Architecture & Autocracy

Every few years a design critic writes about the questionable ethical parameters in which architects, desperate to build at any cost (including any moral cost), freely operate. Back in 2015 it was the New York Times article by Michael Kimmelman, about the American Institute of Architects’s (AIA) rejection of an ethical prohibition regarding the design of execution chambers by its members. Today is it Justin Davidson’s article What Will It Take for Architects to Stop Working With Autocrats?.

Lucinda Devlin/Galerie m Bochum: Electric Chair, Greensville Correctional Facility, Jarratt, Virginia, 1991 (originally published in New York Magazine May 16, 2014)

Whether critics are shaming society’s most heinous building types (like prisons), or its most heinous clients (like China or Saudi Arabia), the lack of a moral and ethical code other than ‘upholding human rights in all professional endeavors’ allows some architects to do as they please with impunity, if not immunity.

Why do architects deserve to be seen as respected members of an ethical and civil society while claiming to be agnostic about the uses and clients for which their buildings are designed? Should architects have a hand in building absolutely everything, no matter how destructive or degrading to human rights, no matter how oppressive or destructive a country’s leadership? Is nothing out of bounds? Not death chambers, nor concentration camps, nor despot’s palaces? Is absolutely everything, if not specifically excluded, implicitly endorsed by the AIA and by polite liberal society…