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Accepted Paper:

Warsaw’s ‘Palace complex’: an actually-existing stalinist utopia in a capitalist city  
Michał Murawski (University College London)

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.

Panel Urba007
Public space as utopia
  Session 1