The Ascension Church, built 1980-85 in a postmodern style in the housing complex of Warsaw-Ursynów to a design by Marek Budzyński and Piotr Wicha, exemplifies the paradox of a “national architecture” under socialism, and the tensions between national narratives and international exchange in late socialist Poland. Taking cues from a pre-modernist, spiritual idea of a nation on the one hand and from generic postmodern architecture and urbanism on the other, the building evidences a “national” space, which was very different from that associated with nineteenth-century nation building, and which in Poland and beyond remained influential to date