The borders of the Modernist City Centre include the area of buildings planned and developed in the 1920s and 1930s, shaped according to new modernist postulates and plans, following the European urban tradition.
It is a compact and very homogeneous complex of urban buildings, consisting of a regular layout of buildings based on a modern urban grid, designated by a network of streets and squares, which define quarters filled with residential and service buildings.
The urban layout and the early modernist buildings of the city centre area survived World War II in a good condition. The buildings that are the carriers of authenticity were affected by the war destruction only to a small extent. Residential and public buildings were repaired immediately after the end of the war, with the help of local specialists who used the same set of materials and tools that were in use before 1939. The development lines of all the streets in the centre remained unchanged, as well as most of the parcel division from the interwar years. The historical street names have also been largely preserved or restored. The buildings of the modernist city centre remain, in the vast majority, in the possession of the heirs of the former owners, and almost all of them today still successfully perform the originally intended functions. The degree of authenticity of the city centre, created in the years 1926-1939, is therefore very high.
The modernist city centre retains until now a high level of integrity of attributes attesting to the inviolability of its cultural heritage. It encompasses all the main elements of a spatially coherent and expressive in its layout early modernist concept of 1926–1939, elements that remain intact, highly intelligible and well protected. The conditions of integrity are retained both individually in particular structures and complexes, as well as in relation with the seaside cultural landscape at the junction of the port and the sea. The dynamic spatial development of Gdynia that lasted merely 13 years from 1926, was abruptly interrupted in 1939 by the outbreak of World War II which left the city partially unfinished. This incompleteness created the necessity and – at the same time – the chance for continuation and filling the gap of the historical urban structure with a new architectural fabric. New buildings were built – and still are – on the basis of new spatial development plans that respect the vast majority of the pre-war plans, with regard to both the street grid and the building dimensions. The architectural form of these additions usually refers to the models from the forming period of the property’s development (1926–1939), both in terms of scale and the used materials.