The construction of the power plant in Scheibler’s factory was a cutting edge project during the electrification era in the industry of the Kingdom of Poland.

History

Scheibler’s Power Plant was erected on the premises of the finishing plant of Joint Stock Society of Cotton Products of Karol Scheibler. The manufacturer set up his finishing plant in the 1870s in the former bleach and mangle plant, built in the southern part of the Łódka settlement in the mid-1820s.

Karol Scheibler became the owner of the property in 1873. In 1877, he built a new bleaching plant and a dye-house. A few years later, he built a printing house, a textiles processing plant, a mangle, a drying room, a starch plant, numerous warehouses and storage facilities. In this way, an entire finishing plant complex was created.

Between the mangles and the water tower, there was a large square occupied by some ancillary wooden sheds. In 1910, a power plant was erected there. Its construction was associated with the modernization of the plants, consisting in the introduction of electrically powered machines. It was the largest project undertaken at the plants of Karol Scheibler at the beginning of the 20th century. The power plant was designed by Engineer Alfred Frisch – a Latvian architect employed there since 1908 in the capacity of the manager of the construction office. The construction works started in the same year and were almost entirely completed in accordance with the design. One same minor changes were made in connection with the location of the chimney – it was moved towards the axis of the eastern elevation of the boiler room and the form of its plinth was modified. The construction works were carried out by a well-known construction company from Łódź - Nestler and Ferrenbach. Due to the system of building the power plant, the construction of the external walls had to take place in parallel with the assembly of machines. The latter was performed by employees of the Machine Factory – Görlitzen Maschinenbau from Zgorzelec and of the company Siemens – Schuckert from Berlin. The works lasted until 1914.

After 1919, the northern annex connecting the chimney base with the boiler room was modified. At its northern wall and at the eastern wall of the engine room, a pump station and a water softening plant were erected. The water softening plant adjoined the pump station from the east. The building survived in this form until the 1950s.

In the 1950s, modernization works were undertaken at the power plant with the aim to increase its efficiency. The resulting changes had a significant effect on the appearance of the power plant. A narrow, three-storey reinforced concrete building with coal feeders for boilers was built along the entire southern elevation of the boiler room. At the same time, the eastern annex of the tower at the northern elevation of the engine room was pulled down. In addition, a single-story building with steam distribution devices was built along that wall.

To the east of the pump station, a high building was erected for water softening devices. At the level of the control room, a concrete escalade was built next to the western elevation – a roofed passage to the new control room and the switching station.

In the 1960s, in the main building of the power plant, the northern wall was pierced with an additional entrance leading to the room with the capacitors. The original entrance to the boiler room was walled up.

The post-war modernization resulted in considerable changes in the external appearance of the power plant, without significantly affecting the interior layout. Inside, only one partition wall was built to separate the control room. Much more important was the opening of the southern wall of the boiler room and construction of the so-called bunker. In 2003, the power plant was decommissioned. For several years, there was a climbing wall there. In 2014, the single-storey annex at the northern wall of the engine room was demolished. In the spring of 2016, the reinforced concrete escalade was demolished, and in the fall of the same year, the bunker house at the southern wall of the boiler room was demolished too.

Description

The power plant was built on the historical property known as the estate of the bleaching plant. In the contemporary topography of the city, ​​the former factory complex of Karol Scheibler occupies a vast area in the southern part of the city, in a quarter delimited from the west by a land plot adjacent to Piotrkowska Street, from the north by Wincentego biskupa Tymienieckiego Street, from the east by land plot no. 618 adjacent to Jana Kilińskiego Street and from the south by Milionowa Street.

The object is classified as representative of the Art Nouveau style. It combines a reinforced concrete frame structure with Art Nouveau furnishings and Art Nouveau interior design. These elements are characteristic for early 20th-century buildings.

