The Palac Kultury i Nauki, the Palace of Culture and Science, also known simply as PKiN, is located in the centre of Warsaw, overlooking the financial district, and houses museums, conference halls, theatres, cinemas and offices.
It is an imposing building of 237 meters, consisting of 42 floors and 3288 rooms, which was donated to Poland by the Soviet Union in the early fifties and for this reason is also known as "Stalin’s Palace".
With the fall of communism in 1989, a debate began because some people thought it was appropriate for the building to be demolished, but in the end the city council decided to save the palace.
It is said that Stalin wanted the building to look like the Empire State Building, so in the late 1930s, he sent a delegation to New York on a secret mission to find out all possible information about the building. Obviously, with the beginning of the Second World War, it was necessary to suspend the start of the work and wait for better times.
In Stalin’s idea, the building was to serve both as the party headquarters and as a "people’s palace", where the best workers of the People’s Republic of Poland could join the top of the nomenklatura for the end of the year ball. The palace was designed by Soviet architect Lev Vladimirovic Rudnev and is a copy of the main building of Lomonossov University.
The Palac Kultury i Nauki was built between 1952 and 1955. A clock was installed on the tower, which until today is the second largest clock in Europe. The work was colossal and saw the employment of about 3500 workers coming mostly from the Soviet Union.
