Michał Murawski
www.michalmurawski.net
Please visit my personal homepage for more up-to-date information about my research and links to publications.
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I am an anthropologist of architecture and of cities based at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, where I am Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow and Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Critical Area Studies. During 2017-2018, I carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Moscow, where I was a Research Fellow at the Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism, Higher School of Economics.
My work focuses on the complex social lives of monumental buildings and on the architecture and planning of Eastern European communism. I am especially interested in the powerful - and subversive - impacts that communist-era built environments continue to exert on the capitalist cities of the 21st century.
I received my PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University in February 2014. My dissertation was about the Palace of Culture and Science, a vast Stalin-era skyscraper 'gifted' to Poland by the Soviet Union in 1955. My book on capitalist Warsaw's self-perceived 'obsession' with the Stalinist Palace, entitled Palace Complex, will be published by Indiana University Press in March 2019. My Warsaw research has also resulted in several articles and book chapters, while my Polish-language book about the Palace was published by the Museum of Warsaw in July 2015. I am currently conducting research for a project on the urbanism of Putin-era Moscow, and have also carried out research on the domestic lives of political dissidents living under house arrest.
In 2018, I co-curated the exhibition Portal Zaryadye - featuring 18 new works by Russian artists exploring the relationship between architecture, politics and ecology in contemporary Russia - at the State Shchusev Museum of Architecture in Moscow.
Phone: +44 (0) 20 7679 8759
Address: UCL-SSEES
16 Taviton Street
London WC1H OBW
Please visit my personal homepage for more up-to-date information about my research and links to publications.
********************************************************************************
I am an anthropologist of architecture and of cities based at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, where I am Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow and Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Critical Area Studies. During 2017-2018, I carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Moscow, where I was a Research Fellow at the Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism, Higher School of Economics.
My work focuses on the complex social lives of monumental buildings and on the architecture and planning of Eastern European communism. I am especially interested in the powerful - and subversive - impacts that communist-era built environments continue to exert on the capitalist cities of the 21st century.
I received my PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University in February 2014. My dissertation was about the Palace of Culture and Science, a vast Stalin-era skyscraper 'gifted' to Poland by the Soviet Union in 1955. My book on capitalist Warsaw's self-perceived 'obsession' with the Stalinist Palace, entitled Palace Complex, will be published by Indiana University Press in March 2019. My Warsaw research has also resulted in several articles and book chapters, while my Polish-language book about the Palace was published by the Museum of Warsaw in July 2015. I am currently conducting research for a project on the urbanism of Putin-era Moscow, and have also carried out research on the domestic lives of political dissidents living under house arrest.
In 2018, I co-curated the exhibition Portal Zaryadye - featuring 18 new works by Russian artists exploring the relationship between architecture, politics and ecology in contemporary Russia - at the State Shchusev Museum of Architecture in Moscow.
Phone: +44 (0) 20 7679 8759
Address: UCL-SSEES
16 Taviton Street
London WC1H OBW
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Papers by Michał Murawski
Co-architect of Moscow’s Zaryadye Park Timur Bashkaev, on New York’s High Line and Moscow’s Zaryadye Park, December 2017
The “social condenser” – a radical idea formulated in the 1920s Soviet Union – has been among the most important and influential architectural concepts of the last hundred years. During the past several decades, it has been misappropriated as a key inspiration for the design of a dubious new breed of multi-functional parks and public spaces (many but not all of them privately-owned): starting in the 1980s and 1990s with Paris’ Parc de la Villette and Promenade Plantée; and culminating in the second decade of the 21st century with Manhattan’s High Line, Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay, Moscow’s Zaryadye Park, Salesforce Park in San Francisco; as well as numerous projects closer to home, among them Greenwich Peninsula’s “The Tides” (a particularly dystopian ersatz High Line) and the failed Garden Bridge scheme. These new quasi-social condensers, crucially, advertise themselves as projects devoid of infrastructure: these are self-avowedly infrastructureless or “post-infrastructural” terrains, which claim to function exclusively on the superstructural level of emotion, spectacle and “wow effect”.
