Powerful architecture, in both a physical and emotional sense, is usually more evident in places that have lived under dictatorial systems of government. Thousands of significant structures can be found in the post-communist world, testament to the dreams and desires of its former leaders. Beginning in the 1920s, numerous impressive palaces were built at the heart of almost every major socialist city, and dedicated to the celebration of one key aspect of the revolution: the ‘culture’. There were both enormous and more modest examples, from Pyongyang's ‘People's Palace of Culture’ to East Berlin's ‘The Palace of the Republic’. The grandest of them all was Warsaw's ‘Palace of Culture and Science’; 65 years have passed since the opening of this monumental building, and it is still the tallest in Poland, both visually and symbolically dominating the urban landscape of the city.
In The Palace Complex, Michał Murawski, a British cultural anthropologist with Polish roots, details the birth and life of this massive tower block in the heart of the now attractive capital city of Poland. He takes a broad approach across the past few decades, analysing the Palace's life, presence and interactions with different cultures, societies, politics, landscapes and economies. In following Deyan Sudjic,Footnote 1 he incorporates both meanings of the word complex to understand the Palace: it consists of many different and connected parts and qualities, containing both real and symbolic features; but it also has a psychological effect, causing a psychic conflict that leads to abnormal mental states or behaviour. Murawski is thus interested in the collective imagination, social life and interpretation of the building; ideas for the development of the Palace after 1989; discussions and conflicts around the development of the adjacent Defilade Square; complicated issues of land ownership; and the experiences of palace employees, visitors and users. All this make the Palace complex the site of a multifaceted fusion of emotions, adoration and hatred, expressed through a changeable relationship with the city.
His approach is thoroughly anthropological, but also historical. To understand the nature of the Palace's relationship with Warsaw, Murawski organized many meetings and discussions about the building and Defilade Square: he conducted a massive public survey; talked with architects, politicians, activists, journalists and enthusiasts of the Palace; and even employed the administration of the Palace to conduct observations (he dubs this complex methodology – quite immodestly – a ‘site-specific ethno-palaceology’). The result of this research, and the rich source materials referred to by Murawski, is a colourful, dense and ambiguous history of relations between the city and this huge – and yet for many somehow still embarrassing – gift of Stalin.
The book is structured into 11 chapters that often show Murawski's witty linguistic creativity. The first three are focused on ‘conceiving’, giving and ‘designing’ the building, while the next four introduce the interpretations, assimilation (‘Varsovianization’), development plans and acculturation of the Palace in the city. His conclusions are followed by an epilogue: ‘The still-socialist palace and the war against postcommunism’, covering the years 2012 to 2018. It seems that the key part of the book – the seven numbered chapters – were written before 2012 as Murawski's University of Cambridge (2013) Ph.D. thesis, which became a base for the 2015 Polish edition of the book Kompleks Pałacu: życie społeczne stalinowskiego wieżowca w kapitalistycznej Warszawie (the exact translation of the English title) published by the Museum of Warsaw.
Thinking about the Palace relationally – as a product of practices, trajectories and interrelations – is one of the book's major achievements, standing out in a field of dozens of other Palace-based publications in Polish. As David Harvey has put it, place formation is ‘a process of carving out “permanences” from the flow of processes creating spaces. But they are always subject to time as “perpetual perishing”’.Footnote 2 The Palace Complex is thus a brilliant example of both place-making and re-making, enabling us to see the discrete spaces of vibrant configurations of ‘permanences’ within the spatio-temporal dynamics of Polish society.