The power plant consists of four connected facilities – a boiler room, engine room, chimney with the annexes of the water softening plant and a staircase tower. The first two were erected on the floor plan of elongated rectangles of various widths. The two buildings share a wall along the long side of the rectangles. The engine room is situated in the northern building. The engine room and the boiler room have a cuboid structure and are separately roofed. The three-storey engine room has a gable roof. The lower boiler room is covered with a gable roof with a skylight along the longitudinal axis. At the northern wall of the engine room, there is a staircase tower, equal in width to the engine room. It is rectangular, covered with a four-hipped roof with three dormers. From the east, the engine room is adjoined by the single-storey water softening plant, covered with a flat roof. Its southern wall adjoins the rectangular base of the chimney. Above the building, the chimney pedestal, through its truncated corners, turns into a prism with an octagonal base, over which there is a cylindrical part slightly tapering upwards. From the south, the corner between the eastern wall of the boiler room and the southern wall of the chimney base is filled with a single-story annex with a rounded corner. The annex has a flat roof.

The boiler room, the engine room and the tower have a frame structure from reinforced concrete. The skeleton is partially glazed and partially filled with plastered brick. The vertical elements of the frames are covered with red clinker bricks. In the window fields between the frames, in the outer walls of the engine room and of the boiler room, there are additional reinforced concrete mullions stiffened with reinforced concrete horizontal beams with a sequence of decorative panels. The mullions are smoothly plastered. The eastern and western elevations, made of red clinker brick, are decorated with arcade friezes. The gable, multi-section, reinforced concrete slab of the roof rests on the upper strips of the structural frame bolts of the machine room. The boiler room has a non-ventilated, flat roof, made from multi-span, reinforced concrete slab based on ribs. The roofs of the engine room, of the boiler room and of the annexes are covered with bituminous felt on a timber deck. The cupola of the staircase tower is clad with standing seam sheet metal. The main door to the engine room is wooden and frame-panelled. The windows in the cupola of the tower are contoured by wooden surrounds. Other windows have metal frames and are divided into multiple sections. In the northern and eastern elevations of the engine room, there are stained-glass windows with coloured panes. They are glazed with yellow, blue, green and colourless glass.

The western and eastern elevations of the power plant are formed by the gable walls of the machine room and of the boiler room. Although they have the same number of axes and the same height, it is the decorative elements that make them visually uniform. Its vertical articulation is created by the structural frames of both buildings, emphasized by brick cladding. The vertical elements are complemented by reinforced concrete mullions running along the entire height of the elevation, which additionally divides each axis into narrower fields. In the attic, the mullions are intertwined with arcades, which are clad with brick too. The volutes of the arcades have the width of a single brick and are topped with a double step.

The elevations of each building are crowned with triangular gables. The gable roofs are concealed by the brick walls, which extend beyond the outer axes. Their slope matches that of the roof surfaces. The top of the central axes was slightly raised and terminated with a section of a circle cut at the base and a C-shaped volute descending onto the side walls. The external structural pilaster strips are topped with brick pillars rising above the surface of the roof.

The horizontal articulation of the wall is highlighted by plastered elements – a simple sill under the ground floor windows of both buildings and panel friezes under the second- and third-storey windows of the engine room. The window and door openings on the first and second storey of the engine room are rectangular and flat-headed. They are filled with multi-section windows with metal frames and colourless panes. Some of the openings were filled with glass bricks. At the height of the third storey, each of the window openings is topped with an elliptical arch. At the height of the second storey, the wall of the boiler room is filled with a window opening topped with a full arch and divided by vertical mullions and structural pilaster strips covered with bricks. The arch of the window opening is highlighted by double, reinforced concrete mullions, smoothly plastered. The original window fields were subsequently filled with glass bricks.

The northern elevation of the engine room is articulated in a similar way as its western wall, with the exception that the axes above the third floor have flat-headed tops, while the elevation ends with a smooth, plastered frieze running under the significantly protruding eaves of the roof. In the second-storey windows, stained glass have been preserved. The third-storey window openings are topped with an elliptical arch and are filled with stained glass too. The mullions over the window openings end with stepped tops. Under the second- and third-storey window openings, there is a horizontal strip containing rectangular panels filled with textured plasterwork. The southern elevation of the boiler room has been destroyed and is completely covered with contemporary corrugated sheet metal.

The site is not accessible.

Compiled by Agnieszka Lorenc – Karczewska, Regional Branch of the National Institute of Cultural Heritage in Łódź. 27 July 2018

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