It is a truth not often acknowledged that, since architecture operates within systems of property, land and infrastructure, it is in fact a commodity. An object that can be linked to monetary value and the consumer world: hence produced, marketed and consumed. This extends the logic that if architecture is a commodity to be bought and sold, it can operate in the form of a gift. Or to put it simply, in some form of donations from wealthy patrons, a tradition that could be traced to imperial and religious customs. For instance, we might think of libraries built and gifted as part of legacies by philanthropists, buildings gifted by patrons to universities, mosques financed by Islamic foundations, or shelters built by humanitarian organisations. An ongoing exhibition by the Architekturmuseum der TUM in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, The Gift: Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture dwells on this idea, to demonstrate how such gifts shape urbanisation processes across the world.

While watching one of my favourite cultural commenters’ piece about Judith Butler and their philosophy, I noticed an interesting example. To begin her critique of how little society understands Butler’s actual arguments, she begins with an anecdote. She talks about how a school in Virginia, United States applied for a grant from ‘It Gets Better’, a non-profit dedicated to children’s mental health. The school won the grant application and got some money to build a room in their school where children could go if they were feeling stressed. But the school board decided to give the money back, alleging that if the room were built, kids would be subjected to pro LGBTQ+ content. While It Gets Better does focus on queer kids, there was no stipulation in the grant about such content being included. So why did the board reject the offer of generosity? The idea is that in a gift economy, certain social relationships are created that are different to the norm, be that in a sense of implicit obligation towards the gift-giver. A gift is never free, and this was presciently highlighted in this instance where the supposed implication of a certain way of thinking made a school board reject a philanthropic offer, alluding to the 'violence' in the exhibition's title.

The architecture exhibition presents four case studies ranging from the 1950s to today and spread across four continents. The exhibition’s curators, Damjan Kokalevski and Łukasz Stanekorking worked with local researchers and communities, using storytelling as a method to exhaustively detail the instances to "explore the generosity and violence of the gift-giving dynamic." The examples used from Skopje, North Macedonia, Kumasi, Ghana, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and California, USA are used as different typologies of gift-giving namely: humanitarian aid, the gift of land, diplomatic gifts, and philanthropic gifts.

Stanek, a professor of architectural history at A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan has previously explored issues of exchange and generosity in his research and defines an architectural gift as, “a building that was designed and constructed with the intention to be handed over, and to be received without explicitly accepting any obligation to reciprocate—even if such an obligation was implied or anticipated by both giver and receiver. This is a very broad definition, but it leaves out many candidates for architectural gifts, from historical buildings donated to a nation by their owners to housing in a welfare state.”

What’s telling about this commodity relation is how it reconfigures our perception of architecture; buildings are not inert objects, but agents in the relationships between giver and receiver. Within the exhibition, what’s most interesting is the use of the term violence in describing the architectural gift. This could allude to acts of colonial violence, where lands are taken in the name of gifts from the colonised, or buildings are ‘gifted’ by/in the name of otherwise imperialist leaders, carrying with the name the memories of violent histories. This, along with how gifted buildings are used is highlighted in the examples in the exhibition through video, interview, photography and archival research.

Boon or burden?

One of the first case studies in the exhibition details the story of humanitarian aid given to Skopje, the capital of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, in what was then Yugoslavia. A catastrophic earthquake destroyed much of the city in 1963, which prompted countries from Africa, Asia, and South America to extend aid to the devastated people. What started with simple clinical aid with things like blood plasma and blankets would soon evolve to include donations of building materials and prefabricated structures such as houses, clinics and sports facilities. These were often accompanied by teams of engineers and workers who provided expertise and labour.

The showcase explains the history of one of these buildings, the Universal Hall, created by pooling donations from 35 countries. One of the city’s main landmarks, it was the first cultural building that became part of the reconstruction efforts. What’s interesting and why the public building is spotlighted in the showcase is the fact that after the country of Yugoslavia ceased to exist in the 1990s, the building would remain unused, eventually closing in 2015. Following numerous failed calls for renovation and contested claims over custody and ownership between the city authorities and the North Macedonian Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Culture recently pledged to renovate it; this following Skopje’s recent winning bid to become the European Capital of Culture for 2028. The building not only attests to Yugoslavia’s political alignments at the time with the Non-Aligned Movement, but it also presents a unique view into how a gift is received generations and political upheavals down the line and also who in the end cares for architectural gifts. Do they end up becoming burdens?

Another interesting instance of the unintended afterlives of a built gift is the case of Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, which was shaped by gifts from both China and the Soviet Union. Vying for amicable relationships with Mongolia, both countries made diplomatic contracts for the construction of housing microdistricts (microraions) which specified obligations for all parties involved, including the Mongolian government, who agreed to pay for some construction materials and to provide a certain amount of labour.

