Plac Ludwika Hirszfelda, Wrocław

Plac Ludwika Hirszfelda is a Wrocław square shaped by successive transformations, from its 1882 green-space plan to postwar rebuilding. Its surviving nineteenth-century former hospital buildings now house the Lower Silesian Oncology Centre, while the changed commercial complex recalls an unusual pavilion that once crossed above Zaporoska Street.

Plac Ludwika Hirszfelda is the city square named for Ludwik Hirszfeld, a physician, microbiologist and immunologist who was born in Warsaw in 1884 and died in Wrocław in 1954. The broad divided carriageway of Zaporoska Street runs through its middle, with a green strip separating the lanes. This was originally a green urban space, laid out in 1882 under a plan by Alexander Kaumann and A.

Hofmann. Notice the surviving older institutional buildings along the square: they belonged to the former regional insurance institution and its hospital. Built between 1891 and 1893, the hospital complex was designed by Eduard Blümner and Karl Grosser in Neo-Gothic, a nineteenth-century revival of medieval Gothic forms.

Much of the surrounding development was destroyed during the 1945 siege of Wrocław, but these hospital and insurance buildings remained. Since 1956, the former hospital has housed the Lower Silesian Oncology Centre. The square was reshaped again in the nineteen seventies, when a residential tower and commercial pavilion were built here. For decades, parts of that pavilion actually spanned over Zaporoska Street; those overhead sections were removed in 2006, reopening the view along the avenue.