The four main attributes which determine the outstanding cultural significance of the modernist city centre are presented below:
- It constitutes a globally pioneering and outstanding example of early modernist city centre.
Built from scratch in the period of 1926–1939, broadly illustrating transformations introduced to urban planning and architecture by the period of early modernism. Due to its modern character and functional and spatial pluralism, the complex displays a high level of adaptability to modern-day conditions and requirements.
- It creates a new, coherent urban structure shaped according to the idea of early modernism, where the traditional ideas of city shaping are combined in a unique manner with the innovative postulates of the modernist avant-garde, and the traditional street-and-square structure is combined with the innovative concept of the urban block, as well as with a new type of a townhouse – an apartment house without annexes.
The modernist city centre is shaped basing on the traditional orthogonal street grid filled with a series of compact development, and at the same time in an innovative way, where a new type of a townhouse – unofficial tenement houses – already meet all modernist postulates of hygiene, sunlight and access to greenery. These features distinguish Gdynia both from the cities of the 19th century, where the residential buildings were crammed with annexes that created bad living conditions, as well as from the building estates that were constructed during the inter-war period according to the avant-garde architecture that promoted a low-density arrangement of blocks of flats, and last but not least, from the new city complexes from the later phases of modernism, departing from the street-and-square layout of development.
- It is a unique example of a city centre designed in close connection with the sea and the port, where this idea laid the compositional foundations for the entire concept and its unique urban planning and architectural solutions.
This idea was implemented through the construction of South Pier – a wide pier stretching 630 metres into the Baltic Sea – located at the extension of the main street-and-square axis of the city, 10 Lutego Street and Kościuszki Square, and intended to be the continuation of this axis. The South Pier accompanied by the Sailing Basin is an unusual, landscape opening of the city to the sea and the port, and a symbolic sea gateway to the world.
- It comprises a big, functionally diverse and technically modern architectural complex demonstrating a very wide spectrum of early modernist forms and excellently illustrating the modernist stylistic breakthrough of the 1920s and the 1930s, leading from the traditional forms of historicism to the innovative forms of modernism.
At the same time, it is a complex that constitutes the main core of the central part of the city with a rich and functional city centre programme, built by many individual investors and designers, a complex diverse and coherent at the same time. With its key position in the city structure, with its functional and spatial pluralism and its multifaceted character of architectural forms, the city centre of Gdynia definitely differs from other urban complexes of its time. The clear local context that emphasises the nautical references and maritime symbolism is an additional trait of this architecture.
fot. M. Bejm