The Town Hall on Plac Ratuszowy is the most distinctive secular building in the old town: a long, low neo-Gothic block of red brick with corner towers, pointed-arch windows, and crow-stepped gables. It was designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel — the great Prussian architect of the nineteenth century — and completed in 1832, replacing an earlier town hall destroyed in the Napoleonic siege of 1807.
The building survived the much more destructive 1945 battle in better condition than most of the old town, and was carefully restored in the 1960s. It still houses the municipal authorities and is normally not open to the public, but the exterior is worth circling. A modest art gallery, the Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej, occupies part of the ground floor.