the secret hiding place of the archives, at the same time many architects were involved in the undercover teaching of students, undercover espionage movements and creation of the architectural vision of the future Warsaw.

After 1945, new leading Polish Architects found their place at the Faculty. The list includes such names as: Romuald Gutt – first after war dean of the Faculty, as well as Bohdan Lachert, Zdzisław Mączeński, Szymon Syrkus and Bohdan Pniewski. The need to rebuild our country from the aftermath of the Second World War in the end flourished in the creation of the „Polish School of the Preservation of the Historic Monuments” – a place which had integrated the society of architects.

The third quarter of the 20th Century brought to light such names as Zbigniew Karpiński, Jan Bogusławski, Jerzy Hryniewiecki, Małgorzata and Zbigniew Wacławek, Halina Skibniewska and others. Urban line of design was continued by Kazimierz Wejchert and Hanna Adamczewska-Wejchert, as well as Zygmunt Skibniewski, and the issues of historic cities – by Wacław Ostrowski.

Presently our Faculty is one of the nine Polish Schools of Architecture. We have over 1000 students and employ 150 of academic staff. Warsaw Faculty of Architecture is one of the largest academic centres both within the scope of Architecture as well as Urban design. Through many international contacts it is well known also in other countries. One of the main values – cooperation with contemporary leading designers and theorists of the Architecture and Urban Design – still forms the integral part of the Faculty’s policy. Therefore our past and great architects who founded our Faculty form an integral part of the Warsaw academic environment.

Faculty web site: www.arch.pw.edu.pl