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Architectural "gift"

COMPILED BY NIMIKURIAN

PHOTO: AP

HISTORIC MONUMENT: Culture Palace.

Critics called for it to be razed when Poland threw off communism, but the towering Palace of Culture, which was built in central Warsaw on the orders of former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, was poised to become a historic monument. Conservation officials in the Polish capital declared that the 230 metre (700 foot) tall building with a surface area equivalent to 16 soccer pitches should be given the status to protect its "socialist realist" architecture from any arbitrary changes. Christened in July 1955 under its full name — the Joseph Stalin Palace of Culture and Science — the 42-storey structure was built on the rubble of a working class neighbourhood in Warsaw, a city almost entirely flattened by Poland's Nazi German occupiers in the final months of World War II.

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