The Height of (Architectural) Seduction: Reading the Changes through Stalin's Palace in Warsaw, Poland

Joseph Stalin's Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Poland, is a representative architectural structure, whose diverse and divergent readings and interpretations elicit larger historic and cultural contexts of pre- and post-1989 developments in Eastern Europe and the West. The Palace's unique ability to encode and compel changing constructions of individual and collective narratives of Polish identity provides a valuable lesson on the relationships between architecture, literature, history, and politics. Structures like the Palace carry ideological and political messages inscribed onto them by their designers and builders and serve as repositories of the changing desires and fantasies of their individual spectators or readers.