Palace of Culture and Science

The building of the Palace of Culture and Science was Joseph Stalin's idea. On 5 April 1952 the governments of the Polish People's Republic and the Soviet Union signed an agreement to raise it, and it was presented as a gift of the Soviet peoples to the Polish nation. The design was by the Soviet architect Lev Rudnev, who wanted the tower to be in a Polish idiom: he visited Kraków, Chełmno and Zamość among other places to acquaint himself with Polish architecture, and with his team produced five designs. The Polish side added theatres and exhibition halls to the chosen scheme, and a second entrance to the Congress Hall from Emilii Plater street. The parapets were modelled on Renaissance houses and on the palaces of Kraków and Zamość, while the building as a whole has many similarities to Moscow's Seven Sisters, the group of Stalinist skyscrapers by the same architect, and in particular to the main building of Moscow State University.

The height was settled by experiment. Soviet and Polish architects gathered near the eastern approach of the Silesian-Dąbrowa Bridge, on the right bank of the Vistula, while a small aeroplane flew over the line of the future skyscraper towing a balloon. The balloon made its first pass at 100 metres, then at 110 and 120. The Soviet party, led by Rudnev, judged 120 metres enough for the highest point in the city; the Polish party, led by Józef Sigalin, chief architect of Warsaw and plenipotentiary for the construction, kept shouting "Higher!" after every further ten metres. The building as completed measures 237 metres including the antenna bracket that forms an integral part of the spire. Preparatory works cleared the site, and many dozens of surviving pre-war tenement houses were demolished for it; a viewing platform was put up near Warszawa Śródmieście station so that the construction could be watched.

On 7 March 1953, two days after Stalin's death and before the building was finished, a joint resolution of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers gave it the name Joseph Stalin Palace of Culture and Science and resolved at the same time to raise a monument to him in front of it. The resolution was signed by Bolesław Bierut, then chairman of the Council of Ministers, and Aleksander Zawadzki, chairman of the Council of State. A competition brought no satisfactory result, and even the design by Xawery Dunikowski that stood out from the rest displeased the party decision-makers. The monument was never built.

Construction ran from 1 May 1952 to 21 July 1955, to Soviet plans. Between 3,500 and 5,000 workers from the Soviet Union and about 4,000 Polish workers took part. Housing in a Warsaw still being rebuilt from wartime destruction was scarce, and the incomers were put up on an estate of wooden houses built specially for them, Osiedle Przyjaźń, the Friendship Neighbourhood, which had its own cinema, canteen, community centre and swimming pool. Sixteen people died during the works; they were buried in the Orthodox cemetery in the Wola district, in section D.

The facade was made of ceramic sinters in a sandstone colour produced at a factory in the Urals, and was light when new before greying with time. In the main hall stood Alina Szapocznikow's sculpture Przyjaźń, two men in a fraternal embrace holding a banner. At four o'clock on 21 July 1955 the protocol transferring the building from the government of the Soviet Union to the government of the Polish People's Republic was signed in Warsaw, and the palace was put into use the same day.

At its completion the palace was the second tallest building in Europe, after the main building of Moscow State University, and the eighth tallest in the world; it held those positions until 1990 and 1961 respectively. Many visiting dignitaries toured it shortly after the opening, and it housed the 5th World Festival of Youth and Students from July to August 1955.

In 1956 a series of suicides began from the observation terrace on the 30th floor, 114 metres up. The first person to jump was a Frenchman, and seven Poles followed. After these deaths the terrace was closed in with steel bars. The same year brought the reversal of the dedication: the building had been named for Stalin since March 1953, and in the course of destalinisation that dedication was revoked and his name taken off the colonnade, the interior lobby and one of the building's sculptures. The palace collected nicknames, among them Pekin, or Beijing, from the acronym PKiN, ruski tort ("Russian birthday cake") and koszmarny sen pijanego cukiernika ("drunk confectioner's nightmare"), the last attributed to the poet Władysław Broniewski.

The palace was put to work as an exhibition and congress building. The International Book Fair was held there from 1958 and for many years after. In 1967 the Rolling Stones played the concert hall, the first major western rock group to give a concert behind the Iron Curtain.

