dawna wieża ciśnień, Wrocław

The former Karłowice water tower rises at the centre of Plac Daniłowskiego, where the neighbourhood’s main routes meet. Built in nineteen fourteen and nineteen fifteen, it supplied drinking water to Karłowice, then a suburban garden-city community. The Breslau firm Lolat Eisenbeton Breslau A.G., known for reinforced-concrete work, constructed it.

By nineteen thirty, two years after Karłowice joined Wrocław, the municipal water company had taken over the system. From then on, this tower no longer supplied the district directly; it acted as the final reservoir, keeping pressure even across the pipes. It left water-service operation in nineteen eighty-five.

The building steps upward: an octagonal technical base, a circular shaft with the stairway, then the tank chamber and a domed belvedere. Its early modernist design strips away much of the decorative imitation of older architectural eras, though the cornices and vertical wall strips still give the tall structure definition. At thirty-one metres sits a riveted Intze-type tank, about nine metres across.

The tower reaches forty-six metres in all. It became a protected monument in nineteen seventy-nine. Today, the terrace level carries mobile-phone antennas, giving this former piece of water infrastructure a thoroughly modern working role.