Skibniewska spent the German occupation of Warsaw in the resistance and in Żegota, the underground council for aid to Jews, then studied under Romuald Gutt and graduated in 1948 into the Warsaw Reconstruction Office. From 1957 she worked for the Warsaw Housing Cooperative, heir to the interwar functionalist estates of Żoliborz, and made her career there rather than in monumental commissions. Her preoccupations were unfashionable and durable: keeping the trees that were already on a site, giving flats an unbraced interior that tenants could rearrange, and designing dwellings usable by disabled and elderly people — the first Polish architect to do so systematically. She taught at Warsaw University of Technology from 1975 and sat in the Sejm from 1965 to 1985, from 1971 as its first woman deputy marshal.
