Vul. Vitovskoho, 33 – residential building
The four-storied residential house is located at the intersection of Vitovskoho and Hretska streets. It was built by Stanisław Dec, a builder, under his own project for himself and his wife Wiktorya in 1912-1913. It is a typical example of a residential house, decorated in the Neo-Gothic style.
Architecture
The corner four-storied house is L-shaped in plan, built of brick and plastered. From the archival design drawings it is known that the building had metal beam intermediate floors and Klein brick vaults in the basements. The roof had a wooden structure of rafters and posts. After 1991 its authentic ceramic tile roofing was replaced with metal tiles.
On each floor, there are three apartments. Although the house was built as a residential one and its layout was quite typical, it is one of the few buildings in Lviv, richly decorated in the Neo-Gothic style. Atypically of the Historicist architecture, the characteristic Gothic-style elements were not copied from medieval patterns but stylized and interpreted in a new way. These trends appeared in Lviv's architecture after 1908 (Бірюльов, 2005). Apart from Neo-Gothic elements, some Neo-Classicist motifs (the nature of the façade division) and Neo-Romanesque elements (a blind arcade above the crowning cornice) were used in the décor.
The building’s street façades are designed symmetrically, thus emphasizing the central protruded wall section and the entrance portal location. Vertically, the composition of the façades is atectonic as upper floors are decorated more abundantly than the lower ones, which is characteristic of Secession architecture. The windows of the first two floors have profiled Neo-Gothic trimmings with fascias. On the third and fourth floors, the protruded wall section is decorated with a blind arcade having giant order pilasters with Corinthian columns and topped with a Neo-Gothic attic with pinnacles. The most striking elements of the Gothic style, tracery, are widely used in decoration, particularly in the main portal’s transom light. Blind stucco tracery can be seen below, between and above the windows of the third and fourth floors as well as in the interior: on the walls at the main entrance, in the wooden door, in the metal fencing of the interior stairs.Related Places
Personalities
Stanisław Dec – a constructor/builder, co-owner of the building in 1913–1939 and its designer
Sources
- State Archive of Lviv Oblast (DALO) 2/1/3182
- DALO2/1/3181
- F. Jaworski, Lwów stary i wczorajszy (Szkice i opowiadania) (Lwów: Nakładem Kurjera Lwowskiego, 1910).
- J. Biriulow, Rzeźba lwowska od połowy XVIII wieku do 1939 roku (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Neriton Stowarzyszenia Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Toruniu).
- Ю. Бірюльов, Мистецтво львівської сецесії (Львів: Центр Європи, 2005 р.)