The Gift: Spaces of Global Socialism and Their Afterlives

Thursday, October 23, 2025, 1:00-2:15pm New York Time

During the Cold War, the gifting of architecture was the most visible and the most ideologically charged form of exchange between socialist countries and the decolonizing Global South. Soviet, Eastern European, Chinese, and Cuban institutions, in collaboration with African and Asian actors, donated factories, schools, hospitals, and housing neighborhoods in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mongolia, Tanzania, Vietnam, and elsewhere. These buildings linked newly independent countries with their socialist allies, but also cascaded into gifting relationships across the Global South. In presenting—gifting and displaying—buildings to African and Asian countries, socialist leaders often emphasized their ideological difference from the capitalist West. Yet in doing so, they needed to distinguish these gifts from colonial and precolonial traditions of architectural gifting. By revisiting these arguments, I will argue that the concept of the gift is productive not as a binary marker of geopolitical distinction, but as an epistemic tool for analyzing the political economy that shaped architectural mobilities in global socialism.

Łukasz Stanek is Professor at A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. He also holds a secondary appointment at the Department of History, University of Michigan. Stanek authored Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2020). The latter won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (2020), among other prizes. His edited volumes include Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment by Henri Lefebvre (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Team 10 East. Revisionist Architecture in Real Existing Modernism (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2014) and Urban Revolution Now (Ashgate, 2014, with Ákos Moravánszky and Christian Schmid). Previously Stanek taught at the Swiss Federal University of Technology (ETH) in Zurich (Switzerland), and the University of Manchester (UK), and he was guest professor at Harvard University (USA), and the University of Ghana at Legon in Accra (Ghana). He was a fellow at Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (Washington DC, USA), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal, Canada), and the Institute d’Urbanisme (Paris, France). He curated several exhibitions, including The Gift: Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture (Architekturmuseum der TUM, Munich, 2024).

Image caption: Mikroraion 5 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, designed by Gong Deshun, Beijing Industrial Design Institute, 1964 (design). A gift of China to then Mongolian People's Republic. Photo by Łukasz Stanek, 2018.