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Gutt, Romuald
(b Warsaw, 6 Feb 1888; d Warsaw, 3 Sept 1974). Polish architect and teacher. He studied architecture in Winterthur until 1908, before returning to Warsaw. From 1910, when he made his début with the design for the Polish Pavilion at an exhibition in Rome, until c. 1920 his work adopted the ‘styl dworkowy’ (‘mansion house’ style), influenced by local traditions. His projects included country houses, smaller houses and cottages, schools and local government offices, several of which were prepared during World War I as references for future use. He also designed military cemeteries and tombstones, work that he repeated after 1945. In his work of the early 1920s, including the Girls’ Vocational Training School (1919–26), Górnoslaska Street, and residential buildings (1922–5) in Sloneczny Square, both in Warsaw, he used simplified cubist forms and became fascinated with exposed, fair-faced brickwork using different types of bonds. This new, personal style was further developed after 1925 in his own house (1926–8), Wronskiego Street, School for Nurses (1927–8), School for Political Sciences (1926–33) and ZUPU Building (1927–31), all in Warsaw, and the Post Office (1925–6) in Ciechocinek. In cooperation with the landscape architects Franciszek Krzywda-Polkowski (1881–1949) and later Alina Scholtz (b 1908), Gutt worked on several landscaping projects, including the house and park (1935–8) of Józef Pilsudski (1867–1935), at Zulów, and the Pilsudski memorial mound (1936–9), Kraków. He also designed a series of villas in Warsaw that were carefully integrated with surrounding gardens, for example at 33a Kielecka Street (1934), 2 Flory Street (1934–5) and 39a Lowicka Street (1936). The best example of Gutt’s rationalist style of architecture is the GUS Building (1948–54), the main statistical office in Warsaw, which is based on a plan shaped like a three-bladed propellor. Also notable is his Chinese Embassy complex (1956–69; with Michal Gutt, his son, and others), Warsaw. Gutt was a professor at the Technical University (1946–60) and the Academy of Fine Arts (1957–65), both in Warsaw.
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