Helena Syrkus, née Helena Eliasberg, also known as Niemirowska, was born on 14 May 1900 and died on 19 November 1982, both in Warsaw. She was an urban planner, architect, professor at the Warsaw University of Technology at the Faculty of Architecture, member of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and co-founder of the Polish avant-garde group Praesens.

She studied architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology at the Faculty of Architecture from 1918 to 1925.

In 1925, together with her fellow students Szymon Syrkus, Barbara Brukalska, Stanisław Brukalski, Bohdan Lachert and Józef Szanajca, she co-founded the avant-garde group Praesens, which published a journal of the same name. The magazine became a central publication for the advocacy of modernism in architecture and art in Poland, known beyond Poland’s borders.

From the moment of her marriage to Szymon Syrkus in 1925, the couple co-signed all her projects.

In 1928, the Praesens Group became a section of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and Syrkus co-signed the Charter of Athens at the fourth CIAM Congress in Athens in 1933. In 1937, at the 5th CIAM Congress in Paris, Helena Syrkus gave a lecture entitled ‘La généalogie de l’architecture fonctionelle,’ in which she discussed modernist urbanism.

During the Second World War, after the German occupation of Poland, Helena and Szymon Syrkus worked in the underground organisation Pracownia Architectoniczno-Urbanistyczna (PAU, engl.: Architectural and Urban Planning Studio), of which she became president after Szymon Syrkus was deported by the German authorities to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp.

In the post-war period from 1945, she was involved in the reconstruction of Warsaw, first as a member of the Biuro Odbudowy Stolicy (BOS) and later as secretary of the Naczelnej Rady Odbudowy Warszawy. From 1948 to 1955 she was one of the vice-presidents of CIAM, which was dissolved in 1959. Helena Syrkus turned against modernism by officially rejecting it in a speech at the 7th CIAM Congress in Bergamo, Italy, in 1949.  Her announcement can be seen as the culmination of the competition between two ideologies, as Helena Syrkus was at the same time advocating the use of Socialist Realism, a new national style imposed on Poland by the communists in the same year. Despite her official announcement in 1949, she returned to modernism in architecture, urbanism and theory after the end of Stalinism and the abandonment of Socialist Realism by the Polish socialist regime in 1956.

In 1955, Helena Syrkus was appointed professor at the Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw Polytechnic University.

Her book Ku idei osiedla społecznego (engl.: Towards the idea of a social settlement) was published in 1976. In the first part of the book, Syrkus gives detailed insights into the CIAM congresses, while the second part is devoted to interviews with some of its famous members, such as Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.