Exhibition The Gift. Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture
Research project Asutsuare Rebound
Research project Spaces of Global Socialism and their Afterlives
Exhibition Accra Futurism
Exhibition Postmodernism Is Almost All Right
Exhibition PRL™: Export Architecture and Urbanism from Socialist Poland
The Gift. Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture.
Exhibition by the Architekturmuseum der TUM in the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany.
Curators: Łukasz Stanek, Damjan Kokalevski
February 29, 2024 – September 8, 2024
Achitectural gifts are everywhere: libraries funded by wealthy philanthropists, shelters donated by humanitarian organizations, farms paid for with development grants, mosques financed by Islamic foundations, and stadiums handed over as part of diplomatic charm offensives. Embedded in religious and imperial traditions of gift-giving, architectural gifts shape the urbanization process across the world. Humanitarian, developmentalist, and diplomatic building-gifts have become ubiquitous in rapidly expanding African, Asian, and South American metropolises and their hinterlands. In North American and European cities, philanthrocapitalists invest in cultural, social, and educational facilities passed down by the dwindling welfare state.
This exhibition features gifted buildings—from spectacular to mundane, from extravagant to genuinely useful—that show how the unequal relationship between the giver and the receiver results in both generosity and violence exerted by and through architecture. What are the benefits of an architectural gift and how may it cause harm? We document how the giving and receiving of architecture impacts the production of these buildings, including their program, design, and materiality, as well as labor relations on the construction site. We consider the economic gains and political influence of the donors. We explore whether architectural gifts require reciprocity, and if so, what constitutes a counter-gift. We wonder if the obligations of the receiver and the giver persist after a building’s completion. What is the afterlife of a gifted building, and how is it perceived, maintained, and used by local communities?
Working with local researchers and communities, and using storytelling as a method, we present case studies on four continents to explore the generosity and violence of the gift-giving dynamic. These include stories of humanitarian gifts for Skopje, North Macedonia; the gift of land in Kumasi, Ghana; diplomatic gifts for Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; and philanthropic gifts in East Palo Alto, California, USA. At the end of the exhibition, we turn to Germany, showing how philanthropy continues to shape Munich and other German cities today.
Asutsuare Rebound
Contribution to the Rotterdam Biennale of Architecture, Netherlands
22 September – 13 November, 2022
Michael Gameli Dziwornu and Łukasz Stanek
Photography by Eric Don-Arthur
After Ghana’s independence in 1957, the village of Asutsuare became the focus of state-led, socialist-inspired agricultural and industrial development. A sugar factory was built, along with a residential area, a sugarcane plantation, and an irrigation system. Twenty years after its closure in the 1980s, the plant was bought by Chinese investors. Today, it manufactures paper and plastic products, while the sugar cane plantation was repurposed for the farming of rice, bananas, and fish.
Asutsuare Rebound, first presented at the Rotterdam Biennale of Architecture (2022), studies the reuse, reappropriation, and revalorisation of modernist planning in Asutsuare. We have interviewed retired employees of the sugar factory and younger inhabitants who explained to us how the material infrastructure and memories of the plant are a resource for imagining and producing a collective future.
By juxtaposing their voices with images by photographer Eric Don-Arthur, this project revisits the ambiguous impact of long-term planning on the landscapes of Asutsuare, including water management, agriculture, and social infrastructure. We understand these ambiguities not as evidence of failure, but as an invitation to rethink the future beyond both modernist techno-utopias and neoliberal short-termism.
All photographs by Eric Don-Arthur
The Gift: Spaces of Global Socialism and their Afterlives
Resarch project on architectural gift-giving in global socialism.
During the Cold War, the gifting of architecture was among the most visible manifestations of global socialism, or the multiple, evolving, and often contradictory exchanges between the socialist countries and the decolonizing world. In collaboration with local actors, Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese institutions designed, constructed, and equipped hundreds of buildings for education, health, culture, industry, and habitation in Ethiopia, Guinea, Indonesia, Kenya, Mali, Mongolia, Tanzania, Vietnam, and elsewhere.
This project is developed by means of conferences and workshops, starting with the British Academy Conference at the University of Manchester, UK (June 13-14, 2022). It gathered architectural historians and anthropologists who discussed the ways in which the dynamics of gift-giving impacted the design, construction, and the afterlives of these buildings. Scholars debated whether the generosity and violence specific for gift-giving, the principle of reciprocity, and the changing geopolitics and foreign trade in the Cold War facilitated the production and everyday uses of gifted buildings. By focusing on their continuous appropriation by inhabitants and users in Africa and Asia, this conference and the forthcoming publication offer a more differentiated genealogy of global urbanisation and its architecture.
