Gmach Gdańskiej Biblioteki Miejskiej przy ulicy Wałowej
Authors: Omilanowska Małgorzata 
Published: December 2021

Following Germany’s unification in 1871, Gdansk was a major municipal centre and a port on the Empire’s map, however it was well past its heyday. In the Gründerzeit, it could not reach as quick a pace of development as other cities of the Reich, and by the late 19th century it did not boast any university. The attempt to catch up on the substantial delay in creating modern public architecture in Gdansk was only made after the fortifications had been dismantled (1895–97). A triangular plot close to St James’s Gate was reserved for the purpose of education and science. It was there that a seat of the city archive and the building of the Secondary School of SS Peter and Paul (Oberrealschule St. Petri und Pauli) were raised. The third edifice was planned as the new home for the Gdansk Library. The precious book collection, whose core was formed by the collection bequeathed by Joannes Bernardinus Bonifacius d’Oria of Naples in 1596, was kept in a former Franciscan monastery, and later in St James’s Church. Attempts to raise a new building to house the collection in the 1820s as designed by Carl Samuel Held failed. Neither was the plan to erect the new library building as an extension of the Dungeon and Prison Gate Complex implemented. It was only Karl Kleefeld’s design from 1901–1902 planning to raise an impressive Gothic Revival complex that finally came to life. Completed in January 1905, the Library welcomed the first readers already on 16 February.

Kleefeld designed the building’s mass on the L -plan layout with a truncated corner and wings. The main reading room boasted elegant, sumptuous, and coherent wooden furnishing, and the gallery’s centrepiece was a ledge decorated with 14 panels featuring bas -relief cartouches with the emblems of the cities of West Prussia. Differing in size, the edifices, were given red -brick elevations with plastered details and glazed green filling, with a sgraffito frieze on the reading room elevation between the ground and first floors. It was the Gdansk Renaissance that dominated in public buildings’ architecture of the city in the last quarter of the 19th century. The resumed popularity of Gothic Revival in its local forms in Gdansk public buildings’ architecture, such as those in the afore - -described Kleefeld’s designs, resulted undoubtedly from a rapid growth of research into historic structures, yet on the other hand it reflected the return to the local tradition (Heimatschutz), which could be observed in the architecture of the German Reich at the time.

Judged in the context of an extremely modest programme of public projects in Gdansk of the period, the creation of the Bildungsdreick with the edifices of the archive, library, and secondary school is to be regarded as a major event in the history of creating public architecture of the city.

As seen against other projects of the time in other Reich cities, the Gdansk City Library stood out neither with its scale, nor innovatory character of the layout solutions. What, however, makes it a special facility are architectural forms that reveal its contribution to the search for the expression of the local tradition. This kind of an archaeological approach to the past and a compilatory additive method of juxtaposing quotes from various buildings, which may have also arisen from the lack of talent of the architect, were undoubtedly in decline in the early 20th century.