Is Europe’s stubby skyline a sign of low ambition?

Atop an ordinary EUCTBUHEUslab of office building in downtown juts what at first might look like yet another example of architectural one-upmanship. But the 80-metre steel spire pointing out of the newish Varso tower is not there merely to provide bragging rights to the building’s owners. For over six decades until Varso was completed in 2022, the tallest building in Poland had been a monumental “gift” from , a tribute to unrequited communist amity completed two years after the dictator’s death in 1953. Without its pointy appendage the new edifice—a tribute to capitalism just one city block away from the enduring Soviet monolith—would have fallen a few centimetres short. Standing proud at 310 metres including its spire, Varso thus holds the title of tallest occupied building not just in the city but in the whole .Those hoping to glimpse a marvel of architecture and engineering are in for a disappointment: Varso and its 53 floors would be difficult to spot in the thicket of skyscrapers found in Manhattan, Shanghai or Dubai these days. Even with its height-enhancing spire the Polish edifice is but the 172nd tallest building in the world, according to the tower-spotters at the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (), based in Chicago. Continental Europe’s second-tallest tower does not make the global top 500; in the year Varso was completed seven skyscrapers went up in America, China, Indonesia and Kazakhstan that would overshadow it. Once an American phenomenon, high-rises have long since become a global one. Everywhere is building upwards, higher, further into the sky—except Europe. At least outside the continent’s fringes in London, Istanbul and Moscow, it is the peninsula that tower-builders forgot. Both North and South America, Asia, Oceania and soon Africa all have more buildings of 250 metres or higher. Only seven of the world’s tallest 1,000 buildings are in the .