Matthew Benjamin Matteson

This dissertation examines ways in which architects exploited the institutional regime of a modern, professional discipline to shape the role that arhitecture would play in the complex transformations of Polish culture and society taking place in the tumultuous decades of the early twentieth century. The Polish language architectural press and new programs of higher education in architecture became key sites for articulating and popularizing the architectural imagination that it was hoped would direct Poland’s march into modernity. This study uses archival records of these emerging institutions of Polish architecture to explore how they challenged outmoded postures towards history and identity and tested alternative collective conceptual foundations for modern architecture.