Looking at the skyscrapers of today’s Warsaw, it is hard to imagine the skyline of the city 100 years ago, when the brick and concrete tenement houses usually reached 4-5 storeys. The breakthrough came with the first steel-framed skyscrapers – and among these, the true pearl was the Telephones and Telegraph building, which after almost a century is now being prepared for revitalisation.
The Telecommunications and Telegraph Office building, located in the heart of the city at 45 Nowogrodzka Street, reached 42.5 metres in height when completed in 1933 and was the tallest skyscraper in the capital. Until the war, it could only compete in height with the ‘Prudential’, completed six months later, measuring 66 metres.
Nowogrodzka 45 is an outstanding example of functionalist architecture in pre-war Warsaw. Just as important as the innovative construction, however, was the significance of the building as the headquarters of the newly established Telecommunications Office. This office enabled the widespread availability in Poland of one of the most groundbreaking inventions of telecommunications – the telegraph.
The beginnings of the telegraph era and the extraordinary history of the building at 45 Nowogrodzka St. are described by the architect and varsavianist, Grzegorz Mika:
The telegraph, telephone and teletype were the most important means of modern communication in the first quarter of the 20th century. The Second Republic, as a country being rebuilt after years of war, needed an efficient communications network, for which the Ministry of Post and Telegraph was responsible.
The Ministry, like other central institutions, ran its own design studio and construction bureau. In 1928, a 36-year-old architect, Julian Puterman, became head of the studio. In the following years, numerous post office buildings were constructed under his direction, including the flagship example of modernist architecture – the Telephone and Telegraph Headquarters building at 45 Nowogrodzka St. The building was a pioneering example of a Warsaw skyscraper.
The first “skyscrapers”
Among the Warsaw buildings erected in the Second Republic, only a handful of structures would fit our contemporary idea of skyscrapers – symbols of modern 20th century cities. After the First World War, office and residential skyscrapers, then known as “cloud skyscrapers”, were still a rare sight even in the skylines of the great metropolises of Western Europe. At the same time, in America, the growth of cities and technology contributed to the construction of increasingly taller buildings, using steel structures as opposed to bricks and concrete. These allowed much greater heights to be reached with not much floor space of their own, which was significant with high land prices. Compared to the USA and Europe, steel in Poland was used for engineering structures. This makes the significance of the building at 45 Nowogrodzka Street all the greater – as a symbol of modern technology, of a modern young country with modern architecture, put into use fifteen years after independence.
The Telephone and Telegraph Office building – along with the ‘Prudential’, PZUW on Kopernika Street and the Waksmans’ house on 4 Sewerynów Street – deserved to be called a high-rise building according to its technical parameters. These buildings measured from 30 to 66 metres and, together with the PAST building (Warsaw’s first high-rise building, completed in 1908), stood out against the silhouette of pre-war Śródmieście.
The first design for the new Telephone and Telegraph Headquarters was drawn up by Tadeusz Tolwiński in 1927. The building was to stand on a square corner plot on Nowogrodzka Street. The small area meant that the new building would reach 48 metres, with the possibility of a 22-metre superstructure. The final design was drawn up in 1929 by the Ministry’s new general designer, Julian Puterman. In the same year, construction began on the final design.
Floors almost 6 metres high
As the building was planned to house massive telecommunications equipment for exchanges and switchboards, the projected loads ranged from 500 to 1,000 kg per metre of floor space. Each storey above the first floor was to measure more than 5 m in height. A uniform height was adopted based on the dimensions of the largest of the new equipment. The accumulation of such mass necessitated the use of a riveted steel skeleton, supported by a grid of columns with a substantial span of 4.25 x 7.5 metres.
Włodzimierz Radlow was responsible for the design. It was decided to use a steel structure because, with such loads, floor plan and dimensions, a reinforced concrete skeleton would have taken up too much of the floor area. The structure was riveted, as the technology for welding steel had only been available for a few years, while riveting had been a proven method of constructing high-rise buildings since the 1880s.
The first steel-framed building
45 Nowogrodzka Street was to become Poland’s first building constructed with a steel frame structure. The facades concealed a complex and multifunctional technical building with offices, flats and other ancillary functions. A post office was designed on the ground floor, together with long-distance and foreign telephone rooms.
The first floor and second floor were allocated to rooms for telegraph and telephone equipment occupying the wing along Poznanska Street. The 3rd floor was to house the Teletechnical School, and the 5th and 6th floors were to house the Museum of Post and Telecommunications. The high-rise section had usable floors, intended to house employees and residents.
Thanks to the use of steel frameworks, there were only single rows of columns inside the building. This made it possible to arrange freely for the use of both separate office rooms, post office rooms and multi-person rooms for telephone exchanges, depots or Hughes teletypewriters or telegraphs. In addition, the wide spacing of the columns allowed for the punctuation of the building’s distinctive extensive window openings on each elevation.
Gymnasium, treatment room and nursery
Approximately 1,300 people were to work in the entire building, so an extensive staff welfare programme was implemented in the design. Rest rooms and the main canteen were located on the fourth floor, while a second canteen was built on the ground floor next to the staff changing rooms. In addition, the building housed a gymnasium and showers, an outpatient clinic and even a day care centre for the staff’s children. On the roof of the main wing, recreational terraces were created for relaxation and exercise.
The lower parts range from 23.5 to 31 metres, while the tower section reached 42.5 metres in height. At this size, the building was only slightly taller than the largest inner-city “sky-high” -townhouses erected two decades earlier, measuring up to 40 metres. But unlike the façade houses, the slender mass of the Post and Telegraph Tower had four designed elevations, forming a coherent composition with the details and masses of the wings of the pedestal section. Each of the wings of the building has different dimensions and an individual architectural composition. The individual blocks are united by common details encircling the entire building.
Opening on the 15th anniversary of independence
The opening of the building probably took place between November and December 1933 and coincided with the 15th anniversary of independence. Erected during the Great Depression, the building could be read as a symbol of the Treasury’s overcoming economic difficulties and modern aspirations after 15 years of a country marked by a string of wars, difficult reconstruction, crises, recessions and short-lived prosperity. Construction was fully completed more than six months before the ‘Prudential’ was completed (which was in the summer of 1934).
In parallel with the Warsaw building, Puterman realised another flagship example of a modernist public building in a kind of ‘city of the future’-the main Post Office in the centre of Gdynia. Puterman was involved in work for the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs until 1939, completing projects for numerous post offices, radio stations and employee housing blocks from Silesia to Gdynia and Vilnius.
ZEITGEIST Asset Management is responsible for the revitalisation of the historic Telephone and Telegraph building.
text: Grzegorz Mika
source: ZEITGEIST Asset Management
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