During the 1920s and ‘30s, many public buildings were built in Katowice in a similar, minimalist, reductionist style in which modern geometrical forms were adorned with monumental details. Examples of this style include the headquarters of the Polish Iron Foundry Syndicate (designed by Tadeusz Michejda and Lucjan Sikorski), the National Economic Bank (Stanisław Tabeński), and the Silesian Technical Scientific Institutes (Jadwiga Dobrzyńska and Zygmunt Łoboda).
Lucjan Sikorski, who designed Katowice City Hall, Witold Kłębkowski, who designed the building of the Independent Offices, and Stanisław Tabeński, who created the Education Building, all went even further in the direction of contemporary modernism. Among the structures that stood out with their novel forms was the so-called ‘skyscraper’. Standing 60 metres tall (at the time, the second tallest building in Poland), the skyscraper housed the Treasury and residential flats for local government employees.
Over a dozen or so years, Katowice was populated with elegant structures of supermodern forms – for example, the first radio building in Poland (Silesian governor Michał Grażyński was a great supporter of the radio medium), whose modern façade was designed by Tadeusz Łobos, and the functionalist building of the International Trade Bank designed by Karol Schayer, designer of the Silesian Museum.
To this day, one can sense the spirit of contemporary modernism in Katowice: there are modern neighbourhoods, urban residential complexes, government villas in the style of Le Corbusier and dozens of public facilities, schools, government offices and institutional headquarters whose small scale did not prevent architects from creating work in what were at the time seen as the most modern forms.