Bear in mind that semantics are not addressed, e.g., in my previous sentence, what determines "the good" ? In the context of this article: good is humane treatment of workers, environmental responsibility, protection of human rights and equality.
Four months ago the architect Daniel Libeskind declared publicly that architects should think long and hard before working in China, adding, “I won’t work for totalitarian regimes.”
Since then, Mr. Libeskind’s speech, delivered at a real estate and planning event in Belfast, Northern Ireland, has reanimated a decades-old debate among architects over the ethics of working in countries with repressive leaders or shaky records on human right.
With a growing number of prominent architects designing buildings in places like China, Iran, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, where development has exploded as civic freedoms or exploitation of migrant labor have come under greater scrutiny, the issue has inched back into the spotlight.
One lightning rod in the debate is Rem Koolhaas’s mammoth headquarters for China’s state broadcast authority, CCTV, a minicity in itself in a capital where cranes dot the skylines and nearly every famous foreign architect has a project on the boards. Mr. Koolhaas suggested at the outset of the project, which he was assigned in 2002, that by the time his tower — a hulking hollowed-out trapezoid — was completed, China’s censorship of the airwaves might well have changed. (The building is almost finished.)
Mr. Koolhaas is known for arguing that market forces have in any case supplanted ideology. Some interpret that stance as a way of avoiding the harder questions and a not-so-subtle reminder that money drives the most ambitious projects in the West.
Robert A. M. Stern, who is also Yale’s architecture dean, drew some criticism last year when he accepted an assignment to design a planned George W. Bush Library in Dallas.
Mr. Stern shrugged off the sniping. “I’m an architect,” he said. “I’m not a politician.”
“I’m a guy who has on my wall a picture of the guy in front of the tank,” said Eric Owen Moss, a Los Angeles architect, referring to the famous photograph from the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. “But I’ve never turned down a project in Russia and China.”
Mr. Moss has designed the Guangdong Museum and Opera House in China as well as a ceremonial plaza, Republic Square, in Almaty, Kazakhstan, which has been ruled by the same autocratic leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, since the 1980s.
William Menking, the founder and editor of Architect’s Newspaper, wrote recently, “To suggest that providing high-quality design justifies working” in China “is slippery ethics.”
“Albert Speer designing for Hitler might have said the same thing. His building itself is not political, but the act of building it, for a regime like that, is a political act.”
Mies van der Rohe designed a competition entry for the German pavilion at the Brussels Expo of 1934 that included swastika flags and Nazi eagles. Le Corbusier aggressively courted Mussolini and the Vichy administration in France to try to get their business. Apart from his notorious Nazi sympathies, the architect Philip Johnson was known for boasting that he would readily design for Stalin if the price were right. Some 600 architects from around the world — including Peter and Alison Smithson — vied for the commission to build the Pahlavi state library for the shah of Iran in the late 1970s; architects including Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown entered Saddam Hussein’s competition in the 1980s to design a mosque in Baghdad.
Bernard Tschumi, former dean of Columbia’s architecture school, said, “Some of the most amazing places were built because of dictators.”
“Architecture is always related to power and related to large interests, whether financial or political,” he said. Yet “there is a moment when the buildings are conceived as an expression of a political regime, he added. “Then it becomes a problem.
Mr. Sudjic of the Design Museum of London: “Now architects are careful about making emotional political stands about anything. That can seem like sophistication, or it can seem like evasion.
From I'm the Designer. My Client's the Autocrat. by Robin Pogrebin, NYTimes, June 22, 2008.
Read the full article here.
