Paper short abstract:

Warsaw’s relationship with the Palace of Culture demonstrates how interactions between buildings and cities can be grasped by an approach which, when confronted with complexity, aspires to reduce it (Luhmann 1995), rather than to celebrate its irreducibility (Latour 1988).

Paper long abstract:

The Palace of Culture and Science is a Stalinist skyscraper, which has dominated the centre of Warsaw since its completion in 1955. Citing the example of Warsaw-Palace relations since the fall of the Polish People's Republic in 1989, I want to claim that the place and role of architecture in a given social setting is 'determined in the last instance' (Althusser 1966) by its relation to the (political) economy. The task of an anthropologist is to test the strength of the last instance; to illustrate whether and how the determination of the built environment by the mode of production is mediated by a 'concrete diversity' (Godelier 1974) of 'relatively autonomous' material and immaterial entities.

The Palace has a tangible and powerful impact on the city's architecture, on its political, bureaucratic, 'cultural', commercial and educational lives, on the bodies and minds of its citizens. The Palace's presence in Warsaw is so prominent, that it sometimes seems to elide its political economic 'conditions of existence': it has evinced an extraordinary 'obduracy' (Hommels 2005) in the face of post-socialist proposals to demolish it, or otherwise undermine its dominance over Warsaw. But, in the end, things are not as complicated as they seem. The Palace - inside, outside and around - has already been profoundly transformed by the market economy. Architecture remains a faithful servant of the mode of production - whether the one which allowed it to come into being, or the one which allows it to remain standing.