Archives for April 5th, 2007

The front page of VeÄ?er imagined what the planned skyscraper might look like.

Earlier this year, news leaked that Maribor wants to build the country’s biggest skyscraper. It would clock in at 40-50 stories, which is just half the size of the Empire State Building in New York, but which would nevertheless dwarf pretty much everything else in the city. (Not to mention the region and country.)

The local newspaper VeÄ?er released their imagined sketch of this thing, showing a huge black tower that looks suspiciously like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Everything is still very premature, though.

I think a lot of people are skeptical. They worry that it will be a giant eyesore, or that it’s overly ambitious and doomed to be Slovenia’s own version of the ill-fated Ryugyong Hotel. But not me. I love massive construction projects and would love to see this thing built. Whether or not it makes sense is quite inconsequential.

What’s also interesting is that if it does get built, it has a strong chance of becoming the symbol of Maribor, because the city’s skyline will be impossible to imagine without it. And you’ll all be able to bore young whippersnappers with long-winded stories about how “I remember Maribor before they put up the monolith…”