Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science was never exactly asked for. Stalin ordered it built in the early 1950s, after the city had been reduced to rubble, and the Poles had little choice but to agree.

Designed by Russian architect Lev Rudnev, whose credits include Lomonosov University in Moscow, it is sometimes called the eighth sister of Moscow's Seven Sisters. The tiles were made in the Urals; the 30 stone sculptures were carved in Estonia. Almost nothing about it is Polish, which is precisely why it still divides opinion.

At 237 metres, it held Poland's height record for decades and set the ceiling for everything built around it. Falcons have nested near its clock tower since 1998.

VoiceMap's dedicated tour uses the building to trace Warsaw's arc from wartime ruin to communist showcase to modern metropolis, reading its sculptures, sundials and socialist reliefs as a political history written in stone.