How have the world’s many new “social condensers” coped with regimes of “social distancing”? And was the way people chose to behave in the “social condensers” during pre-pandemic times really all that different to the social distancing enforced during the current crisis? Will a more radical, truly collective type of social condensing become possible after social distancing measures are gradually reversed? This text argues that infrastructureless space is always-already “socially distanced”: a substantive, progressive, radical – truly public, communal, free, wild and equal – mode of social condensation will only be possible when architecture and public space systematically confronts its own infrastructures – understood in the Marxian sense as referring to its material, economic and political underpinnings. Indeed, the contours of a new infrastructure-conscious social condensation have begun to come into view under conditions of late lockdown: not on the High Line, but on the embankment of Bristol Harbour.
This architectural juxtaposition serves as the point of departure for the text’s two, interconnected key themes: an inquiry into the complex continuities and contradictions between the political and economic reconfigurations experienced by South Africa after 1994 and Poland after 1989; and an exploration into what the author defines as the ‘political morphology’ of monumental architecture.
The bulk of the text is concerned with a critical investigation into how scholars conceive of the relationship between the morphological (spatial, geometric and aesthetic) characteristics of built form, and their political or economic correlates. Must there be – as the scholarly consensus suggests – an intrinsic connection between democracy and architectural humility, and between authoritarianism and monumentality?
Co-architect of Moscow’s Zaryadye Park Timur Bashkaev, on New York’s High Line and Moscow’s Zaryadye Park, December 2017
The “social condenser” – a radical idea formulated in the 1920s Soviet Union – has been among the most important and influential architectural concepts of the last hundred years. During the past several decades, it has been misappropriated as a key inspiration for the design of a dubious new breed of multi-functional parks and public spaces (many but not all of them privately-owned): starting in the 1980s and 1990s with Paris’ Parc de la Villette and Promenade Plantée; and culminating in the second decade of the 21st century with Manhattan’s High Line, Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay, Moscow’s Zaryadye Park, Salesforce Park in San Francisco; as well as numerous projects closer to home, among them Greenwich Peninsula’s “The Tides” (a particularly dystopian ersatz High Line) and the failed Garden Bridge scheme. These new quasi-social condensers, crucially, advertise themselves as projects devoid of infrastructure: these are self-avowedly infrastructureless or “post-infrastructural” terrains, which claim to function exclusively on the superstructural level of emotion, spectacle and “wow effect”.
How have the world’s many new “social condensers” coped with regimes of “social distancing”? And was the way people chose to behave in the “social condensers” during pre-pandemic times really all that different to the social distancing enforced during the current crisis? Will a more radical, truly collective type of social condensing become possible after social distancing measures are gradually reversed? This text argues that infrastructureless space is always-already “socially distanced”: a substantive, progressive, radical – truly public, communal, free, wild and equal – mode of social condensation will only be possible when architecture and public space systematically confronts its own infrastructures – understood in the Marxian sense as referring to its material, economic and political underpinnings. Indeed, the contours of a new infrastructure-conscious social condensation have begun to come into view under conditions of late lockdown: not on the High Line, but on the embankment of Bristol Harbour.
This architectural juxtaposition serves as the point of departure for the text’s two, interconnected key themes: an inquiry into the complex continuities and contradictions between the political and economic reconfigurations experienced by South Africa after 1994 and Poland after 1989; and an exploration into what the author defines as the ‘political morphology’ of monumental architecture.
The bulk of the text is concerned with a critical investigation into how scholars conceive of the relationship between the morphological (spatial, geometric and aesthetic) characteristics of built form, and their political or economic correlates. Must there be – as the scholarly consensus suggests – an intrinsic connection between democracy and architectural humility, and between authoritarianism and monumentality?
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 and minds of the city's inhabitants.
