Paper short abstract:

Tracing the afterlives of Socialist architecture in late-capitalist Warsaw, this paper provides ethnographic material for a critical engagement with philosopher V. Todorov's (1991) contention that 'Communism produced ultimately effective aesthetic structures and ultimately defective economic ones'.

Paper long abstract:

My argument begins with a brief historical survey. I trace the continuity between paradigmatic (built and unbuilt) monuments to gigantism across successive stages in Soviet history: Tatlin's Monument to the Third International (1919), Lissitzky's Wolkenbügel (1925), Boris Iofan's Palace of the Soviets (1934) and the seven Stalinist high-rises built in Moscow between 1947 and 1953. I examine these against the background of foundational Constructivist notions: Lissitzky's idea of the Palace of Labour/Culture as 'power source for the new order' (1929) and Moisei Ginzburg's notion of the 'social condenser' (1927).

Turning to ethnographic and archival data collected during fieldwork in Warsaw (2008-2010), I argue that the material and ideational content embodied in the above achieves a remarkable level of fulfilment in the form and function of the Palace of Culture and Science, a skyscraper 'gifted' by the Soviet Union to Poland in 1955. Echoing Constructivist language, the Palace's Stalinist designers envisioned the Palace as a 'distributor' of 'architectural power … throughout the city as a whole', and as a 'transformer … of the infrastructure of social ties' in the city (Goldzamt 1956). Deploying ethnographic materials, this paper shows how the Palace today – despite (or because of) the collapse of the state socialist system in 1989 – exerts a more powerful impact than ever before on Warsaw's architecture, on its political, commercial and cultural existence and on the social lives, bodies, minds and affects of the city's inhabitants.