The building was rectified by Adam Dietrich, a teacher of the institute. The tower was supposed to provide artesian water from nearby wells to the entire Forest Institute (the current Forestry Engineering Academy). This project, alas, failed — the water turned out to be so rich in iron that it had a brown hue and a characteristic taste. So the building was first handed over to a meteorological laboratory, and then it was adapted for living quarters. An interesting fact from the “biography” of the tower is that the inventor of the radio Alexander Stepanovich Popov conducted his experiments in it.

The building height is 30 meters. Once the top tier was a wooden superstructure, but it collapsed during a fire. The top of the tower is decorated with narrow elongated windows. Inside, there was not a single reminder that the building was supposed to provide water to the institute: now the floors are separated by metal partitions and connected by narrow and rather steep stairs.