View from Krakow.

Every hour, a trumpet call resounds around central Krakow. Just as it is about to reach its climax the music dies, commemorating a trumpeter who, in the middle of the thirteenth century, blew enough of his warning to alert the citizens of the approaching Mongol hordes, but could not complete it before an enemy archer shot him through the throat. The grateful townspeople endowed a trumpeter in perpetual and grateful memory.

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All visitors hear this story almost as soon as they set foot in the city, but its accuracy as a metaphor for its architectural condition is less well publicised. Like the melody, Krakow's urban development evolved with beauty, consistency and practical purpose until it was rudely truncated by the Second World War and the subsequent Communist regime. Its architectural character comes essentially from its historic core and an outer ring, laid out in the 1930s and lined with institutions which no longer fitted into the old centre. Communism's only strategy for the core was neglect; its architectural endeavours were largely devoted to industrial developments on the outskirts. But as Poland assumes its rightful place at the heart of Europe, Krakow's architectural future seems to appear in fleeting glimpses, just as the trumpet call echoes ethereally around the city centre. The first glimpse is unexpected, Arata Isozaki's Manggha Centre of Japanese Art and Technology. This sensuously curving building occupies a prominent site on one bank of the Vistula River, looking across to the Wawel Hill and castle. It owes its existence to the film and theatre director Andrzej Wajda, who donated his Kyoto Prize to establish it as a home for the Japanese art collection built up at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Feliks Jasienski. Isozaki's flowing design makes literal reference to the bends and currents of the river, and more elusive ones to the sort of shapes and forms that are found in Japanese art. Since its completion in 1994, it has combined display of the collection with temporary exhibitions of contemporary technology, encapsulating the vital challenge of overcoming the hiatus that Communism imposed, by creating a connection between existing cultural resources and newly emerging opportunities.

Alongside Manggha is a smaller Japanese language school. At a glance its minimal detail and limited palette of materials might suggest it originates from Tokyo, but it is actually the work of local architects Ingarden and Ewy. Rather than imitate or compete with Isozaki, they seem to have taken Manggha's brief to examine art and technology from Japan and re-apply it in Polish context, and the result is a satisfying, elegant and modest building.

Galeria Kazimierz, a vast and recently opened shopping centre, shows a very different international influence. Designed by HOK with local firm Asymetria, it too combines history with contemporary life, though here history takes the form of slaughterhouse buildings refurbished as restaurants and specialty shops with Krakow's first H & M store and American-style coffee bars in the main mall. It is easy to decry 'mallisation' wherever it rears its head but anonymity is of course the point. Poles do not have to be old to remember queuing for scarce and poor quality goods in the Communist era, and here is a building that gives them access to the consumer goods of California or London--and better designed than most malls in either: the fact that its detailing does not have quite the same appeal for architects as some of the old state-run stores is irrelevant. HOK know their job, and their market.

Other glimpses of Krakow's architectural future are more obviously connected to its rich cultural traditions. There are new buildings for the Jagiellonian University, founded in the fourteenth century but one of the institutions that left the centre for the 1930s ring: one is a teaching block of engineering brick and crisp detail; another is Romuald Loegler's extension to the library. A controversial and successful local architect, Loegler excites praise and enmity in equal measure, but with the economics academy completed and an opera house under construction, he is an important part of what Krakow will become.

But the most potent potential symbol of a new future is presently a ruin. The Communist authorities decided to build Krakow's tallest building, but left it incomplete. Its skeletal form has figured large on the skyline ever since, a tacit reminder of the past even as EU funds start to free up the surrounding road system. Local rumour has it that this wreck has been bought by a pair of architects--but for purposes unknown. Like the trumpet call, it recalls the past, but unlike the music, it could also project a future.