Fourteen-storey skyscraper on ul. Żwirki i Wigury, completed in 1934, one of the tallest buildings in Poland at the time.
Drapacz Chmur, the former Tax Office building, is a modernist skyscraper at Żwirki i Wigury 15 in the centre of Katowice. It is entered in the heritage register, and when completed in 1934 it was, alongside the Prudential building in Warsaw, among the tallest buildings in Poland.
The building was constructed on a steel frame, which was innovative for the time. It is regarded as one of the most interesting and spectacular examples of functionalism in Poland. Once assembled and welded, the frame was encased in concrete by the gunite method on wire mesh, and Klein floors were used throughout the building. The heritage register gives the material as reinforced concrete and the style as modernist.
The design was prepared by the structural design office of the Public Works Department of the Silesian Voivodeship Office, and the calculations were made by Prof. Stefan Bryła. The site manager was the engineer Henryk Griffel. Earthworks began on 14 May 1930, and the whole was completed in 1934. The frame of the fourteen-storey part was made by workshops in Huta Królewska and Laura, and that of the six-storey part by the steelworks in Nowy Bytom. Both plots belonged to the State Treasury, and the nearest mining working was 800 metres away.
The building was divided into two parts: a six-storey part with offices at number 17 and a fourteen-storey part with flats for officials at number 15. In the office part there was a paternoster, a continuous-chain lift, which ran until 2021. The skyscraper was featured in the film "Steel-frame construction" (Budownictwo żelazno-szkieletowe), which premiered on 9 July 1931 at the Rialto cinema in Katowice.
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