The exhibition at the Podgórze Museum is devoted to the Hotel Forum, a brutalist building and reinforced-concrete landmark of the Ludwinów landscape, one of Kraków’s most recognisable sites. The display presents the building’s history and the people who created it over the years. The opening took place on 28 May, and the exhibition can be visited from 29 May 2026 to 10 January 2027.
For years, the hotel was far more than a place to stay: it was the everyday workplace of a staff of over 600, a setting for professional development, and a symbol of openness to the Western world during the final years of the People’s Republic of Poland and the early days of Polish capitalism. The exhibition’s curators stressed that the hotel’s history has survived in a scattered and incomplete form. Many documents relating to the construction and operation of the building have been lost or are held in private collections, and the archives of the firms involved in the project have, for the most part, ceased to exist.
The exhibition is based on the recollections of former employees, who call themselves “Forumowicze”, along with their private archives and personal accounts. Among other things, the exhibition presents:
- surviving administrative documents,
- fragments of technical documentation,
- the hotel’s commemorative guestbook, containing entries from former guests, which was saved thanks to the efforts of technical manager Zbigniew Galuba.
The exhibition explores both the architecture and history of the site and the memories of the people connected with the hotel, as well as the social and economic changes of the late twentieth century.