In the second half of the 1930s, the process of transforming the urban space of Vilnius became significantly more dynamic. In 1936, a four-year investment programme of the Vilnius city municipality was submitted to the Vilnius Governor, which was in fact a programme for the modernisation of the city; one of its points was a long-term programme for the construction of public schools in every district of the city. As part of the implementation of the programme, a decision was made to build a public school building in the Nowy Swiat district in 1937.

History of the construction of the public school in Belina Street

The project for a comprehensive school in Belina Street was submitted in August 1937. Its author was one of Warsaw's most respected architects, Professor Romuald Gutt, who in the same year became head of the newly established Municipal Urban Planning Studio in Vilnius. For the construction of the new school, the city allocated a site at 22 Beliny Street in the suburb of Lipówka, situated in a natural, sparsely urbanised, wooded landscape with an undulating surface.

Work began in autumn 1937; Gutt's assistant on the project was one of his closest collaborators from the Urban Planning Studio, a graduate of the Warsaw University of Technology, the architect Stanisław Bukowski, who supervised the construction. Construction work continued throughout 1938, but financial problems caused a six-month delay in finishing and equipping the building; it was handed over for use in August 1939. The institution began its activities in September 1939 as the Marszałek Józef Piłsudski Primary School No. 40.

Architecture of the building

The primary school in Lipówka was of the twin-school type, with separate bodies for male and female classes. Romuald Gutt designed the building in a horseshoe shape with a short connector between the two elongated wings. The connector housed a gymnasium on the ground floor with associated rooms (changing rooms, showers, disinfection room), while the upper floors housed the offices of the school doctor and dentist, as well as a spacious assembly hall. The facades used a variety of materials: plaster, ceramic cladding and natural stone used to clad the blind gable walls.

While it was still under construction, the building on Belina Street was justifiably considered the most modern school building in Vilnius, mainly due to the new functional and spatial solutions. The building was constructed in reinforced concrete, and for the first time in Vilnius a mushroom ceiling was used, supported on pillars with cup-shaped heads. The abandonment of historical forms, which had previously dominated the architecture of Vilnius schools, did not mean a purist, universal form, typical of geometric functionalism. On the contrary, the three-storey block, composed horizontally, was precisely inscribed into the surrounding natural landscape of a high green hill. This effect was enhanced by the sculptural, relief wall surfaces faced with fieldstone. On the north façade, the auditorium is open to the landscape through a panoramic corner window, while the entrance on the first storey has a direct connection to the slope via a reinforced concrete bridge. The combination of modernist architecture and nature, so characteristic of Romuald Gutt's work, opened a new chapter in the interwar architecture of Vilnius.

Historical address: 22 Beliny Street

Contemporary address: Liepkalnio g. 18