Poznan is getting more downtown high-rise buildings. They are of average quality and moderately tall. They usually grow where no one planned them, and their height is decided by aviators. Meanwhile, near Poznań - a birth disaster. The authorities of neighboring Swarzedz intend to erect 98 towers in the field, ranging in height from fifty-four to one hundred and sixty meters. Slawomir Rosolski - the author of the new building of the Architecture Department of Poznan University of Technology - is responsible for the concept.
There are no skyscrapers in Poznan, and one is unlikely to expect a lone mace along the lines of Wrocław's Sky Tower. The exuberant ambitions of investors are cut down by the Civil Aviation Office. This is because the air corridor leading to Poznan's Ławica airport has been designated precisely over the center. However, the city sometimes likes to let investors take an upward leap. The first skyscrapers that jumped over the forty-meter threshold were built in the downtown area as early as the 1960s. The authorities modernized the nineteenth-century strict center and trimmed it with, among other things, three point towers on Piekary Street and five towers on one long "footing" housing retail and services on the city's main street, Swiety Marcin.
Patching up the city's fabric
Under Gierek, several nearly 100-meter-high towers were supposed to be built in the downtown area, but only the Orbis hotels Polonez and Poznañ (both made of large slabs) and the Wiepofama office building on Dabrowskiego Street in Jeżyce grew in reality. Also hatching by then was the tower of the Academy of Economics, completed only in 1991. Dominating the silhouette of the center, the red block of the university (measuring one hundred and five meters with the TV transmitter) reigned supreme throughout the 1990s - at a time when planners rather ruled out building more skyscrapers. Poznan, abandoning the spatial expansion decreed in the 1970s, opted then for patching up the city's fabric and a moderate scale similar to pre-war gabbiness. Only one site was planned at the time for a high-rise enclave, continuing the intentions of previous decades.
Sipinski office buildings
In the second half of the 1990s, the studio of Ewa and Stanislaw Sipinski developed a concept for a complex of high-rise office buildings on a vacant lot along Królowej Jadwigi Street next to the Poznan Hotel. The first, PFC, was built in 2001, the second, Andersia Tower, six years later. Both are quite conservative and not very slender, in a style similar to European developments of this type from the early 1990s. For the third, tallest skyscraper - Silver Tower - the investor has been making us wait for thirteen years. He recently presented another version of the investment, also designed by the Sipinski studio. The target height is 115 meters.
The office and hotel complex at Andersa Square (proj.: Pracownia E. i S. Sipinski, from right: PFC - 2001, Andersia Tower - 2007, Andersia Business Centre - 2012). Another tallest skyscraper named Silver Tower is planned behind the built complex.
photo: Jakub Głaz
more or less lege artis
However, the contents of the bag of unplanned skyscrapers by urban planners spilled out when the current Law on Planning and Zoning came into force. All more or less lege artis, based on a loosely interpreted principle of so-called good neighborliness. It began to bud. Where there were no development plans, tall grew nearby, not necessarily with a similar function. Thus, at the foot of the Citadel shot up, taking advantage of the proximity of the Polonez Hotel, a massive apartment building by Ataner, one of the very successful local developers. On the other side of the hotel - the provincial government built a tall edifice for the Marshal's Office a few years later. Some city planners and architects protested against both investments. To no avail. Meanwhile, budding has also occurred at the Wiepofama in Jeżyce. Since 2006, it has been accompanied by the mediocre quality Omega office building (designed by Arcada), and since 2014 - a neat, albeit strong on originality skyscraper designed by Piotr Barełkowski.
A residential complex with a tall building covering the Citadel hill (design: M. Kibler, M. Waśko, realization: 2008).
The good neighborhood (former Hotel Poznañ), to which the developer managed to refer, is out of frame.
Photo: Jakub Głaz
vague principle of good neighborliness
The rather vague principle of good neighborliness so infuriated the investors that they even managed to obtain development conditions for high-rise buildings on the site of the devastated Szyc Stadium, provided for sports and recreation in the city's Study of Conditions and Directions for Spatial Development. The benchmark was to be a high-rise development nearly a kilometer away. The passing of the plan curbed these intentions. Instead, a high-rise maneuver was successfully executed (again) by Ataner next to the train station. For several years, the thriving investor has been erecting more banal apartment buildings here - each taller than the last. The construction of the 73-meter-highpunktowiec, the tallest residential building in the city, is just coming to an end. There is nothing as tall nearby. Where does the neighborhood come from? Only the investor, officials and designers - the aforementioned Sipinski company - know the answer to this question.
Appetite for high accents
The same, by the way, was true of the already iconic Bałtyk office building from the MVRDV studio (68 meters), although in this case the very successful form absolves to some extent the authors of the not entirely obvious permission for such a high accent. By the way, the Baltic has whetted the appetite of the neighboring Poznań International Fair, which - so far - has had no high-rise ambitions. MTP settled a student study competition this spring that provided space for new towers, and the city amended its local plan to allow the fair to make high investments.
The Baltic office building (design: MVRDV, 2017) was designed so that it looks different from all sides.
Photo: Jakub Głaz
Also in the pipeline is a plan allowing a tall dominant building near the Rataje traffic circle, on the border of modernist housing estates from the 1970s. As in the case of the MTP, however, the urban planning analyses accompanying the draft plan are limited to the impact on the closer surroundings. It remains unclear what impact the new towers might have on the silhouette of the entire city.
Madness in Swarzędz
However, the divagations about Poznan's skyscrapers pale in the face of plans for the suburban town of Kobylnica, a village in the Swarzedz municipality with a population of about one and a half thousand. A... housing development of more than 130 buildings, including 98 residential ones, would be built there. The site for the development is ten of the hundred hectares of the Ligowiec airfield belonging to Aeroclub Poznan, which is moving out of there. The height? Dozens of point towers of 53 meters each, another dozen measuring 75 meters, 41 stumeters, three towers of 130 meters each and one - 160meters high. Among them low-rise buildings, schools, services, a church and a metropolitan railroad station.
Concept "Island of Towers" on the site of Ligowiec airport in Kobylnica - a village in Swarzedz municipality, proj.: Slawomir Rosolski
© Slawomir Rosolski | Illustrations courtesy of "Informator Swarzedzki", swarzedz24.pl
Contrary to appearances, this is not a crazy and undeveloped idea of the overambitious municipal authorities, but a concept realized at their request, branded by an experienced designer: Slawomir Rosolski (author of many residential enclaves, including Poznan's City Park, and more recently the Poznan University of Technology building, where future architects will be educated). Repeating the old modernist dogma, Rosolski argues that a tall development will free up space for greenery and recreation, which would be seized by a single-family housing development. According to local media reports, such a judgment was to be made by the architect after nearly two years of analysis. Rosolski reassures that the "Island of Towers" is to be a self-sustaining enclave, rich in modern eco-friendly solutions. However, the issues of access, service and the impact of high development on the surrounding area and nature are controversial, as is the sense of the whole project.
embodying the dreams of radicals
The idea of an "Island of Towers" in an honest field is so surreal that even the protests of residents and the comments of architects are restrained and full of disbelief. Does the idea, which can only defend itself as a theoretical concept, have a chance of being realized? Councilors and residents of the municipality who have had a chance to see the project are rather hostile to it, but nothing is certain in Poznansky lately. Few believed in the realization of the so-called reconstruction of Przemysl Castle, and no one seems to have expected that a huge private castle would grow from scratch in the suburban town of Stobnica. And yet. And since madness can take many forms, after historical fantasies it's time to embody the dreams of radical modernists. Le Corbusier would be applauding.
