The three American hikers captured in 2009 by the Iranians and held in jail for two years (for allegedly straying over the border from Iraq) have written a book about the experience. Now making the rounds of talk shows, they describe solitary confinement as one of its horrors and cite a UN report on torture declaring such treatment—if lasting more than 15 days—cruel and unusual and liable to cause severe mental distress, sometimes irreversible. In fact, while there’s no question about the cruelty, it’s hardly unusual. In the U.S. there are at least 80,000 prisoners being held in isolation, and many of them have been there for years.
Following an earlier effort to persuade designers to refuse prison work altogether, Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility is now conducting a campaign to have the AIA revise its code of ethics to enjoin architects from designing spaces for the worst aspects of our penal system: execution chambers and solitary-confinement cells. The San Francisco, Portland, and Boston chapters have voted in support of this, but New York just said no and proposes instead a subcommittee be appointed to develop “Best Practice Guidelines: Design for Humane, Effective, Segregation,” which sounds like a classic bureaucratic way of evading the issue, at least for the time being. But prisons are just one egregious instance of architecture’s moral dilemma. The act of building—which is directly engaged in setting and supporting virtually everything we do—is implicated on every side by choices about our own participation and complicity with evil.
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