The Palace of Culture and Science casts a long, spiky shadow over Warsaw’s Plac Defilad (Parade Square). Europe’s biggest public square is brutalised by the vast mass of this “gift” from the Soviet Union, a hulking, syringe-spired skyscraper in Stalin’s favoured socialist realist style, completed in 1955. It was designed by Lev Rudnev who was also responsible for similar prominent towers including the looming main building of Moscow State University.
Its shadow seemed so present that for decades it haunted and stymied development of the square, which was designed for military parades and May 1 tank shows and, after the fall of communism, was filled with booths, kiosks and car parks as capitalism arrived in a hurry.
Now, 70 years after the completion of the Soviet skyscraper, comes the next phase in the square’s life. A large white groundscraper has appeared on its eastern side, beginning to enclose the windy, uninviting public space.
This block houses the Museum of Modern Art, an impressive new institution and home to the city’s collection. It was designed by New York-based Thomas Phifer, a genial architect whose work is the culmination of a quarter-century of efforts to reimagine the site. First there was a mooted Frank Gehry blockbuster that came to nothing, then a competition-winning proposal from Swiss architect Christian Kerez. Badly mishandled by the city authorities, that commission ended acrimoniously in a legal dispute and the next competition was won by Phifer with his gleaming white concrete block.
Architects like the idea of dialogue between buildings, between new and old. I’d have to say that here, in this charged space, there is not much dialogue at all — more of a confrontation. Perhaps there could never be; perhaps these are mutually exclusive languages; the vertical and the horizontal, the minimal modern and the maximal authoritarian. Between a banal commercial thoroughfare and that stonking symbol of Stalinism, the design might have been more nuanced, more of a conversation with history, language and material. Or perhaps the stark contrast is a deliberate moving on.
Either way it is bold and a little clumsy. The clean, white, toothpaste texture of the concrete appears more like a taut tarpaulin than a civic building. An arcade suggests a public nature but there is no real reason to wander along it and remarkably, for a building stuck right in the middle of a square and on a main road, the entrance isn’t immediately obvious. The unfindable entrance is a hoary cliche of modernist architecture but one that seems to weirdly abide.
The glass behind the facade appears blank and corporate but once you’re inside, the building begins to wrap itself around you. The biggest surprise appears in the form of an elaborate central stair. It looks like an MC Escher for the digital age, an impossible split stair squeezed through an AI grinder to produce something uncanny, almost kaleidoscopic, maybe a little headache and vertigo inducing. It is photogenic, striking and, for a building in 2025, oddly ableist. I know the less mobile can ascend in lifts but having the pivotal public experience of an interior as an epic stair seems a little undemocratic. Phifer talks about it “as a place for meeting, encountering people” but perhaps not all people?
If this all sounds a little like a lot of unreasonable quibbling, it stops here. There may be issues with the public spaces, both inside and out, but the galleries are outstanding. Arranged in a simple circuit over two large floors, they are easy to navigate, exquisitely lit and generous spaces of luminous clarity.
Many contemporary museums confuse, leaving you with the impression that you might have missed a room along the way. Not this one. Phifer credits the museum director, Joanna Mytkowska, with steering the designers away from an idea of vague flexibility. Instead these are fixed and formal rooms, known quantities for the curators who have regular, serious galleries to fill. There are no leftover spaces here, no awkward corners, only well-proportioned, well-lit rooms.
About two-thirds of the work here is Polish, with the rest establishing some contemporary global context and more than half of the work is by women. There are plenty of familiar names: Monika Sosnowska (more of her would have been good), Mirosław Bałka, Paweł Althamer, Magdalena Abakanowicz (a stunning red sculptural installation), Isa Genzken alongside many younger and less well-known artists. There is every medium imaginable, from amateur movies (Marysia Lewandowska) to suture stitches from Mexican morgues (Teresa Margolles) via craft, sound installations and the usual explorations of gender and sexuality through dressing up. The powerful socialist realist bronze “Friendship”, by sculptor Alina Szapocznikow, dominates the central stair space. It has stood in the Palace of Arts since its opening and the figures lost their arms when they were shoehorned out in 1992. Found in a garden, it was restored and returned. The art is not all brilliant but yet all somehow looks brilliant.
The top floor galleries are naturally top-lit, milky glass spanning deep concrete beams. Huge stainless steel doors impart a sense of permanence. There are occasional generous windows so that the city is always present; if there is a conversation it is finally established from the inside. The gallery sequences are broken up by a series of wood-enveloped “City Rooms”, spaces for looking back at the everyday life of Warsaw. With bespoke benches and huge pull wooden handles they feel like little temperate saunas, an occasional quiet relief from the intensity of the art.
To one side of the museum stands a blind tower, a stubby San Gimignano effort perhaps in riposte to the stiletto atop the Soviet Palace. lt houses a neat little cinema with scalloped, illuminated walls. The occasional rumble of a subway train beneath gives a hint as to what seem rather arbitrary structural decisions that inform the facades; the building needed to accommodate the serpentine tracks beneath with pinpoint precision. It is this aspect, rather understated, which suggests the complex archaeology here; not so much a subterranean landscape of physical fragments and remains but a metaphorical subconscious, the memories of a city not only scarred but obliterated by war and marked by the relationship with Russia ever since. That (mostly) armless sculpture of embracing Polish and Soviet worker is totemic here.
The Soviet Union may have disappeared along with the tribunes, fur-hatted politicians and massively medalled generals, but the threat from the east now looks more real than it has for a generation. Yet this has also been a place of celebration, of football screens and enormous crowds for a Polish pope. Cities are all about adjacency, about layers of history and use, good and bad neighbours, new, old, shabby and shining. Plac Defilad, with its epic dimensions, will never be intimate or charming like Warsaw’s rebuilt old town, but its scale embodies a history that is grand, uncomfortable, ceremonial, sentimental and contested. I find it difficult to imagine that those acres of pristine white concrete will not become a canvas for graffiti of every sort but perhaps if they do it would be a perfect carapace for an art museum with an unforgiving shell but a wonderful inside.
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