The height of the building made it useful for telecommunications from early on, and an antenna was installed on it in 1956. In 1974 a microwave link was fitted to send the first programme of Polskie Radio to the longwave mast at Konstantynów. Soviet Central Television Programme One, later Channel One Russia, was rebroadcast from the palace transmitter between 1 April 1987 and 31 May 1997; its audience was the Soviet, later Russian, armed forces personnel stationed in the country until 1993. FM radio transmissions began in 1992.

Leonard Cohen's concert in the palace in 1985 was given during the period of martial law in Poland, and was surrounded by intense expectations that he would make a political statement about the growing Solidarity movement. On the last night of 2000 the mayor of Warsaw, Paweł Piskorski, unveiled the Millennium Clock on the 40th storey, its four faces about six metres across and sponsored by Telekomunikacja Polska SA; the mechanism began working on 31 December 2000.

The palace belongs to the city of Warsaw and is run by a municipal company, the Zarząd Pałacu Kultury i Nauki. It is the seat of the Warsaw City Council, which sits in the Sala Warszawska, and holds city offices as well. Its tenants include four theatres (Studio, Dramatyczny, Lalka and 6. piętro), the museums of technology and of evolution, the Kinoteka cinema, a swimming pool, Collegium Civitas and the offices of the Polish Academy of Sciences; the Congress Hall, an auditorium for 3,000 people, held the final of Miss World in 2006 and has been closed since 2014.

On 2 February 2007 the palace was entered in the register of monuments by Maciej Czeredys, acting provincial conservator of monuments in Warsaw, with further heritage designations following in June 2007 and in 2012. The decision was opposed. On 30 March 2007 a group of seventy people from culture, science and the media sent the President of Poland a letter asking him to intervene and have it reversed, arguing that the palace is not merely a monument but a symbol of Poland's subjugation by the Soviet empire and a mark of the humiliation of the Polish nation; the signatories, among them Krzysztof Kąkolewski, Jan Pietrzak and the priest Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, held that the building's future should be settled in a wide public discussion, perhaps in the Sejm and the Senate or even by referendum, and recalled that the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Warsaw had been dismantled after Poland regained independence in 1918. Experts from the Committee of Architecture and Urban Planning of the Polish Academy of Sciences had already told the conservator that the conception of the building was a denial of architectural rationality in all its economic, technical, aesthetic and urban aspects.

Others welcomed the listing. Professor Andrzej Tomaszewski, head of the social council for the protection of cultural heritage attached to the mayor of Warsaw, called it an outstanding example of socialist realist architecture and said that objects of equally high class were hard to find even in the former Soviet Union. Professor Irena Huml of the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences said that no other 1950s interiors survived in Poland in that state, and that they were a document of the epoch. Jarosław Zieliński, a historian of Warsaw, said that without the entry in the register interesting elements had been disappearing at speed, and that Szapocznikow's sculpture of the men with the banner had already gone from the main hall.

The palace was built at the peak of Stalinism, when Polish citizens suffered severe violations of their human rights, and it is often viewed as a symbol of Soviet domination over the Polish People's Republic. Calls to demolish it have continued alongside the listing. The Porozumienie Organizacji Kombatanckich i Niepodległościowych w Krakowie, a coalition of veteran and nationalist groups, and the Law and Justice party have called for demolition; in 2009 the then foreign minister Radosław Sikorski supported it, citing the expense of maintenance, and other government figures including the former prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki have endorsed demolition plans. Other proposals have been to screen the palace behind office blocks or to put a museum of communism, Socland, inside it, a scheme of Czesław Bielecki, Andrzej Wajda and Jacek Fedorowicz. Those who defend it argue that it now serves many useful purposes and has become a permanent part of the city's landscape. In 2010 the illumination was modernised with high-power LED lights that allow the building to take on different colours at night: it was lit green and white at Christmas that year, blue and yellow in December 2013 during the Euromaidan protests in solidarity with the protesters, and on 29 January 2021, during the Women's Strike protests, the movement's symbol of a single red lightning bolt on a black ground was projected on it. Together with the MDM housing district, the palace is the only completely preserved example of socialist realist architecture in Warsaw.