A Form of Friendship. The Museum on the Square

Warsaw’s Parade Square, where the MSN building designed by Thomas Phifer stands, is a unique place and a meaningful context for the Museum. The center of communist state life in the shadow of the Palace of Culture, and later the arena for the formation of Polish capitalism—from market stalls to gleaming office towers around it. This is where the fiercest land reprivatization disputes erupted, and where people first arrive from train and bus stations—including refugees from Ukraine under attack from Russia.

Michał Murawski interweaves these threads, attempting to grasp the “spatio-temporal and infrastructural nexus” in which the new Museum exists, and to “distill” the institution’s “ideology” that emerges from it.

The author’s tour-de-force essay introduces a narrative, which is further explored through conversations with experts in art, architecture, urbanism, and activism - among others the architect of the Museum of Modern Art Thomas Phifer, art historians and curators Sarah Wilson, Dorota Jędruch, and Agata Jakubowska, architecture theorist and critic Deyan Sudjic, representatives of the "Sunflower" Solidarity Community Center, as well as architect of Central Square, Zygmunt Borawski. A timeline summarizes the history of building MSN’s new headquarters.

The guide throughout this story is Alina Szapocznikow’s 1954 sculpture Friendship, which for almost forty years welcomed those entering the Palace, only to later disappear from view, and now returns, albeit in an amputated form, to the square—in the Museum of Modern Art.

Michał Murawski — anthropologist of architecture and cities. Associate Professor of Critical Area Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Author of The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw and a City Transfixed (Indiana University Press, 2019) and only to hell: architecture, nature and violence in recolonial russia (MIT, 2025); co-editor of Anti-Atlas: Critical Area Studies from the East of the West (with Wendy Bracewell and Tim Beasley-Murray, UCL Press, 2025) and Re-Centring the City: Global Mutations of Socialist Modernity (with Jonathan Bach, UCL Press 2020). Co-convenor of PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics), a research platform based at UCL.

Co-publisher: Instytut Adama Mickiewicz / Adam Mickiewicz Institute

Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage