Helena Syrkusowa

Helena Syrkusowa , also Helena Syrkus , b. Niemirska (born May 14, 1900 in Warsaw , † November 19, 1982 in Warsaw) was a Polish architect and university teacher. She was married to Szymon Syrkus .

Life

Helena Niemirska's father was the Riga doctor Izaak Eliasberg. Her mother Stella, b. Bernstein, taught in an orphanage run by Janusz Korczak . The daughter studied architecture at the Warsaw Technical University from 1918 to 1923 . Then followed a study of philosophy under the professors Władysław Tatarkiewicz and Tadeusz Kotarbiński at the University of Warsaw .

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Together with Szymon Syrkus, Stanisław Brukalski , his wife Barbara Brukalska-Sokołowska , Bohdan Lachert and Józef Szanajca , she founded the Praesens architecture group at the end of 1925 . From 1926 to 1929 she worked as the group's office manager. In 1926 she married Szymon Syrkus, from then on they always worked together on projects. After Prasens became the Polish representative of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne ( CIAM ), close contacts were established with the international architecture scene.

Second World War

Following her husband's arrest in World War II , she took over the management of the PAU architectural office in 1942 . After the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising , she fled to Krakow , where she worked for a short time on a project to plan the Warsaw reconstruction (under Roman and Anatolia Piotrowski). On January 6, 1945, she was arrested and subsequently interned in various camps. Eventually she was taken to a prison in Wroclaw . On May 7, 1945, she was liberated there by the Red Army .

post war period

From March 17, 1945 Syrkusowa worked in the Office for the Reconstruction of the Capital (BOS) in Warsaw. She headed the information department here and traveled to the USA on business with her husband in 1946. After her husband was released from the reconstruction office, she worked with him on old and new housing developments. Together they built a workers' settlement in the Warsaw district of Koło.

Since the announcement of the decree on the architectural style of Socialist Realism at the party conference of architects in June 1949, the relationship between the rulers and the Syrkus couple deteriorated. Both were honored for their achievements (Syrkusowa had already joined the Polish workers' party Polska Partia Robotnicza as a staunch communist in March 1943 ), but despite a declaration of solidarity with social realism, Syrkusowa was viewed with suspicion because of her modernist-functionalist attitude and international contacts. Even her distance from her great colleague and friend Le Corbusier did not change that. Syrkusowa became head of the Central Project Office for Architecture and Urban Development in Warsaw in 1950, but neither she nor her husband were appointed to the influential Naczelna Rada Odbudowy Warszawy ( main councilor for the reconstruction of Warsaw ) or to the important planning committee.

In addition to the housing estate in Koło, Syrkusowa realized the reconstruction of the Śleszyński Palace , a tenement house on Ulica Walecznych (before the war) and the “Praga I” and Rakowiec settlements (before the war).

From 1948 to 1955, Syrkusowa acted as vice president of CIAM and was one of the few women on the governing bodies of this organization. Since 1955 Syrkusowa worked as a professor at the Warsaw Politechnika. After her husband's death in 1964, she took over his chair for housing construction at the Politechnika. On June 15, 1981, she opened the Congress of the International Union of Architects (IUA) in Warsaw. She died the following year.

References and comments

1. ↑ according to Reginna Göckede and Gabriele Diana Grawe, The Gender of the New Building - Gender Roles and Sexual Codification in the Discourse of CIAM II  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.   in: Collection of speeches from the Symposium New Living 1929/2009 (October 22 to 24, 2009) on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of the 2nd Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM II) , 2009, p. 41 Syrkusowa was even from 1945 to 1954 worked as Vice President of CIAM .

literature

• Niels Gutschow, Barbara Klain, Destruction and Utopia. Urban planning Warsaw 1939-1945 , Junius-Verlag, ISBN 3-88506-223-2 , Hamburg 1994, p. 168 ff.

Web links

• Warsaw Wiki (in Polish)
• Helena Syrkusowa. In: arch INFORM .