Palace Complex (eBook)

The Palace Complex explores the many factors that allow Warsaw's Palace to endure as a still-socialist building in a post-socialist city.

1. This book is both a work of anthropology and a consideration of the social significance of architecture. This "ethnography of a building" is a unique new approach and encourages similarly exciting cross-disciplinary studies.

2. The language throughout is very readable and the stories Murawski tells are fascinating not only as studies of a city, but also as explorations of the ways in which urban landscapes can influence people's lives and mental states. Some people in the city suffered mental breakdowns which they attribute to the building.

3. Murawski worked as an employee in the building for 16 months, and in doing so gained a unique insider's viewpoint of the building's operation and its role in the city.

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An exploration of the history and significance of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Poland.The Palace of Culture and Science is a massive Stalinist skyscraper that was "e;gifted"e; to Warsaw by the Soviet Union in 1955. Framing the Palace's visual, symbolic, and functional prominence in the everyday life of the Polish capital as a sort of obsession, locals joke that their city suffers from a "e;Palace of Culture complex."e; Despite attempts to privatize it, the Palace remains municipally owned, and continues to play host to a variety of public institutions and services. The Parade Square, which surrounds the building, has resisted attempts to convert it into a money-making commercial center. Author Michal Murawski traces the skyscraper's powerful impact on twenty-first century Warsaw; on its architectural and urban landscape; on its political, ideological, and cultural lives; and on the bodies and minds of its inhabitants. The Palace Complex explores the many factors that allow Warsaw's Palace to endure as a still-socialist building in a post-socialist city."e;The most brilliant book on a building in many years, making a case for Warsaw's once-loathed Palace of Culture and Science as the most enduring and successful legacy of Polish state socialism."e; -Owen Hatherley, The New Statesman's"e;Books of the Year"e; list (UK)"e;An ambitious anthropological biography of Poland's tallest and most infamous building, the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. . . . It is a truly fascinating story that challenges a tenacious stereotype, and Murawski tells it brilliantly, judiciously layering literatures from multiple disciplines, his own ethnographic work, and personal anecdotes."e; -Patryk Babiracki, H-Net History