Architecture and the Donor Class: Philanthropy, Power, and Empire

In 2021, billionaire-investor-turned-amateur-architect Charlie Munger gave a conditional $200m gift to UCSB: a dormitory for 4,500 students in windowless, single-occupancy bedrooms, glowing screens mimicking sunlight. The university chancellor praised the “inspired and revolutionary” plan before popular outcry halted construction. This is just one example of a long history of buildings tethered to whims of “the donor class” (Herbert). Art history and museum studies have long grappled with the “price of patronage” (Ryan), yet the “generosity and violence of the gift giving dynamic” (Stanek) is just being theorized in architectural history.This panel welcomes papers from diverse periods and geographies considering the built environment’s place amongst the “unlimited agenda of works” (Zunz) imagined by private wealth, particularly since the nineteenth century.

What does considering philanthropic foundations, endowments, membership organizations, religious charities, and bequests as architectural producers reveal about architecture’s role in capitalist systems of valuation? What did donors gain from these transfers of knowledge and capital–whether ROI, legitimation, or worldmaking? How did buildings provide unique physical and financial structures for cultivating those relationships? Where were disciplinary concerns–favored architects, historical styles, theories of environment–controlled by the “dead hand” of the donor and how have they shaped civic building types, from schools to research centers, housing projects, museums, and libraries? Philanthropists often crossed borders, tethering privatized welfare state projects to imperial building campaigns; what relations of power, hegemony, or supremacy did they construct and maintain? What constitute counter-histories of the architecture of the donor class–as undercommons, sites of occupation, physical alteration, or radical toponomy?