When Architecture Causes Suffering

http://hyperallergic.com/179337/when-architecture-causes-suf...

When Architecture Causes Suffering

by Laura C. Mallonee on February 9, 2015

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

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When Architecture Causes Suffering

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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.

A cell inside Guantanamo Bays Camp Five (Image

via Wikimedia)
ADPSR didnt buy into that reasoning. It accused the AIA of hiding behind legalisms and
smokescreen arguments while placing business interests above human rights. The
unwillingness of Americas leading architectural association to prohibit the design of torture
facilities is a shocking, shameful and deeply troubling statement, ADPSR President and AIA
member Raphael Sperry wrote in an op-ed for CNN. It refuses to place any limit on the
potential role of design in human rights violations, even the most egregious.
Yet the AIA is an architectural trade association, not a human rights group. The question
surrounding state execution is one still up for active debate in the US, as Republicans and
Democrats both sanction it. According to an October 2013 Gallup poll, 60% of Americans still
support the death penalty for convicted murders. ADPSR was essentially asking the AIA to
weigh in on a hot-button issue, and its understandable that the group wouldnt want to come
down hard on either side. The case against solitary confinement might be clearer, as research
shows its harmful, long-term effects, and some psychologists have compared it to torture.
Its also a little difficult to see much benefit in banning architects from designing capital
punishment facilities and prisons. If the AIA stood against designing these buildings, its
possible that its opposition could influence policy. But it seems more likely that the structures
would still get built, either by architects who drop out of the association or by foreign firms. And
that may lead to worse design, as those who go that extra leg to win such projects might be
truly devoid of ethics and have little reservations about what they create.
But in its refusal to condemn architects who design buildings whose functions are unabashedly
wrong torture facilities, for instance the AIA unfortunately reinforces the misguided notion
that architects can be apolitical and architecture can be amoral. This attitude seems rife in a
world where big-timers like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe once competed to design Nazi
buildings, and where more recently Rem Koolhaas didnt seem to think twice about drawing
up the sleek China Central Television Building, home of one branch of the totalitarian
governments propaganda apparatus. As a leader of its profession, it is the AIAs responsibility
to admonish and denounce those who openly collaborate with evil not simply look the other

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When Architecture Causes Suffering

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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.

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