(b Warsaw, 19 May 1880; d Warsaw, 14 Jan 1936). Polish architect and teacher. He studied at the Politechnical Institute of Tsar Nicolas II, Warsaw (1901–4), then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, under Friedrich Ostendorf, and also in Vienna. After his return to Poland in 1909, he built some country houses and some buildings in Warsaw, the most important of which was the Polish Theatre (1912–13), Karasia Street. Designed in the French classicist style, this was one of the first buildings in Poland to be constructed in reinforced concrete; it also had modern technical devices including a revolving stage. Between 1914 and 1917 he designed some schools in Kiev for the Ukraine Ministry of Polish Affairs, and in 1918 he began to teach monumental architecture at Warsaw Technical University, where he was appointed Professor in 1931. A founder-member of the Association of Polish Architects, Przybylski became one of the principal exponents of modern classicism in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s. Much of his work was monumental in scale; for example, in his competition project (1922; unexecuted) for the State Archives, he used deep, enclosed courtyards to increase the scale of the building. His building (1924) for the Ministry of Military Affairs, Warsaw, had a heavily rusticated façade with a classical pediment. The modernist approach is clearly visible in his Electronics and Chemistry Buildings (1929) at Warsaw Technical University, where he used simple, flat elevations and horizontally divided windows. In his Military Housing Fund building (1933) in Warsaw’s historic Krakowskie Przedmiescie Street, he included both these opposing tendencies, designing functional flats behind the façade of a modern version of an Italian Renaissance palace.

• Przybylski, Czeslaw
  • Poland, §XIV, 3: Art education, after c 1900
  • Warsaw, §II, 2(ii): Urban development, 20th century