Kraków's symbol of transformation

While visiting Kraków from the 1980s through to the early 2010s, I was increasingly intrigued by the presence not far from the very centre of the city of an unfinished hundred-metre high office tower just standing there. Visit after visit after visit, nothing happening. Decade after decade. My local hosts would point it out to me as a enduring curiosity. 

As time went by, it was neither demolished nor completed - just remaining there an eyesore that suggested helpless civic impotence. And at a time when the city was in the throes of a shared-services boom, many large foreign investors drawn to the city by its human talent, desperately looking for office space.

But back to the beginning... Work started on the NOT tower (Naczelna Organizacja Techniczna) in 1975, and paused in 1979 for the same economic reasons that triggered the workers' strikes that led to the Solidarity movement. Then for over one-third of a century, nothing happened. The skeletal frame of the tower became accepted as a part of the Kraków skyline. There was interest in doing something with it, but effort after effort crashed upon the shores of bureaucratic and legal complexities and the helplessness of the nie da się ('it can't be done') mentality.

Finally, in 2016, something moved. Work began on completing the NOT tower, by this time dubbed by locals 'Szkieletor' (Skeletor) after the skull-faced Masters of the Universe supervillain. The original skeletal frame was kept, but the old floors were taken down and replaced by new ones, reducing their number from 30 to 27. Covid happened just as work was nearing completion, but since 2021, tenants have started moving into the building, renamed Unity Tower.

Below: and here it is, standing proudly in the late-November sun. Photo taken from Rondo Mogilskie, a gyratory traffic system that separates cars from trams and pedestrians in a 1970s sort of way; to get across this on foot means using a succession of tunnels and footpaths and escalators; not a perfect for walkers, but at least cars are not a danger.

Below: my photo of the building taken in August 2019 as work was under way... [Looking at the angle, the car I was sitting in must have been just to the left and above the spot where I took the photo above.]

...and the complex as it appears today from ulica Lubomierskiego. Everything located a short walk from Kraków's main railway station.

The story of how Szkieletor - a building said to have been cursed to remain unfinished for all time - has become a part of Kraków's modern business ecosystem of offices, shared services, IT, accountants and lawyers - is yet more proof that Poland's doing well. Kraków sorely needed modern office space; besides, the trend that's observable across other cities is that edge-of-town campuses are losing in popularity to smaller spaces rented right in the centre.

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First proper snow of 2022/23

This time two years ago:

Sleep - a portal to another universe?

This time four years ago:
A month and much progress at Chynów station

This time five years ago:
Tram tips for visiting Edinburgh

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Tax dodge or public service?

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Still here, the early snow

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Another point of view