The former Forum Hotel is turning 50. It was an enclave of the West in socialist Warsaw

The Forum Hotel was opened in January 1974. Today marks the 50th anniversary of that event. It was the most modern hotel in Warsaw at the time, with 752 rooms, 8 high-speed lifts, a rotisserie restaurant and many other amenities. The Forum’s guests were intended to be foreign tourists. The author of the design for the hotel, which stood at the junction of Marszałkowska Street and Jerozolimskie Avenue, was the Swedish architect Sten Samuelson. It was one of the first high-rise buildings in post-war Warsaw (the second building after the Palace of Culture and Science to exceed 100 m in height) and, next to the Victoria Hotel built a little later, one of the first Warsaw hotels of a high standard.

The hotel in the very centre of the nation’s capital was built by the Swedish company Skanska Cementgjuteriet AB of Malmö. The Swedish contractor imported both the materials and its own workforce. The fast pace of the work and the orderliness of the construction site were praised by the city’s residents. When completed, the building stood out as a monolithic mass with hundreds of small windows. However, the architecture, which was unusual in Warsaw, became the subject of criticism.

The Eastern Wall and the Forum Hotel in 1975. Source: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The hotel started its operation on 25 January 1974. It was staffed by 800 people, had air-conditioning, the Soplica restaurant with a huge rotisserie set up in its central part, the Maryla café, a cocktail bar, the Pollena hair and beauty salon, the PeKaO foreign exchange shop and a banquet hall for 1,000 people, which could be divided into smaller rooms thanks to a system of movable walls. The hotel introduced so-called room status, i.e. a luminous link between the rooms and the reception desk. An employee at the reception desk was able to see whether a room was vacant, paid for or cleaned and ready to receive a guest via an illuminated console. In addition, the hotel’s French-made pneumatic post office was installed in the building. Meanwhile, automated bookkeeping was provided by machines imported from the GDR. Furniture and tableware came from Poland.

The Forum was an enclave of the West in the very centre of socialist Warsaw. Its offer was intended almost exclusively for foreigners. For it belonged to the American Intercontinental chain, and room reservations were coordinated by a computer system in New York. In the early years, it hosted, among others, President Jimmy Carter’s entourage and the group ABBA. The hotel claimed to have had 400,000 guests by 1978. A multi-storey car park was opened adjacent to the hotel. After Orbis became majority-owned by the Accor hotel group, the facility became part of the Novotel chain, as a result of which, on 1 July 2002, its original name was changed from Hotel Forum to its current name, Novotel Warszawa Centrum.

Between 2004 and 2005 the building underwent a major refurbishment. The colour of the facade was changed from yellow to grey (metallic cladding by French architect Yves Lagache). The entire infrastructure, rooms and corridors were modernised. The ground floor of the hotel was also extensively rebuilt: the podium was enlarged, with reinforced concrete beams protruding at ground floor level, and the main entrance was moved from the back of the hotel to its front on the Marszałkowska Street side. After reconstruction, the hotel was officially opened on 7 December 2005.

Source: ekartkazwarszawy.pl, tvn24.pl

Read also: Architektura w Polsce | Hotel | Wieżowiec| History | Modernism | Warsaw