Jan 1960: The Dortmund Tower

Every two years a city in Germany hosts the Bundesgartenschau, a federal horticultural show that runs for several months with the current tagline of ‘we make cities greener’.

The city of Dortmund was granted the honour in 1959 and to mark the occasion it was decided that a broadcasting and observation tower - The Dortmund Tower, or Florianturm – would be built as an attraction to the summer event.

Designed by architect Will Schwarz, the tower was the first in the world to have a revolving restaurant built into it. Another claim to fame is that it was fleetingly Germany’s tallest building at 220m (including aerials). Regular visitors to Frankfurt won’t be surprised to read that the current holder of that distinction is the 259m tall Commerzbank Tower, which for six years (1997-2003) was the tallest building in Europe.

As Germany’s financial hub, Frankfurt is home to most of Germany’s tall buildings, but the trend to build enormous free-standing structures can be traced back to a post-war building boom across Europe, as noted by The Engineer in its January 1, 1960 edition.