Poland's ugliest building

Many of my visits to Wrocław have involved the mile (1.6km)-long walk from the station to the old town square or back again. The main part of this route is along ul. Świdnicka, crossing the city's moat and then under the inner ring road. It's not a long walk, eminently pleasing to the eye with so many great buildings along the way. But one stands out as being utterly hideous - the SolPol building (1993), designed by local architect Wojtek Jarząbak. Apparently, it took him a week.

Designed for magnate Zygmunt Solorz-Żak (today one of Poland's very few billionaires, who got rich on TV station Polsat), it is a textbook piece of early 1990s 'we can do whatever we like now - except there's no budget for it' school of Połlysz Arkitekczer. (SolPol = SOLorz-Żak + POLsat.) The building is stupendously ugly, lacking any redeeming features other than a strong tang of zeitgeist. It's popularly believed to be so bad that it's good, and that it has become a listed building. 

Not so. 

There was an attempt in 2015 to register it as such with the local conservator of monuments - who roundly rejected it as having "no value, either artistic, scientific or historic". Buildings of this era, maybe not quite as awful as this one, are being routinely pulled down in Warsaw to be replaced by something taller, nicer, far more energy efficient and ergonomically more pleasant to work in.

I went into this building once, to be interviewed for a Polsat TV programme - Polsat (set up by Solorz-Żak) had its Wrocław studio here. My memory of its interior is that it was full of cheap ill-fitting aluminium doors, tatty contract carpeting, cables everywhere and hardly any furniture.

In a ranking of the worst of Polish architecture conducted by the PolskaZachwyca.pl website, the SolPol building came third, behind the Gorzów Wielkopolska's viewing tower and Lichen's basilica. In all honesty, Licheń offends me not in the slightest - it's big, it references classical styles, I'm fine with it. (I'm not fine with the way it was financed - the Polish Marian Fathers selling the Christopher Wren-designed Fawley Court, that bastion of Polishness in Henley-on-Thames.) The spider-globe viewing tower in Gorzów has won several awards for hideousness - and sorely needs to be recycled.

But SolPol? Should it be allowed to (dis)grace the streets of Wrocław for decades to come, serving as a reminder of how God-awful Polish architecture was at the time of the nation's political and economic transformation? And one day, Poles might come to appreciate in the same way the John Betjeman's generation came to appreciate Victoriana?

I'll let you be the judge...

Below: facing the brickwork of the 14th-century Church of St Stanislaus, St Wenceslas and St Dorothea it stands all angular, decorated in postmodern pastels, pistachio and pink. "I want a cylindrical staircase on the corner!" "But curved glass elements cost too many deutschmarks!" "OK then - compromise - we'll have a hexagon. You know - almost round."

Below: even on a bright sunny day in early autumn - does this building have any redeeming features? Or are we too early to find nostalgia in it?

Update, July 2023: Like Freddy King, it's tore down, almost level with the ground. SolPol - man, it's gone. Real gone.

So what's Wrocław's ugliest building now? I nominate Wybrzeże Stanisława Wyspiańskiego 35...

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