In 1919, by a decree of the Head of State, the Supreme Chamber of State Control was established, whose task was to comprehensively control public finances: state revenues and expenditures, budget execution, the correctness of administration of state assets and the economy of local government units, as well as institutions, establishments and foundations receiving subsidies from the State Treasury.

The March Constitution shortened the name of the institution to the Supreme Chamber of Control (NIK). It was headed by a president, while more important decisions were taken collectively. In 1921, field branches - the District Chambers of Control - were established by law. Instead, by separate decrees of the President of the NIK, they were established in Warsaw, Lviv, Kielce, Kowel, Poznań and Vilnius.

The provincial town of Kowel was chosen as the seat of the district chamber out of necessity, as no suitable building could be found in either Brest-on-Bug or Lutsk to house the chamber in the Polesie and Volhynia regions. It soon became apparent that the choice of premises in Kowel was not a good idea. The building was - as it was written in the "Report on the Activities of the State Control for 1922" - "extremely inconvenient and cramped, and did not meet the most modest cultural requirements". Eventually, it was decided that the institution would be located in the provincial town of Brest-on-Bug, where a new building was planned.

The architecture of the building

Neither the designer of the building nor the exact years of construction are known; in any case, the edifice was built back in the 1920s. Like most of the large public buildings constructed in Brest in those years, it stood on the representative Union Lubelskaya (now Lenin) Street.

The building consists of a front part of a rather elongated rectangular ground plan and a rear part of a similar size, connected to the main body by a wide wing. The rear section was designed entirely for residential use, and was further separated by a passageway in the ground floor. The front section, which is slightly higher than the rest of the building, houses the offices.

In terms of architecture, this is an interesting and relatively rare example of neoclassicism in the so-called revolutionary variety in the architecture of interwar Poland. This trend was inspired by austere, cubic forms. They were typical of the designs and realisations of French architects from the second half of the 18th century. - Claude-Nicholas Ledoux (1736-1806) and Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728-1799). Due to the extremely avant-garde nature of their designs, they are referred to as 'revolutionary architects'.

A characteristic motif from this trend (typical especially of Ledoux's work) are the so-called fettered columns, i.e. columns with shafts girded by horizontal, rhythmically arranged brackets. This very element - although not in the form of columns, but pillars - was used as the main architectural motif of the Brest State Control District Chamber. Such pillars framed both the façade and the side elevation. Similar solutions were used, among others, in the building of the Ministry of Military Affairs in Warsaw and the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Łódź. In this way, a highly simplified, austere and monumental architecture was created, suitable for the edifices of state offices.

Today, the building houses the headquarters of the State Security Committee (KGB) in the Brest region.