A gift is a gesture of generosity, a privilege, an obligation. During the age of Imperialism and the Cold War gift giving was an alleged harbinger of civilization and technology—to educate, to improve living quality, to modernize infrastructure. Does a gift bring only benefits? What if gifts and rights were to collide? What are the power dynamics of gift giving? 

The exhibition “Gift. Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture” at the Munich Architecture Museum showcases gifted buildings that carry multiple interdependencies in their DNA. Skopje, Macedonia, received a humanitarian gift after a devastating earthquake in 1963, which helped to emphasize international solidarity with the newly founded Non-Aligned Movement. In Kumasi, Ghana, the KNUST university was founded by joint initiative of the colonial government and the Asante King; prefabrication facilities for housing estates were a gift of the USSR to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in 1974; finally, East Palo Alto, California, a socially excluded island in the affluent Silicon Valley, has been a subject to philantro-capitalist interventions by the surrounding tech-giants. 

The exhibition, a joint effort of transnational teams of researchers and artists and curators Łukasz Stanek and Damjan Kokalevski disentangle gift giving dynamics in a careful collection of archival materials, stories, personal interviews, and media coverage. This includes dissent: Ghanian farmers at KNUST university claim their right to land that was taken from them via the colonial gift. The resettled families from traditional gers (Mongolian yurts—home to 60% of the 1.5 million inhabitants of Ulaanbaatar) narrate subtle efforts to retain cultural identity in Soviet-style housing estates.

The exhibition focuses on large scale urban interventions, beautifully unveiled in transformation plans—of the Soviet housing Microrayons, Kenzo Tange’s Skopje urban plan, or the KNUST development plan. Fascinating media include a documentary of East Palo Alto, an animation of the Kumasi campus, and snapshots of locations conceive a kind of urban visual storytelling reminiscent of the Book for Architects by Wolfgang Tillmans.

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