![]() ![]() There is a lot of research documenting how the right kinds of design reduce violence inside prisons and even recidivism. Today, prison design is a civic cause for some architects who specialize in criminal justice and care about humane design. A century ago, movements like the Bauhaus, looking to improve design for the masses, emerged from a culture in which the widening gulf between rich and poor was sundering civil society. This is an interesting moment, with echoes in the past. If architects want more respect, he argued, they need to take a stand. You just dig yourself deeper into a hole.” But you don’t gain respect by hunkering down in a position of fear. is basically saying business is more important than human rights. “What about concentration camps? The A.I.A. “Is there nothing so odious that the A.I.A. The United Nations and other international human-rights organizations consider the death penalty a violation of human rights. International human-rights treaties don’t explicitly prohibit abortion or nuclear power, as they do execution and torture. Sperry said there was a difference with death chambers. I imagined that she was talking about other politically fraught buildings, like, say, nuclear power plants or abortion clinics. “If we begin to stipulate the types of projects our members can and cannot do, it opens a can of worms.” I asked if the institute has issued any position or policy statement about death chambers. He said architects have a basic responsibility to act in the public interest, pointing to the institute’s code of ethics and professional conduct, which states, “Members should uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors.” That’s boilerplate, without teeth. I met with him here the other morning to talk about the institute’s decision. Raphael Sperry, the Bay Area architect who spearheaded the petition to the institute, thinks the public deserves more in return for that monopoly. It requires a license, giving architects a monopoly over their practices, in return for a minimal promise that buildings won’t fall down. What are the ethical boundaries for architecture? Architecture is one of the learned professions, like medicine or law. “Architects self-select, depending on where they feel they can contribute best.” “Members with deeply embedded beliefs will avoid designing those building types and leave it to their colleagues,” Ms. She said she put together a special panel that reviewed the plea. “It’s just not something we want to determine as a collective,” Helene Combs Dreiling, the institute’s former president, told me. Just a few weeks earlier, the American Institute of Architects rejected a petition to censure members who design solitary-confinement cells and death chambers. ![]() SAN FRANCISCO - Faced with lawsuits and a growing mountain of damning research, New York City officials decided last month to ban solitary confinement for prison inmates 21 and younger.
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