Accra Futurism. 60 Year of Imagining Accra’s Waterfront
Exhibition, ArchiAfrica Gallery, James Town, Accra, Ghana
June 2019
Curator: Łukasz Stanek
A collaboration between the University of Manchester and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Technology in Kumasi.
In recent years, the Marine Drive in Accra, Ghana, has become a focal site for re-imagining the future of Ghana’s capital city. Yet the most recent design of Accra’s waterfront is only one among many architectural and urban proposals envisaged for this area during the last 60 years. This exhibition revisits some of these designs, and shows the various, competing urban futures which they proposed for Accra.
This exhibition focuses, in particular, on the first decade of Ghana’s statehood (1957-66). As the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence under the leader Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana became a centre of a cosmopolitan architectural culture to which Ghanaian, British, Eastern European, African-American, and other architects and urban planners contributed. The designs from the Nkrumah period shown in the exhibition include the large-scale development of the Korle-Bu Lagoon into a leisure and sport centre; three competing projects for the Marine Drive area; the visionary Accra 2000 design developed at the School of Architecture in Kumasi (KNUST); a monumental mausoleum for Kwame Nkrumah at the Osu Castle; and the development of Labadi around the International Trade Fair. This exhibition brings to the fore specific visions of urban everyday for Accra that were proposed and conveyed by these designs. They are analyzed by means of a GIS-based database of archival planning documents for Accra since the late colonial period.
Based on archival research in Ghana, Eastern Europe, the UK, and the US, this exhibition was prepared in the course of two seminars taught by Łukasz Stanek at the Manchester School of Architecture (Manchester, UK) and the Taubman College for Architecture and Urban Planning, the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor MI, USA). The exhibition was designed by students of the Manchester School of Architecture, advised by Ola Uduku, in collaboration with students of the University of Ghana at Legon and Central University (Ghana). Additional advise was provided by Irene Addo (University of Ghana at Legon).
Postmodernism Is Almost All Right
Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland, and contribution to the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Italy
1 – 30 October 2011 (Warsaw)
22 May – 21 November 2021 (Venice)
Curators: Piotr Bujas, Łukasz Stanek
This exhibition revisits the work of Polish architects in oil-producing countries in North Africa and the Middle East during the last two decades of the Cold War, and questions the impact of this generational experience on the production of urban space in Poland after socialism. Working in Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates gave Polish professionals an acquaintance not only with advanced technologies, materials, and functional programs, but also with postmodernism as the new mainstream in architectural practice and discourse. The postmodern appropriation of traditional urbanity and the rejection of architectural “utopias” of the early 20th century avant-gardes was as popular with the regimes in Baghdad, Damascus, Tripoli, and Abu Dhabi in the 1970s and 1980s, as with investors and large parts of the public in Poland after socialism.
Archival research and interviews: Piotr Bujas, Alicja Gzowska, Aleksandra Kędziorek, Łukasz Stanek
PRL™: Export Architecture and Urbanism from Socialist Poland
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw / Museum of Technology, Warsaw, Poland
October 15–November 15, 2010
Curator: Łukasz Stanek
The People’s Republic of Poland (PRL) was a well-known brand on the global market of intellectual labor during the Cold War, particularly regarding the labor of architects, planners, and engineers, which was widely exported to the countries of the post-colonial South. This exhibition showcases the designs of Polish professionals sent by state agencies of foreign trade to Iraq, Syria, Libya, Algeria, Ghana, and Nigeria. The architects, planners, and engineers mobilized both the heritage of Polish inter-war architecture and the experience of large socialist building sites, such as the reconstruction of Warsaw and the construction of the socialist city of Nowa Huta, adapting them to local climatic, cultural, and technological conditions. The buildings, neighborhoods, urban and regional plans, as well as research projects shown in the exhibition, testify to the individual talent, knowledge, and engagement of particular designers and reveal the political economy of architectural labor in socialism. These sites became nodes in global networks of knowledge and technology distribution, which, at the end of the Cold War, reflected less an ideological conflict and more a new global division of labor specific to the post-socialist world.
Cooperation: Piotr Bujas, Tomasz Fudala, Alicja Gzowska
Design: Metahaven
