Professional Documents
Culture Documents
http://hyperallergic.com/179337/when-architecture-causes-suf...
The China Central Television Building by Rem Koolhaas (image via Wikimedia)
The city of Buckeye, Arizona, recently got a glittering new supermax prison. Designed by DLR
Group, an architecture and engineering firm that says its mission is to elevate the human
experience through design, the $50 million Rast Unit at the Arizona State Prison Complex
building can hold up to 500 prisoners in 12-by-8-foot cells, many of them intended for solitary
confinement.
In December, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) rejected an amendment to its ethics
code that would have prevented architects from designing buildings just like the Rast
Unit. Drafted by the advocacy group Architects/Designers/Planners for Social
Responsibility (ADPSR), the new language would have enforceably barred the AIAs roughly
100,000 members from designing spaces intended for execution or for torture or other cruel,
inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, including prolonged solitary confinement.
That means everything from the $900,000 San Quentin Lethal Injection Chamber,
constructed in California in 2010, to facilities at Cubas Guantanamo Bay.
On the surface, it seems like the sort of thing that would have gone down without a fight. But a
1 of 3
12-02-15 11:48
http://hyperallergic.com/179337/when-architecture-causes-suf...
panel of seven anonymous architects appointed by the AIA ruled it was not the associations job
to condemn the design of any particular building (not even the gas chambers at Auschwitz?),
but rather to guide its members toward best practices; the AIAs current ethics code gives the
unenforceable suggestion that members uphold human rights in all their professional
endeavors. If it were to go forward with the amendment, the AIA argued, it could open up a
pandoras box of proposals or demands for similar rules limiting or prohibiting design. The
association also cited fear of antitrust challenges, as well as concern over how the AIA would
judge whether projects broke the code.
2 of 3
12-02-15 11:48
http://hyperallergic.com/179337/when-architecture-causes-suf...
way. Its clear the association needs enforceable language in its ethics code relating to
architecture that causes suffering, but as these recent events reveal, its sometimes hard to
determine exactly what that language should be.
3 of 3
12-02-15 11:48