on 1 May 1952, the Party House – the headquarters of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party – was put into use. It was built with obligatory contributions from party members and the general public on the site of, among other things, a milk pump house and the headquarters of the fire brigade, as well as one of the largest tenement houses in Warsaw, which had been bombed in 1939.
An architectural competition was held in 1947 to design the building. In the same year, the design of the “Tigers” team (Wacław Kłyszewski, Jerzy Mokrzyński and Eugeniusz Wierzbicki) was selected from among 10 invited teams. Construction began in July 1948.
Construction of the PZPR Central Committee building, 1949. Source: NAC – National Digital Archive
The site designated for the building was the area between Aleje Jerozolimskie, Nowy Świat and Książęca Street, where the surviving tenement houses were to be demolished, thus opening up a wide view of Trzech Krzyży Square and Ujazdowskie Avenue. The main façade of the building was therefore designed from the south. The monumental modernist edifice was given the shape of a closed quadrangle with a large internal courtyard, connected to the open space in the ground floor by wide arcades. Along the long balcony above the clearances leading into the spacious courtyard was the office of the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, Bolesław Bierut. Further departments of the PZPR gradually began to move into the new building, but finishing work was still underway. Among other things, granite from the destroyed Hindenburg Mausoleum was used in the construction. The interiors, designed by Jerzy Bandura, Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz and Franciszek Strynkiewicz, among others, took on a socialist realist appearance. The Party House was put into use in 1951. The building remained the headquarters of the PZPR until 1989.
The building of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party in 1951 and today. Source: Adrian Grycuk, CC BY-SA 3.0 PL, via Wikimedia Commons and szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl
From 1991 to 2000, the building housed the Stock Exchange, which later moved to the Stock Exchange Centre. Currently, the building is owned by Centrum Bankowo-Finansowe “Nowy Świat” S.A., and the main tenants are Agencja Rozwoju Przemysłu and Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego.
In 2009, the building was entered in the register of historical monuments.
Source: portalwarszawski.com.pl, iwaw.pl
Read also: Architecture in Poland | Modernism | Interesting facts | History | Warsaw
