Architecture
& Autocracy

The Problem

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 AIA’s rejection of an ethical prohibition of 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?

Whether critics are shaming society’s most heinous building types or most heinous clents, without a moral and ethical code that does more than vaguely reference ‘upholding human rights in all professional endeavors’ professional organizations like the American Institute of Architects (AIA) blur precisely the line they should be clearly drawing.

Why should architects expect to be the respected members of a civil society they crave being, while claiming to be agnostic about the uses for which their buildings are designed and for whom they 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 is out of bounds? Not death chambers, not concentration camps, not despot’s palaces? Is absolutely everything, if not specifically excluded, implicitly endorsed by the AIA and by polite liberal society as appropriate for its members to proudly author?

Kimmelman was addressing the singular event of the AIA refusing to restrict members fom designing facilities of state oppression like execution chambers, Davidson takes on the entire panoply of ethical rationalizations to do work in the worst places on earth. [5 years after Kimmelman’s article the AIA finally prohibited members from ‘knowingly’ designing spaces for execution or torture. Nowhere does it prohibit working for despots, of course.]

It’s not just journalists calling out reprehensible behavior among architects; a former classmate Tom Fisher has written several books on just that subject, even exploring case studies to better illustrate real life quandaries. As an educator he can help shape a generation of ethical architects, poised to change the profile of the profession a couple of generations after his own education.

While the AIA spends significant marketing dollars to reposition the perception of architects in society, is it dodging a critical moral morass in its quest to reshape its member’s societal roles? Are architects, especially the globally famous ones, being unfairly charged with working for autocrats only when those countries behave reprehensibly, and encouraged to bring them into the community of modern nations when they are less oppressive? How does the looming autocracy here in the US play into the criticism?

I am a Fellow of the AIA, a member for 40 years and I see it squandering an opportunity to be seen as a progressive standard of decency rather than a tool of any client’s need. Five years after an uproar is hardly acting (or reacting) in a timely way. And while myriad firms have pulled out of projects in Russia to protest its unprovoked war against Ukraine, Russia (and China and Saudi Arabia and others) are repressive every single day, not just when prosecuting a war. The firms withdrawing are engaged in crisis PR, but where are the ethical limits of working for the most despicable entities on earth?

If the American Medical Association (AMA) prohibited prescribing or administering death chamber lethal injections, was it really a leap for the AIA to proscribe death chamber design? The AMA could at least argue that their involvement would alleviate suffering, but what possible role would architects play in alleviating execution chamber suffering? Better lighting? Less lively acoustics? Soundproofing? There may be significant debate about nuclear power plants, about private prisons, about animal testing labs and even about border fences. But we hope that death chambers and concentration camps have no moral constituency. 

But, how to properly circumscribe work in those countries engaged in rampant oppression? There are, of course, those extremists who support the oppressive regime who will find no issues that prevent them from participating in their projects. There are those whose long term work in countries spans a progressive and oppressive period. There are those whose work is aimed at challenging the powers in rogue nations. But the rest of us, what excuses do we have? Davidson runs through a litany of excuses:

The Everyone’s-Okay-With-It Argument 
The See-No-Evil Argument
The No-Politics-Here Argument
The That’s-Business Argument
The Trojan Horse Argument

This list highlights, of course, both the best and the worst natural tendencies of any architect: we are doubly optimistic, believing we can improve (society, people’s lives, sustainability, etc.) with architecture, by holding dear the belief that good architecture can make absolutely any part of the built environment, no matter how debasing, incrementally better.

The line between design positively influencing society and designers naively dressing up every square inch of the world to ‘make the world a better place’ is elusive to some, even, on occasion, me.

I don’t pretend to be preaching from a pulpit of purity; I am guilty of working outside the ethical boundaries I set for myself, as when I designed a small part of The Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. David Koch, an MIT grad and massive contributor (in addition to being a legendary basketball player while a student there) put up $100 million to house an innovative cancer research strategy; putting bioscientists and engineers in close proximity to collaborate on solutions that might not arise in other contexts. It is, at the very least, an interesting avenue of medical inquiry into a plague that swallows 10 million people a year, though it wasn’t easy to swallow the offense to my political sensibilities.

