The American Institute of Architects said on Friday that it approved new ethics rules to prevent members from deliberately designing spaces for execution or torture, including prolonged solitary confinement.
Such a rule has been championed by architecture professionals for many years, but the organization has so far resisted declaring that the architects were not responsible for the torture policies and procedures that occurred in the spaces they designed Were. In recent months, as the institution has responded to calls for equality, the group has reevaluated its stance following the assassination of George Floyd.
“We are committed to promoting a more equitable and just manufactured world that eliminates racial injustice and enhances human rights,” the group’s president, Jane Frederick, said in a news release.
Members of the institute are required to “maintain the health, safety and welfare of the public” in their work, Friedrich said, and the board of directors had determined that the meaning of spaces for execution and torture was “contrary to those values is.”
In June, Michael Kimelman, architectural critic for the New York Times, renewed his call for the group to take action on the issue, writing that if it made its new commitment to work against systemic racial injustice Wanted to keep, so he needed to speak out against architects who design execution chambers in prisons and cells of solitary confinement that provoke and execute a largely proportionate percentage of black Americans.
Kimelman wrote, ‘Architects should not contribute their expertise to the most egregious aspects of a system that commits extraordinary violence against African Americans and other minorities.’ “The least American Institute of Architects can do now is agree.”
The new ethics rules prohibit members from deliberately designing locations in which prisoners remain in solitary confinement for 22 hours or more per day without meaningful human contact, for more than 15 consecutive days.
The AIA previously rejected calls to condemn the practice. Several years ago, the institute rejected a petition calling for the closure of members who design solitary-confinement cells and death rooms; Last year the AIA published an opinion from its National Ethics Council stating that it would not shut down designers who work on capital punishment because capital punishment was legal in the United States.
The design of an execution cell merely “reflects the conduct that is accepted by society in the courts where the death penalty has been adopted as a law of the land,” said last year’s opinion.
An architect from the Bay Area, who led an earlier petition, Rafael Sperry, has said that the group’s previous stance was a declaration that business was more important to them than human rights. Sperry’s organization, Architects / Designers / Planners for Social Responsibility, was one of the groups the Architecture Institute said it consulted to come to a decision.
“Architecture has historically been a white, male-dominated profession that has participated in systems of oppression and injustice, including segregation and mass oppression,” Sperry said in an email on Friday. “This code change is a sign that things can change and they are changing.”
The decision comes a day after the high-profile execution of a black man of the Justice Department, Brandon Bernard, who was assassinated when he was 18 years old, requested a flood in the White House to grant Bernard a pardon. was.
Prominent Architects Group Prohibits Design of Death Chambers. The American Institute of Architects has changed its stance on members who design spaces for executions or prolonged solitary confinement. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/arts/design/american-institute-of-architects-execution.html
USA. There’s No Reason for an Architect to Design a Death Chamber https://deathpenaltynews.blogspot.com/2020/06/usa-theres-no-reason-for-architect-to_13.html
There’s No Reason for an Architect to Design a Death Chamber https://youtu.be/dm2JWhux748
Death Row Tutorial | Prison Architect https://youtu.be/2NHs89pye-g
