Like many organizations in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, the board of the American Institute of Architects issued a statement the other day expressing solidarity with protesters — and offering a mea culpa. “We were wrong not to address and work to correct the built world’s role in perpetuating systemic racial injustice,” the statement said. But “we support and are committed to efforts to ensure that our profession is part of the solution.”
To that end, the statement added, “we will review our own programs” and “ask our community to join us and hold us accountable.”
That’s good to hear. So, for starters, how about stop repeating that it’s OK by you for architects to design death chambers and solitary confinement cells in racially biased prisons that incarcerate and execute an overwhelmingly disproportionate percentage of African-Africans?
Several years ago, I wrote about a petition filed with the A.I.A. by an organization called Architects/Planners/Designers for Social Responsibility. A Bay Area architect, Raphael Sperry, leads the group.
The petition asked the A.I.A. to censure architects who designed death chambers and solitary confinement facilities, which, as constituted and employed in countless American prisons, often function as instruments of psychological and physical torture. As Mr. Sperry pointed out, while the death penalty is legal in the United States, the United Nations and other human rights organizations have determined that it violates human rights. The A.I.A.’s code of ethics instructs its members to “uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors.” Last year, Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant, became the latest among dozens of drug companies to ban the use of its products in executions; and the American Medical Association instructs doctors not to participate in execution and torture.
So why not architects, too?
The A.I.A. rejected the petition.
Its former president, Helene Combs Dreiling, explained to me at the time that “the code has to do with the way architects practice, treat each other, perform in the eyes of our clients.” She said, “It isn’t about what architects build.”
Mr. Sperry and his associates didn’t give up. Last October they met with the A.I.A. National Ethics Council, which, in January, published an opinion on death chambers and solitary confinement. The opinion basically doubled down on the organization’s position. A death chamber is not a problem, it reiterated, because the death penalty is legal in the United States and “the norms of our society are reflected in its laws.”
And if solitary confinement is a form of torture, the A.I.A. ethicists reasoned, that’s the fault of those who run the prison, not an architect’s problem: “Members could not be held responsible for torture policies and procedures put into place by their clients after they occupy a space, so long as the members were unaware as they were designing the space that it was intended to be used for torture.”
Do we need to run the numbers again? Between 1976 and the end of last year, there were 21 white defendants executed in this country for the deaths of African-American victims — 295 African-American defendants executed for the deaths of white victims. African-Americans constitute some 13 percent of the United States population but more than 40 percent of the death row population.
The board members of the A.I.A. might want to watch Ava DuVernay’s “13th,” on Netflix, the documentary about the mass incarceration of African-Americans, which, among other things, gives a vivid picture of the role that architecture plays in perpetuating a broken system.
There is nothing radical about this position. That racist policing and racially biased criminal justice practices have institutionalized discrimination in the country is perhaps the single issue about which both the Koch brothers and Black Lives Matter ever agreed.
Diverse architecture firms, like the New York-based PAU, founded and run by Vishaan Chakrabarti, the incoming dean of the school of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, have declared as part of their mission statement a refusal to design correctional facilities.
On June 4, Michael Ford, who co-founded a nonprofit in the Midwest called the Urban Arts Collective and runs the Hip Hop Architecture Camp, which introduces black and brown children to architecture, made a few waves when he tweeted: “Let’s list every architecture firm that has designed a jail or prison and make sure upcoming designers do not join those offices!”
Fewer than 3 percent of licensed architects in the United States are African-American.
Last week Mr. Ford resigned from SmithGroup, one of the nation’s biggest architecture firms. We spoke this week and he sent me a copy of his resignation letter, in which he explained: “Our office has recently provided master planning services for the Kenosha County Civic Campus which includes planning services for juvenile detention spaces and a jail. Recently, I learned that we also completed the City of Detroit Public Safety Headquarters. These project types are the literal structures of structural racism against black people in the United States. Wisconsin has some of the highest incarceration rates of African-Americans in the United States and I will not work to further those disparities.”
Mr. Ford, who is African-American, also added: “The death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and many before them provided an opportunity for all of us to question how our morals and values are practiced in our daily lives, including our work as designers and architects.”
After my column ran on the A.I.A.’s rejection of Mr. Sperry’s petition in 2015, an architect emailed in confidence to chastise me, saying that architects can’t be held responsible for what occurs in the buildings they design, and besides, while he had never been hired to design a death chamber, he was sure the right architect could design a more humane one.
This was pre-Trump. I didn’t think the architect’s email demanded a reply. But the time has passed for moral prevarication in America. Public attitudes are swiftly shifting.
We are what we build. That includes our jails and prisons. How (or, as an increasing number of prison abolitionists would ask, whether it’s even possible) to design more just and humane forms of incarceration in a nation riven by racism is a long and urgent conversation.
But death chambers and many solitary confinement cells — they’re officially called segregation units, not incidentally — are extreme cases. Architects should not contribute their expertise to the most egregious aspects of a system that commits exceptional violence against African-Americans and other minorities.
The least the American Institute of Architects can do now is agree.
Source: nytimes.com, Michael Kimmelman, June 12, 2020. Michael Kimmelman is the architecture critic. He has reported from more than 40 countries, was previously The Times's chief art critic and, based in Berlin, created the Abroad column, covering cultural and political affairs across Europe and the Middle East.
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
