Modernism came to Stanislavov quite early. One of the first manifestations on the Stanislavov grounds can be seen in the construction of a residential house in 1928-1929 on the initiative of the Military Lodging Fund. It was a project imported from the capital city and designed by a team of twenty-year-old Warsaw architects: Bohdan Lachert, Włodzimierz Winkler and Józef Szanajca, selected by the FKW for implementation in the project, originally intended for Krakow, was accepted for implementation in Stanislawów and Kowel. The block of flats for non-commissioned officers, with its smooth, purist facades, represented the new minimalist trend in Stanislawow in an extremely bold and original way.

Decisive for the development of Stanislavov modernism was the appearance in the city of a young architect, a graduate of the Lviv Polytechnic, Stanislav Trela (1892-1950). Stanisław Witold Trela, was born in the village of Żurawiczki near Przeworsk. After passing his secondary school-leaving examinations in 1911, he enrolled at the University of Lviv, and from 1913 at the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Lviv Polytechnic. From 1 August 1914, he served in the Austro-Hungarian Army. After the war, he continued his studies from 1921 at the Faculty of Architecture of the Lviv Polytechnic. He was a pupil of Tadeusz Obmiński, Witold Minkiewicz, Władysław Derdacki and Jan Bogucki. In 1924 he received the title of engineer architect and already in June 1925 he won the competition for the project of the church in Stanislavov, after which he accepted the offer of a post in the building department of the Technical Department of the City of Stanislavov and settled in the city.

Trela's most important modernistic projects in Stanislavov were: the realisation of the winning project of the Church of Christ the King, begun in 1926. The church was built in the district of Gorka, in Volchynskaya Street, as a three-nave basilica with a transept and a dome, with elements of the so-called ship's style; the reconstruction of the Moniuszko Theatre (now the Philharmonic Hall) in 1928-1929. Moniuszko Theatre (now the Philharmonic Hall), giving it a cubic form with a rounded corner decorated with a long balcony, again alluding to the so-called naval style; reconstruction of the destroyed town hall, intended as a museum, library and municipal archive, as the most prominent modernist building in the urban landscape.

One of the first local moderni¬stic buildings from private investments, we can call the residential house built in 1929 the seat of the architectural office of Leon Lippman. The rectangular body of this building at 6 Mickiewicza Square has large, horizontally elongated windows, emphasising the horizontal sequence of the façade's composition, in which, apart from this fully modernist trick, there are also classicist decorations in the form of a prominent cornice and reduced to a minimum acroterions in the metal balustrades of the balconies.

The breakthrough that fostered the development of the new style was the 1931 project called New Houses. New Houses was the name of a housing estate designed by Paul Engelmann (1891-1965) on behalf of the Stanislaw Liebermann family. Partially completed, the estate consisted of cubist houses with clean, white-plastered facades, standing perpendicular to the traffic routes. In 1931, the magazine "Das Neue Frankfurt", published in Frankfurt am Main, included material on this Stanislavl project on several pages.

The stylistic patterns tried in the early 1930s prevailed in Stanislavov architecture in the last years before the start of the Second World War. They were referred to as modernist or functionalist and, when deliberately emphasising the lack of reference to tradition, as international style. The international dimension of this fragment of the architectural heritage of the Second Polish Republic in the multi-ethnic borderlands of the eastern provinces had particular resonance. Particularly in Pokucie, where the urban population was predominantly Jewish and the rural population Ukrainian, the fashion for this new style fell on fertile ground. Stanislawow, which in 1939 had a population of over 68,000 and was the second largest city in Eastern Lesser Poland after Lviv. It was predominantly Jewish with 46% of the population, Poles made up about 36%, while Ruthenians (Ukrainians) made up 16% and about 2% of the population represented other nationalities.

Two thirds of all white-collar workers, clerks, teachers and doctors in the town were Roman Catholics - i.e. Poles. They mainly represented the state institutions. By contrast, industry, commerce and crafts remained in Ukrainian and Jewish hands. Ukrainians most often ran businesses in the sphere of construction, woodworking and metalworking. Architectural offices, on the other hand, were run in overwhelming majority by Jewish engineers and architects.

