A historic mosaic has disappeared from Krakow's Forum Hotel. Can the building, falling into disrepair, still hope for better times?
On Monday, public opinion was shaken by information about an act of vandalism that took place at the Forum Hotel in Krakow. It turned out that last year one of the priceless elements of the decor was destroyed - a blown glass mosaic that once adorned the space of the Panorama restaurant, located on the top floor of the building. The glass composition was smashed, and in its place appeared the spray-painted inscription "FUN." The current owner, who is about to open his restaurant on top of the Forum, claims that the composition was already destroyed when he rented the space.
Believe me, if the mosaic had been untouched, we would have just cleaned it and left it. But in this case we had no choice but to dismantle it, secure what we could and wait. We found a person who could take on the task of restoring it, but the cost of this operation is beyond our budget for now," said the owner of the new restaurant, Maciej Feherpataky in an interview with Gazeta Krakowska.
External funding, perhaps in the form of public funds, would probably have to be found for such work. However, the city has been washing its hands of matters related to the hotel's future for years.
Brutalist facades of the Forum Hotel overgrown with greenery
Photo: Michal Derela © CC BY-SA 3.0 | Wikimedia Commons
The team responsible for the mosaic, consisting of Krystyna Strachocka-Zgud, Agnieszka Zgud-Sobol and Janusz Ziembinski, also made a wooden relief and metal decoration for the nightclub, located in the hotel's basement. It is quite possible that they also shared the fate of the glass mosaic. However, these are just fragments from the sad reality of the Forum, which was once "the most modern hotel in Poland." The building has been falling into disrepair for years, and only a small part of it is in use. Can the Brutalist icon of Krakow be saved from further degradation? Should we worry about the vision of Volyn Boulevard without the concrete giant?
Giant on the Vistula River
Since its opening in 1988, the silhouette of the Forum Hotel, designed by Janusz Ingarden, has been one of the most prominent elements building the skyline of Krakow's right bank of the Vistula River. Other landmarks certainly include the blocks of the Manggha (designed by Arata Isozaki, Krzysztof Ingarden), the ICE Congress Center (designed by Ingarden & Ewý Architects, Arata Isozaki) or, in the last decade, the Cricoteka (designed by IQ2 Konsorcjum; nsMoonStudio, Wizja). All these buildings have one thing in common - they are owned by the City or the State. The situation is different for the Forum Hotel, which has been in private hands for years. Due to new legal conditions, it can no longer perform its original function - for years it was known as Poland's largest billboard stand, and now its owner, which is currently the Wawel-Imos International company, makes individual spaces available for lease to catering establishments. These, however, occupy a small portion of the spaces offered by the hotel. The rest are deteriorating, and it is unclear how long maintaining the building will be profitable. We asked the local preservation offices about the hotel 's current status as a historic landmark and the possibility of preserving it.
The Forum Hotel was covered with large-format advertisements for years
Photo: Radoslaw Ziomber © CC BY-SA 4.0 | Wikimedia Commons
icon without protection
As Sebastian Stanik of the Malopolska Monument Protection Office informed us, the Forum Hotel building is within the competence of the local Municipal Conservator of Monuments in its entirety, excluding only issues of the scope of conservation protection, i.e., among other things, entry in the records or register of monuments.
We also inquired about the prospect of listing the hotel building in the Register of Historic Places:
[...] on registry issues - at the moment, no proceedings are underway at the tut. Office there are no proceedings pending on the entry of the Forum Hotel into the register or record of monuments. The last decision that rejected the application for entry in the register was issued 17 years ago. A lot has changed since then, so the MVCC does not rule out that now the decision could be positive. However, in order to conclude this, it would be necessary to initiate proceedings beforehand and collect and analyze evidence, Sebastian Stanik wrote.
We also spoke with the City Historic Preservation Officer about the protection of the Forum Hotel. Among other things, we learned that
The Forum Hotel is not covered by any form of monument protection as specified in Article 7 of the Act of July 23, 2003 on the protection and care of monuments (i.e. Journal of Laws of 2022, item 840, as amended.), including, inter alia, not subject to protection in the provisions of the current local spatial development plan "Bulwary Wisły" (Resolution No. LXXXI/1240/13 of the Krakow City Council of September 11, 2013).
Similarly, matters are similar in the case of the area around the building, where there is currently an "amusement park" with questionable landscape values. In the event that the procedure for entry into the register of historical monuments is initiated, all construction and demolition work must be stopped for the duration of the proceedings - such a situation recently occurred in the case of the Market Hall.
The Forum Hotel was covered with large-format advertisements for years
Photo: Radoslaw Ziomber © CC BY-SA 4.0 | Wikimedia Commons
A buffer is not enough
A certain form of protection for the Forum Hotel is its location inside the so-called buffer zone surrounding the Old Town and Kazimierz areas, included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Such an argumentation was used, among others, by the former Municipal Conservator of Monuments, Monika Bogdanowska, who gave a negative opinion on the idea of building a housing development on the site occupied by the Forum. As it turns out, however, the buffer zone in no way protects against the devastation and progressive degradation of the hotel's historic interiors. It also seems that the investor himself is merely waiting for a convenient moment to get rid of the inconvenient building. In fact, he already presented such plans in the early 2000s.
Hotel Forum in Cracow
Photo: Fiedler © CC BY-SA 3.0 | Wikimedia Commons
no move without the City
Can the unlucky hotel still hope for better times? It's hard to say - for that, first of all, an initiative is needed from the Provincial Office for Historic Preservation and the City. Representatives of the latter already speculated last year about the urgent need to buy the plot on which the Forum Hotel is located and organize a tender for the reasonable development of the area along with the brutalist building. Given Krakow's extremely difficult financial situation, these plans could be considered a song of the future. Meanwhile, the building is falling into disrepair, and more elements of its design are disappearing irrevocably from the interiors.
