Hotel Forum

Striking in its architectural form, an outstanding example of brutalism, a reinforced-concrete landmark of the once intimate landscape of Ludwinów. Hotel Forum was not lucky with the times, but it was lucky with people – with a staff of over 600, for whom it was more than a workplace – it was a home with its windows wide open to the Western world.

Hotel Forum is not a grateful subject of research. Its history is scattered and incomplete. The building plans remain in private hands, and the archives of the enterprises that produced the hotel's fittings no longer exist. The Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie does hold the company archive of Budopol, but it contains only documents from the first year of the hotel's construction. Thanks to the foresight of technical staff, photocopies of several key administrative documents have survived, such as the decision to build the Hotel Kongresowy and descriptive fragments of technical documentation from the architectural design. The search and research were not made easier by the political history of Poland at the time, with its reprivatisation processes, restructurings and the liquidation of the companies involved in building the hotel. One of the more valuable surviving archival items is the guestbook of Hotel Forum. Guest entries confirm the prestige and uniqueness of this place. The book survived thanks to the foresight of technical manager Zbigniew Galuba and today – alongside press articles – constitutes tangible proof of Forum's radiant past.

The exhibition would not exist without them: the group of former Hotel Forum employees. The “Forumowicze”, a dream team, as they call themselves. For them Hotel Forum was and remains one of the most important life experiences, a keystone of identity, a point of reference and a turning point, the beginning or end of a hotel career, a beautiful fairy tale about an extraordinary hotel in the ordinary times at the dawn of Polish capitalism. For some of them the phenomenon called “Hotel Forum” has grown into a myth, something almost flawless; for others it was a space of intense development – a testing ground for technological experiments in a reality changing at the speed of light at the end of the 20th century. Most staff know almost every centimetre of this reinforced-concrete giant. The Forumowicze are inseparably bound to the hotel, and returning to those memories is often charged with strong emotion for many of them. Their recollections form a multi-volume story of one of the most iconic buildings in Kraków.

And so we met. Stories about Hotel Forum sparked my imagination and made this reinforced-concrete giant above the Wisła stop being for me an abandoned, gaping void, an enigmatic brutalist mass boldly suspended over Wawel, Skałka and the Wisła.