Making use of visual, textual and verbal interventions, staged at public fora (including debates, weblogs, media appearances and surveys), I (the ‘anthropologist’) presented provocative ‘hypotheses’ to my informants (referred to as tubylcy – ‘natives’), whom I invited to assist me in ‘validating’ or ‘invalidating’ my ‘hypotheses’ concerning them. In part, this ‘ethnographic laboratory’ was my response to the methodological ‘flattening’ of the field attendant to the brand of holistic empiricism advocated by scholars like Latour and Strathern. I argue that ‘flattening’ has been done at the expense of eliding the hierarchies attendant to fieldwork practice. Instead of overcoming methodological dichotomies between subject and object, instead of seeking to minimize or ignore the impact that fieldworkers necessarily have on their field, I suggest capitalizing on the distinctions and dialectics between anthropologists and informants.
I argue, however, that such an asymmetry-conscious approach to fieldwork practice can be reconciled with the empirical imperative to carry out an urban anthropology which is as holistic as possible, which is of rather than merely in the city. In short, I would like to argue that an ‘ethnographic conceptualism’ which is public in scale and performative in style constitutes a credible methodological response to the frenetic but graspable ‘concrete diversity’ (Godelier 1978) of the urban experience.
Laying common ground between materiality and materialism, I will identify ‘the economy’, or more specifically, the mode of production as a powerful factor-actant (‘factant’), which ties the realms of the ‘abstract’ (relations of production) inextricably with the ‘material’ qua ‘physical’ (productive forces). Citing my ethnographic research in Warsaw, I want to claim that the place and role of architecture in a given social setting is determined in the last instance by its relation to the economy. The task of an anthropologist investigating this determination is to test the strength of the last instance; to illustrate whether and how the determination of the built environment by the mode of production is mediated by a ‘concrete diversity’ (Godelier 1978) of ‘relatively autonomous’ material and immaterial entities.
Edinburgh, Niddrie Marischal: 15-storey Bison blocks. Built 1968, (barely) demolished 1991.
Copyright Miles Glendinning
The animal inhabitants of a Stalinist skyscraper in Warsaw have become pampered celebrities during the last two decades. I would like to show that, in the last instance, this fauna owe their fame and wealth to changes in Poland’s economy.
Long abstract
The Palace of Culture and Science – a Stalinist skyscraper which dominates the city centre of Warsaw – has always been full of animals. Cats have lived in the cellars since 1952 (the year construction work began) and the Palace chronicles mention peregrine falcons nesting high in the tower during the spring and summer of 1981. In the course of the last decade or so, however, as the ‘wild’ capitalism of the post-socialist transformation raged all over town, a systematic but unplanned ‘taming’ of (some) Palace beasts has taken place. The sixteen (more or less) resident cats have been toilet-trained and placed on the municipal payroll, while the three-or-so falcons have been tagged, named and webcammed. Moreover, this handful of glamorous felines and avians have become media celebrities, better known and loved than the tens of thousands of human beings who work and spend time in the building every day – not to mention the skylarks, quails and redwings who die in their hundreds here each year, crushed by the Palace’s walls (Rejt 2000) or gorged with impunity by its birds of prey.
This paper argues that these newly glamorous cats’ and falcons’ fame should not be explained by reference to their elemental cuteness or any other autonomous faunal intensity. Rather, the Palace’s nonhuman inhabitants should be seen as the agentively inert beneficiaries of Poland’s transition to a market economy.
Re-Centring the City zooms in on these questions, taking as its point of departure the experience of Eurasian socialist cities, where twentieth-century high modernity arguably saw its most radical and furthest-reaching realisation. It frames the experience of global high modernity (and its unravelling) through the eyes of the socialist city, rather than the other way around: instead of explaining Warsaw or Moscow through the prism of Paris or New York, it refracts London, Mexico City and Chennai through the lens of Kyiv, Simferopol and the former Polish shtetls. This transdisciplinary volume re-centres the experiences of the ‘Global East’, and thereby our understanding of world urbanism, by shedding light on some of the still-extant (and often disavowed) forms of ‘zombie’ centrality, hierarchy and violence that pervade and shape our contemporary urban experience.