“When Architecture Causes Suffering”

When Architecture Causes Sufferingby 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 DLRGroup, an architecture and engineering firm that says its mission is to elevate the humanexperience through design, the $50 million Rast Unit at the Arizona State Prison Complexbuilding can hold up to 500 prisoners in 12-by-8-foot cells, many of them intended for solitaryconfinement.

In December, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) rejected an amendment to its ethicscode that would have prevented architects from designing buildings just like the RastUnit. Drafted by the advocacy group Architects/Designers/Planners for SocialResponsibility (ADPSR), the new language would have enforceably barred the AIAs roughly100,000 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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panel of seven anonymous architects appointed by the AIA ruled it was not the associations jobto 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 theunenforceable suggestion that members uphold human rights in all their professionalendeavors. If it were to go forward with the amendment, the AIA argued, it could open up apandoras box of proposals or demands for similar rules limiting or prohibiting design. Theassociation also cited fear of antitrust challenges, as well as concern over how the AIA wouldjudge whether projects broke the code.

A cell inside Guantanamo Bays Camp Five (Imagevia Wikimedia)

ADPSR didnt buy into that reasoning. It accused the AIA of hiding behind legalisms andsmokescreen arguments while placing business interests above human rights. Theunwillingness of Americas leading architectural association to prohibit the design of torturefacilities is a shocking, shameful and deeply troubling statement, ADPSR President and AIAmember Raphael Sperry wrote in an op-ed for CNN. It refuses to place any limit on thepotential 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 questionsurrounding state execution is one still up for active debate in the US, as Republicans andDemocrats both sanction it. According to an October 2013 Gallup poll, 60% of Americans stillsupport the death penalty for convicted murders. ADPSR was essentially asking the AIA toweigh in on a hot-button issue, and its understandable that the group wouldnt want to comedown hard on either side. The case against solitary confinement might be clearer, as researchshows 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 capitalpunishment facilities and prisons. If the AIA stood against designing these buildings, itspossible that its opposition could influence policy. But it seems more likely that the structureswould still get built, either by architects who drop out of the association or by foreign firms. Andthat may lead to worse design, as those who go that extra leg to win such projects might betruly devoid of ethics and have little reservations about what they create.

But in its refusal to condemn architects who design buildings whose functions are unabashedlywrong torture facilities, for instance the AIA unfortunately reinforces the misguided notionthat architects can be apolitical and architecture can be amoral. This attitude seems rife in aworld where big-timers like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe once competed to design Nazibuildings, and where more recently Rem Koolhaas didnt seem to think twice about drawingup the sleek China Central Television Building, home of one branch of the totalitariangovernments propaganda apparatus. As a leader of its profession, it is the AIAs responsibilityto admonish and denounce those who openly collaborate with evil not simply look the other


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way. Its clear the association needs enforceable language in its ethics code relating toarchitecture that causes suffering, but as these recent events reveal, its sometimes hard todetermine exactly what that language should be.


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“When Architecture Causes Suffering”

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