An elephant without a home

Warsaw now has its very own candidate for a white elephant that could serve as an example in future dictionary entries. When the announcement was made in March by the new management of Orco that the developer’s Złota residential project in Warsaw had been a financial disaster and that they intended sell it in its unfinished state asap, it came as little surprise. The distinctive 192m, 54-storey sail-shaped tower, the highest residential building in the EU, was planned in the middle of the last decade at the euphoric height of the boom and designed by an architect of world-renown, Daniel Libeskind. The idea was to develop high-end luxury flats in a prestigious building located in the epicentre of Warsaw – a city hitherto lacking in such properties. Obviously, it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. However, no sooner had the project been launched than the problems started to multiply. It was plagued for several years by permitting issues and objections from residents and environmentalists; but when it finally started to take shape the banking system crashed.

Work on the tower carried on through the economic gloom, but the heavily leveraged Orco was lurching towards total collapse, from which it was only saved by French bankruptcy protection laws. Radovan Vítek, the owner of Czech property investor CPI, has since become the largest shareholder and taken over the board of the crippled developer. The new management revealed that work had ceased completely after a dispute with the general contractor in late 2013, and that more than half of Orco’s substantial net losses of EUR 227 mln that year were attributable to Złota. The company also claimed that the PLN 65,000 per sqm price tag for some of the apartments was set so prohibitively high simply to ensure publicity for being the m in tost expensive in the country. Orco has since secured a bridging loan to keep the creditors from the door, but it is still faced with a formidable task in finding a buyer for the tower.

So where does the project stand in the pantheon of white elephants? There are many such schemes across the globe to compare it with, which is a testament to mankind’s capacity to cock up on a colossal scale. From the grandiose Chinese dams that are now unusable but resulted in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, through to North Korean dictators’ gargantuan (and still unopened) hotel projects, and pretty much all of Dubai. But there are two buildings that could serve as comparable to Złota. The Millennium Dome in London was touted by the UK government as a grand gesture to celebrate the year 2000 and at the same time revitalise a contaminated area of London dockland. However, the ballooning costs of the project and the design (resembling a contraceptive diaphragm) ensured that it soon became a national joke and a political embarrassment. Exhibitions held in the Dome suffered from a serious shortfall of visitors, inflicting further losses. With some difficulty it was eventually sold, since when it may finally be finding its identity as an all-purpose arena.

The other comparable project, you might be surprised to hear, is the Empire State Building. As with Złota it was conceived on the crest of a boom (the Roaring 1920s) and completed after a crash (Wall Street). Despite its heart of Manhattan location, it took until the 1950s for the building to make a profit. Nevertheless, thanks partly to a monstrous gorilla with a sweet spot for blondes, it has become an icon of the New York skyline. I mention these two projects because finding a buyer and a function (whether it remains as a residential tower or becomes offices, a hotel, or a combination of the three) are the stages that Złota now needs to successfully negotiate. Undoubtedly, it is a striking building, although I feel the city’s populace has yet to warm to a project designed exclusively for a super-rich elite. If its distinctiveness can be used wisely and a way found to turn it into a building of the people, then just maybe in years to come lexicographers won’t be choosing it to illustrate the wrong kind of dictionary entry.