Foster + Partners has completed work on Varso Tower in Warsaw, Poland. At 310 meters (1,017 feet) tall, the scheme overtakes Frankfurt’s Commerzbank Tower (also designed by Foster + Partners) to become the tallest building in the European Union. 

The new tower is also nearly 400 feet taller than the Intempo skyscraper in Benidorm, Spain, which became the tallest residential building in the European Union following its completion last year.

At ground level, the project includes a plaza enclosed within a glazed screen. Described by the designers as an ‘urban room,’ the plaza contains full-height trees and seating for office workers on breaks and the public.

Inside, the tower’s lobby features a 33-foot-high ceramic artwork by local artist Krystyna Kaszuba-Waclawek. Above, office floors are accessed by two banks of double-deck elevators where each car serves two floors at any one time. 

The building provides 753,000 square feet of office space with 10-foot-high clear ceiling heights, while triple-glazed facades help the scheme achieve BREEAM Outstanding and WELL Gold certification. The tower’s viewing platform, located on the 53rd floor, is the highest inhabited floor in Poland, while a landscaped terrace bar on the 49th floor with sixteen trees forms the city’s highest garden. 

“We believe that the tower, filled with activity and featuring extraordinary rooftop public spaces will make a strong, positive contribution to this wonderful city,” said Grant Brooker, Head of Studio at the firm. “We hope that it will become a hub for local and international business and a symbol for contemporary Poland.”

The scheme is one of several recently completed by Foster + Partners. Earlier this month, the London-based studio completed a pair of towers in Shenzhen for drone and camera company DJI. In July, the firm completed a Kuwait skyscraper with curving concrete fins, while June saw the completion of an ‘innovative’ retrofit scheme in an old Spanish gas plant. At the beginning of 2022, Foster + Partners also completed a pyramid-like museum in Datong, China. 

In addition to the building completions, the firm’s founder Norman Foster recently unveiled a new set of sustainable urban design principles ahead of COP27, while back in August, it emerged that the firm was suing an Indian government contractor over unpaid design fees on a scrapped master plan.