As stated above, modernism fully developed in the area in question in the second half of the 1930s. In Poland at that time, after the crisis of the early 1930s, it was a time of economic growth and strengthening of the zloty. In Stanislawow, this resulted in an increase in the share of private capital in the real estate market and a general improvement. A significant financial and organisational mechanism for the increased construction movement was low-cost loans from the Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego (BGK), and their operator in the city was the City Development Committee (KRM).

The modernist buildings that emerged at that time were of high quality workmanship, fitted into the surrounding context in terms of scale and height, and provided comfort for the residents, and are today recognisable as the own distinctive 'interwar' face of Stanislavov from the Second Republic. Its basic module was the cube form and the most desirable sign of modernity - flat roofs, smooth walls without decoration and large windows, lots of space, air and light. It consists of small-scale, three, sometimes four-storey townhouses and two-storey apartment buildings located in the centre or nearby. The largest of these, luxuriously finished, remain cosy buildings, usually with ten to twelve flats, one staircase, no outbuildings, usually with a compact rectangular ground plan, large windows, covered with stucco on the outside. Their raised attics concealing the roof structure visually relate to the terrace roofs.

A popular solution was to combine several cubic blocks into a symmetrical or asymmetrical composition. Often repeated elements were overhanging bays and risalits in various configurations appearing in front of the face, emphasising the symmetry or asymmetry of the building mass, as in Roguskiego Street (currently Orłyka 1).

The corner buildings, which were the culminating points of the streets, were the most visible in the sequence of buildings. One of the first urban accents introducing a decidedly new scale to the nineteenth-century city centre was the building on Sobieskiego Street (now Sichovich Striltsiv 29) at the junction with St. Joseph Street. This modern residential house was built in 1934 to the order of Bernard Harlik and Pesi Höningsberg, on their own land. Its rounded corner block, flanked by bands of horizontal windows and balconies, was differentiated by verticals of semi-circular bay windows. Boruch (Bendit, Bruno, and eventually Bernard) Harlik (1899-194?), an ordinary dentist (a dental technician at Dr Jarosiewicz's dental establishment at 15 Sapieżyńska Street), with a family and mother to support, undertook the construction of the entire tenement with a small loan from the City Expansion Committee. Right next to Bernard Harlik's tenement house, forming a unified row with it, another modernist house was built between 1936 and 1938, constructed by Dr Adolf Dworski, a lawyer, and designed by Jonasz Vogel. More such sequences appeared in the second half of the 1930s. They were erected in groups in the inner city, in place of the ruins from the First World War, but also replaced the old single-storey buildings - as in Lipowa Street, (then Pierackiego, now Szewczenki).

Facing each other, two modernist tenement houses with rounded corners created the so-called 'belvedere gate', closing the promenade of Sapieżyńska Street. On one side, from Kazimierzowska Street, the building of Majer and Róża Bertisch was erected in 1936, starting a sequence of modernist buildings on Belwederska Street up to the intersection with Roguckiego Street. On the other side, a four-storey tenement house was built between 1935 and 1937 by the Mandl family. In the 18th century, a ravelin - a triangular-shaped fortification reinforcement of the Tyśmieniecka Gate - stood on this site. After the fortifications were removed, the land was purchased by the Meller family and in the 19th century they built a tenement house housing the hotel Pod Czarnym Orłem. During World War I, the hotel (and the entire quarter) was completely destroyed. The plot of land with the ruins was bought by Salomon Mandel, whose company Salomon Mandel and Sons Stanislavov in the 1930s became rich from selling metals to industry. The railings in the new building, now devastated, were cast from an expensive and unusual material for interior design - aluminium. Construction of the tenement was started in 1935 by the two sons of Salomon and Chai Mandel: Don Izak Mandel (1887-1942) and Josef Mandel (1888-1942?).

The Mandels' tenement house is one of the more interesting works of interwar architecture in Stanislaw. It differs from buildings created according to the usual patterns of local production. It is an example of Lviv circle modernism. It could have been the work of any of Lviv's architects.

Another interesting modernist building is the house housing the office of the Grünberg and Vogel company, which the architects built in 1938 on Giller Street (now 6a Hordynśkoho Street). Opposite, on the other side of Giller Street (now Hordynśkoho 1), stood the three-storey Herman Grimminger building, designed by Julius Feuerman in 1936. Its front was finished with a terrabon mortar facade. This noble stone render, which was fashionable at the time, rightly earned an excellent reputation among professionals for its qualities: the mica grains it contains ensure the ventilation of the masonry. It is damp-proof and, as time has shown, also durable, does not crumble or fall off, and after eighty years it still saves its owners the expense of maintenance. The rough terracotta plasters, admixed with minerals, a variety of shimmers, shine out in the sunlight with geometric surfaces on the facades, in places only decorated with a serrated frieze or a prominent cornice.

