From the 1920s to the 1930s, today's Western Ukrainian city of Lviv was the centre of architectural and urban design experiments in the newly born Second Polish Republic, influenced by modern international movements. Modernist aesthetics in architecture and household played a major role in the re-invention of a new cultural identity following the former Habsburg empire. During the interwar years, graduates of Lviv Polytechnic formed the original school of modernist architecture. Lviv architects also studied in Warsaw, Vienna, Munich, and Rome Technical Universities, and were oriented towards the German Bauhaus and the Dutch De Stijl. 

During this era, both public buildings – such as educational institutions, workers' clubs, swimming pools, sacral buildings, and sanatoriums – and private ones, including commercial, office buildings, and housing, emerged. However, private residential housing became central to Lviv's modernist movement. Economic challenges and state funding directed towards industrial zones far from the eastern Polish border led architects in Lviv to focus on private investments, prioritising housing for upper- and middle-class families over public projects largely established during the Austro-Hungarian period. 

Talking about styles, in the first half of the 1920s, the art Art Deco and Neoclassicist style with historicist elements prevailed and starting from 1927–28 to 1939, functionalist-modernist and international styles took over in Lviv; however, some Neoclassicist forms were still in use. 

Lviv – a city that lost 90% of its population through the devastating upheavals of World War II, including the Holocaust during which almost all Jewish inhabitants were killed, the forced displacement of Polish residents, and the deportation and killing of Ukrainians—remains a testament to these shifts through its built environment. In particular, the modernist architecture built during the interwar period stands as a silent witness to these changes. Over time, new occupants repurposed these structures, with each wave of events and social transformations leaving marks on the city's material landscape. So, these buildings and their domestic materiality embody both the lost identity of Lviv and a layered record of 100 years.

Myroslava Liakhovych