Varso Tower

At 310 meters, Varso Tower is the tallest building in the European Union, and it earns the title with a spire. The Foster + Partners-designed tower rises to 230 meters at its top occupied floor, then carries an 80-meter mast that pushes it past every rooftop from Frankfurt to Paris. It anchors Varso Place, a three-building mixed-use complex that developer HB Reavis built on a tight 1.7-hectare plot next to Warsaw’s central train station.

Project Scope

The tower is primarily office space stacked across 53 above-ground floors, topped by two public observation decks that opened in September 2025 and give Warsaw its highest public viewpoint. Two lower buildings, Varso 1 and Varso 2, designed by HRA Architekci, fill out the block with offices, retail, a hotel, and ground-floor public space woven into the street. The complex earned BREEAM Outstanding certification, the rating system’s top tier, on the strength of its energy systems and a design built for daylight and air quality. Construction ran from 2016, with the tower topping out in February 2021 and the complex completing in September 2022 at an estimated 500 million euros.

Why It Matters

Varso is a marker of where European tall-building activity has shifted. While supertall construction concentrated in the Gulf and East Asia, Warsaw quietly built the continent’s new height record, a signal of Poland’s standing as one of the EU’s faster-growing office markets. The tower’s slender profile and transit-adjacent siting also reflect a more disciplined kind of supertall, dense, walkable, and tied directly to rail rather than parked behind a plaza.

Its place in the global height table is modest next to Asian giants like Merdeka 118, but its meaning is regional and clear: the EU’s tallest address sits in Central Europe, not its western capitals. For a city rebuilt almost entirely after 1945, that’s a statement as much as a building.

Project Team & Details