Boiler House

Piotrkowska 282

In the early days of industrial Łódź, textile workshops were largely dependent on water from nearby rivers to power their machinery. When Ludwik Geyer decided to build a modern, mechanised factory in the 1830s, the heart of the investment was the boiler house. It housed an impressive steam engine imported from Seraing, Belgium. Geyer decided to use tested English solutions and to that end, he placed an order with the John and Jacob Cockerill machine factory specialising in the production of replicas of British devices. To employ this new technology, he enlisted the help of a British engineer – Thomas Jowett.

The first industrial building of this type in Łódź consisted of two rooms – the machine room and the boiler room. A 46-meter-tall chimney – the only one present in the city in 1838 – rose up from the top of the building. The boiler house’s modern-day appearance is the result of several reconstructions in subsequent plant modernisation efforts. The single-storey building with unplastered red brick walls features large, semi-circular windows. Windows embellished with an arch of this kind were used in factories until the 1960s. The frame divides the window into several sections, which provided for a more rigid construction while also making it was easier to replace broken panes.

Today the boiler house is again equipped with state-of-the-art technology in the form of an interactive multimedia exhibition with films, animations and games tracing the history of the textiles industry. It also features an original steam engine from that era – used in the first decades of the 20^th century at a different Geyer property – the “Ksenon” Chemists’ Cooperative.