Postal check office in Wroclaw

Postal check office in Breslau with skyscraper (2017)

The postal check office in Breslau of the Deutsche Reichspost was built from 1927 to 1929 in the style of brick expressionism. The eleven-story and 43-meter-high skyscraper in the building complex was the second tallest skyscraper in Europe east of Berlin, after the Past building in Warsaw; see also the list of historic high-rise buildings in Germany . Today the building is a listed building and houses, among other things, the Polish Post and Telecommunications Museum.

description

The Wroclaw Postal Check Office building was built on the site of a former military cemetery. It was built on an elongated, triangular plot of land east of the old town of Wroclaw in Feldstrasse (today: ul.Zygmunta Krasińskiego) and extended from Am Ohlau-Ufer in the north (today: al. Juliusza Slowackiego) to Klosterstrasse in the south (today: ul. called Romualda Traugulta).

The complex consists of an eleven-story high-rise building on its north corner with a five-story side wing to the west and an elongated, five-story central building to the south, which is caught by a six-story corner building with a five-story, western side extension. The building has a length of 142 meters and a width of up to 47 meters. The structure comprises 74,000 m³ of enclosed space. The high-rise was built as a reinforced concrete half-timbered building , the compartments of which are built with brickwork. All other parts of the building were made of brick. The post office was built by Huta Hoch- und Tiefbau , Breslau.

Medallion by Felix Kupsch: A student (a Wroclaw Prussian with a Prussian circle on his cap and an empty pocket) receives his monthly bill from the money postman

The facade was clad with blue-red brick in the Oldenburg format, which gives the modernist building a regional and historical character, and it was decorated with expressionist elements and those that are based on the Gothic, tracery- inspired balustrades and network vaults in the passageways.

The facade received reliefs made of iron clinker ceramic, which the sculptor Felix Kupsch created in 1928. There is a relief on the side wing and a portal frame on the central building, both directly next to the high-rise, as well as 20 medallions: twelve on the high-rise with postilion heads from different centuries and eight on the southern corner building with scenes from the lives of city dwellers, workers and students in Wroclaw. The reliefs were made by Ullersdorfer Werke AG, Nieder-Ullersdorf , Krs. Sorau , Niederlausitz .

The building has three stairwells with elevators and a paternoster lift . The interior design of the building is kept simple, with only a few components highlighting, such as a stairwell with colored glazing, wall cladding made of ceramic tiles in the area of the counter hall and colored wall tiles in the entrance hall. Rooms on the ground floor and first floor were used for public traffic. The staff rooms above are mostly large halls. The counter hall was in the skyscraper and receipts were stored on the sixth to eleventh floors. A canteen was available to the staff, which included a roof terrace above for the recreation of the employees. A pneumatic tube system was operated for the service of the post office .

The construction costs amounted to 3,150,000 Reichsmarks . Of this, 290,000 Reichsmarks were used for a deeper foundation on a pile grid made of concrete piles, as the building was built on damp ground on the former Breslau moat as part of the fortress belt .

The design of the building complex comes from the government master builder and later senior post office building officer Lothar Neumann (1891–1963), who also took over the construction management.

The post check office building in Wroclaw survived the Second World War and the Battle of Wroclaw largely unscathed, while 65–80 percent of the buildings in the city and the vicinity of the post check office were completely destroyed. After the war, the building of the Polish Post served as the main post office in Wroclaw. Since 1956 it has been used by the Polish Post and Telecommunications Museum, the only museum of its kind in Poland.

View of the west side with the start of construction work on the Hilton Hotel (2009)

Since 2007, the construction of the OVO Wrocław congress center with the Hilton Hotel has been planned on the property adjacent to the west of the former post office, which was completed in March 2017. The inner courtyard with restaurant and café allows a view of the west side of the post office.

Postal check office in Wroclaw from the southwest
skyscraper
Entrance hall
View inside the building
View from the high-rise to the southwest, where the OVO Wrocław is being built on the adjacent excavation