With every municipal construction project, the city of Munich supports the realization of contemporary art. According to our guidelines, up to two percent of construction costs are set aside for art. Artists participate in constructing new buildings to house kindergartens, schools, city agencies, cultural institutions, and subways, as well as in the redesign of parks and city squares, and in some cases, for the municipal wastewater utility. The Municipal Building Department commissions the work in consultation with the Commission for Architectural and Public Art, founded in 1985.
To illustrate the wide range of creativity involved in the architecture-related artworks, the Berlin artist and writer Adib Fricke (The Word Company) was commissioned in 2001 to devise a name for the Munich program, and thus QUIVID came into being. The two syllables of this newly coined word are reminiscent of—among other things—the Latin words qui (“who”) and videre (“see”), and with that Fricke creates space to make a variety of associations.