I ignored the political in favor of the potential good the institute could produce. While David Koch may have been a monstrously misguided political animal, he was either smart enough or genuinely multi-dimensional enough to fund projects like the renovation of The New York State Theater at Lincoln Center (with another $100 million the same year as the MIT donation), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The American Museum of Natural History, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Columbia Presbyterian and on and on. He admitted that one purpose of his donations was to tweak the liberal establishment…and it worked.

One friend, a client who was dean at the Macaulay Honors College (another project of ours, funded by yet another energy billionaire) said that there was no ‘dirty money’ when it was being used for the greater good. One could argue that Koch or Macaulay are just money laundering via cultural institutions, but is it a positive overall? Is the destruction of one aspect of life mitigated by using a small part of the proceeds to do good? Is it OK for me to make money channeled from undesirable sources as long as I spend a lot of it on pro-bono worthy social projects? Is social good like buying carbon offsets; a fungible way to ameliorate ones guilt?

Norman Foster withdrew from Saudi projects when they murdered Khashoggi. Seems like a reasonable response that most might follow. They didn’t.

Jacques Herzog, whose firm designed the ‘bird’s nest’ stadium for the 2008 Olympics said that “only an idiot” would have declined the project, claiming to increase Chinese ‘freedom from surveillance’ by building in nooks or crannies for unsurveilled conversation. Thanks so much, Jacques.

Bjarke Ingels was pictured meeting with Jair Bolsonaro and when criticized said “Creating a list of countries or companies that BIG should shy away from working with seems to be an oversimplification of a complex world”. So who wouldn’t he work for? Is every despot who will listen to him exempt? Is there any recognition that these photo ops are a despot’s way of validation in the western liberal world?

The 2022 World Cup Stadiums built in Qatar were the sites of 6,500 deaths of migrant workers, though no architects, including Zaha Hadid and Albert Speer Jr. and Partners (yes, that is really the firm, son of Hitler’s architect) withdrew as a result.

I don’t know the answer, but I do know how see where it might lead. The logical extension of the moral quandary architects face, proudly declaring freedom from the obligations of a moral life, is the preposterous position that everything we do to improve the physical world is an improvement to the world at large.

‘Alternative facts’, the legendary Kellyanne Conway coinage, may be ‘lies’ rebranded as ‘balanced reporting’ and this Alternative Ethics Manifesto is no different:

An Alternative Ethics Manifesto

We are Problem Solvers, able to make Anything Better, through Good Design and Award Winning Projects! Finally liberated from ethics and morality we can truly express ourselves in every possible category, and in every building and space. Every problem can be solved and every solution can make the world a better place.

Our tag line:

“We make the unimaginable imaginable”

This means an entirely new set of categories in the various Design Award Competitions held at the local, state, national and international levels:

-Best Detention Facilities (subcategories; CIA Black Sites, Most Overcrowded, Most Degrading, Most Hidden)

-Best Project in the Worst Nation (subcategories; Oppressive Regimes, Olympic Facilities, North Korea, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Autocracies)

-Best Warlord HQ (subcategories; Permanent, Nomadic, With and Without Torture Chambers)

-Best Housing (subcategories; Without Light and Air, Least Permanent, Highest Occupancy per Sq. Ft.)

-Most Lethal (subcategories; Highest Casualty during Construction, Most Destructive of Life, Shortest Lifespan)

-Best Camps (subcategories; Concentration, Death, Boot, Re-education, Internment)

Coda

There are great examples, both serious and satirical, of architects in moral quandary from Monty Python’s “the Architect” sketch to “My Architect”. And there was a wonderful show at MAXXI in Rome (and a companion book) “Architecture in Uniform” about the varieties of design and architecture prompted by war from Jeeps to Auschwitz and from Quonset Huts to the Pentagon.

Architecture has many ways to respond to the moral questions of the day, but simply declining to respond is not one of them. Philip Johnson may have flippantly quipped that “all architects are pretty much high-class whores” but even sex workers draw the line somewhere.