There were cases of building according to a single basic design. For example, there were two tenement houses: one on Sobieskiego Street (now 15a Sichovykh Striltsiv Street), the other on Romanovskoho Street (now 11a Harkushi Street), both dating from 1935-1936. Not far from the very centre, entire newly delimited streets were built up with exclusively cosy modernist houses: Vysotsky (now Pavlyanka), Szajnocha (now Dontsova), Zarzewie (now Drahomanova), Panska (now Kupchynsky).

The modernist buildings of the 1930s in Stanislavov were characterised by perfectly elaborate detailing: well-polished wood, crystal glass for glazing the entrance gates, brass handles and handles. Staircases were laid with terrazzo, a mixture of water, cement and grit, Italian for terazzo. It was made famous by Dominik Serafini, who settled in Stanislavov after the First World War and founded a concrete construction company - the First National Factory of Cement Products. The factory's office and the adjacent owner's flat had been located on Zarvanska Street (now Zakynskich 18) since 1932. Wrought iron for railings and grilles was produced by Piotr Jaroszewski (First Artistic and Iron Construction Ironworks and Wire Grid Factory, founded in 1902) and Jan Fedorowski in the ironworks at 20 Dąbrowskiego Street. The production of architectural sculptures, which were few in the interwar period, was handled by the sculpture and stonemasonry workshop of Marian Antoniak, whose office at 69 Sapieżyńska Street was located opposite the Catholic cemetery, as the main production of the workshop was cemetery sculpture and the grinding of marble slabs for tombstones.

In addition to architectural buildings made "to a high gloss", with artistic elements, many small, more modest tenement houses, houses and bungalows were built in this period, in large numbers, erected on BGK credit.

The facades of the new modernist townhouses complemented the development of the prestigious street leading from the city centre to the city park, first named Lipowa and from 1934 Pierackiego (now Shevchenko). A particular highlight of this street and a quintessential example of modernism before the Second World War was the Margosches family villa: a white, plainly plastered building with clean shapes. Situated at the end of the street, at number 79, where it transitions into the central park avenue, the Margosches' villa most fully embodies the aesthetic ideas of a luxury modernist house.

The Margosches Villa is distinguished by its individual, unusual plan and excellent quality of detail. The building is made up of freely connected volumes and surfaces: spacious terraces, large windows and smooth wall planes. The strict geometry of the cubist risalit contrasts with the circular opening in the composition of the main entrance, which corresponds to the metal rings of the gates. Expensive materials have been used to finish the elements and details: marble, art glass, expensive types of metal and wood, as well as the latest technology, specially designed lamps, fireplaces, doors, numerous metal elements, which testifies to the pursuit of aesthetic perfection. The walls of the lobby are finished with black and white marble panels. The inner doors are fitted with round windows, evoking elements of a ship. The fireplace room on the first floor was finished with wooden panels, rhythmically interrupted by a vertical sequence of marble pilasters. The metalwork of the fireplace grilles harmonises with the shape of the metal chandelier. One of the walls is formed by a four-panel door; when opened, the fireplace room connects with the two bright rooms to form a common space, with access to the south terrace.

The history of Stanislavski modernism began and symbolically closes with the work of the eminent Polish architect Bohdan Lachert. In 1937-1938, a project for a post office building in Stanislavov was created and its realisation took place. The smooth rectangle of the Stanislavov post office, with horizontal ribbons of windows, raised on pillars in the entrance area, with a flat roof and on a free plan, openly referred to the famous principles of modernist architecture formulated by the pioneer of functionalism, Le Corbusier. The blind rustic wall surrounding the post office, with a wide ribbon surrounding the white body of the office building and marking the boundary of the inner courtyard of the post office, around which the garages, coach house, warehouses and transformers and other technical rooms were located, was a visual response to the perceived need to strengthen the boundaries and increase defences.

The well-preserved modernist architecture developed in the interwar period, and in fact in the 1930s, shaped an urban fabric that determined the modern image of the city and became an indispensable part of the identity of contemporary Ivano-Frankivsk.