The research on this history by GerHub details a bilateral treaty Mongolia signed with the erstwhile USSR which involved the gifting of large development projects to Ulaanbaatar, including two factories for prefabricated buildings and the third and fourth housing microdistricts, unlike the Chinese government whose contracts operated on loans. Under this treaty, the Soviets also sent engineers and construction workers to the country from 1976-80. The intention was to modernise Mongolia by redeveloping vernacular ger areas (semi-formal settlements named after the nomadic felt dwelling) and building infrastructure, often the rhetoric for such diplomatic aid.

The exhibition depicts one particular case study of a home built under this treaty that was passed down to the children of the original occupants. In this way, it becomes interesting to note how different generations relate to a concrete gift such as a home, and how they accept and care for it. Once again, the gift also serves as a reminder of the Soviet Union’s attempt to increase its influence in Mongolia, as it was trying to do in other parts of the world at the time.
Benefits of violence or violence for benefit?

Two other stories on view present the idea of violence more explicitly in the exchange. The first is perhaps the most obvious case of violence, where the focus is on Kumasi, in the Ashanti region in Ghana. In the early 1950s, pressured by the British colonial government, the king of the Asante people granted land to the College of Technology that was planned there. This land, described by the British as virgin land, was not so. People farmed there, gathered firewood, and buried their dead; an entire community depended on it. Violence was enacted upon this Indigenous population when their land was taken from them. However, what’s even more concerning is that the land had been leased by the king.

The term gifted was actually used by the then-principal of the college, Dr JP Andrews. This prompted several college officials, then the university, to continue referring to the land as a “gift.” Since there were local communities already on the land, they were provided compensation in exchange for this ‘gift’ as the university felt they should honour their moral obligations. Hence, since the 1950s, the university has been offering jobs to those in the neighbouring towns and villages and occasionally shares access to social and technical infrastructure.

It’s interesting how this example presents two sides of the gift-giving process, one where the gift was violently taken, but then this triggered the people into asserting that the university adheres to their moral obligations in correcting their wrongs.

While here, the ‘gifters’ feel it is the moral obligation of the receivers to compensate them, most ‘philanthro-capitalist’ ventures, especially in the West, are made with the expectation of a return in some way. For instance, the city of East Palo Alto in Silicon Valley in California, located between the Google campus, the Meta headquarters, and Stanford University has received endowments from public-private partnerships since the 2000s. Populated mostly by BIPOC communities, the people here have become entangled in often uneven negotiations with tech-philanthropists, such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which funded a primary school in the area. The town has become a laboratory for philanthro-capitalism, where the success of investment is measured by so-called social returns, for example, an increase in the number of people who have received a certain type of training. This in turn complicates the idea of an actual gift.

The exhibition does a good job of bringing to the fore the notion of exchange within architectural objects, a thing that is as previously stated, never really a matter of much concern, when talking about design. In doing so, it explicitly ties the object to issues such as racism, exclusionism, labour conditions and spatial violence. As Stanek states, it becomes interesting to consider how such relationships affect how architecture is produced and then re-produced. As Stanek questions in an interview, how does the offer to build shape architectural decisions such as the programme, design, construction materials, labour and technologies used? Who owns the building and can thus renovate or sell it? Who pays for its upkeep? The answers are often embroiled in specific contexts.

Another interesting aspect is the collective nature of the architectural gift. It points to a certain obligation when the philanthropist or diplomat presents the gift. It foregrounds a particular normativity, that now that the gift is made, the people who may use it must be “good workers,” “good citizens,” and “good consumers”, and often this is defined in terms of religion, class, gender and race, as with the anecdote of the school presented at the beginning of the article.

While many recent exhibitions about architecture and the built environment have attempted to reveal architecture’s complicity in structural forms of racism and exclusion, the exhibition at TUM is prescient in exposing how certain systems are built into the structures we inhabit. The sense of implicit obligation that receiving an architectural gift carries can prove useful in reflecting on exacerbating inequalities—including asymmetrical access to resources, both natural and social, democratic deficits in decision-making pertaining to urban investments, politically driven upward redistribution of social wealth and worsening environmental injustice—that do end up shaping the cities we live in. These are often the result of political allegiances or policies, which are brought to the fore by this beneficiary relationship of gift-giving. As the curators point out and what I believe we should stress is, that the gift appears as both a promise and a threat in a context where redistributive justice is widely called into question.

The Gift: Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture at the Architekturmuseum der TUM in Munich runs until September 8, 2024.