With the conclusion of World War I, subject to conditions of a newly formed Polish State, Łódź was a large, second as to size, city. However, it had to face shortages in infrastructure as well as economic and social problems stemming from wartime damage to its industry. Over the initial years of the twenty–year interwar period the city had at its disposal a staff of construction engineers that was small and insuffi cient. It was supplemented over successive years by architects educated at foreign universities.

The subject of the paper is the description of the development of the Łódź architectural community during the twenty interwar years and the impact of the Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw University of Technology on the professional community of the city and its architectural landscape. The architecture of Łódź of the discussed period has been the subject of research and publications. However, the sheer magnitude of Łódź’s archival resources means they continue to be unexplored and undescribed.

The work is the outcome of conducted bibliographic research and archival queries relating to the biographies of selected architects and their creativity. The subject of research was current literature on the topic, press from the discussed period, and archival documentation accumulated by local government and state institutions as well as in the private family collections of the discussed designers.

It is the process of transformation of the Łódź architectural community, the impact of a young generation of designers on institutional structures and the architectural landscape of the city that are subject to analysis. Special attention was devoted to confl icts of generational and worldview character, the infl uence of external conceptual models on local design practices, and the importance of architectural competitions. What is presented is the dynamics of the development of the architectural community and the process of the coming onto the professional stage of a group of designers whose education took place in the reality of an independent Polish state. The article makes an eff ort to order information regarding the architectural community whose members, in spite of no spectacular nationwide careers, had an impact on the picture of the city and its architectural identity.