Wieża ciśnień Na Grobli, Wrocław

Wieża ciśnień Na Grobli is the forty-metre water tower rising here as one of Wrocław’s oldest surviving pieces of municipal engineering. Built between eighteen sixty-six and eighteen seventy-one, it formed the heart of John Moore’s plan to bring water to two hundred thousand people. Carl Johann Christian Zimmermann revised the scheme and gave it its historicist character, borrowing the visual language of earlier centuries rather than leaving a purely utilitarian structure.

Inside, the original installation combined a riveted steel tank with a pump house. A second reservoir, made of reinforced concrete, arrived in nineteen oh two; together the pair held four thousand one hundred and fifty cubic metres. Steam-powered pumping engines worked here from eighteen seventy-nine, and a Zoelly steam turbine replaced them in nineteen twenty-four.

The reservoirs stopped operating in the nineteen sixties, yet much of the equipment remains. Most remarkable is the oldest surviving overhead crane, installed in eighteen seventy-one, along with richly ornamented nineteenth-century details and spiral cast-iron stairs described as the tallest of their kind in Poland. The tower also briefly gained a second life as a theatre venue, when the Ad Spectatores group performed here from April two thousand until two thousand five.