commentNewsmaker: Cameron Sinclair
AB: At the Barbican Centre this year, you said, “Inviting Zaha Hadid to a conference on architectural ethics is like inviting Robert Mugabe to speak about human rights.” Do you think that much of the top level of the profession doesn’t have or doesn’t feel it needs to have an ethical stance?
Based on what you have seen and read about this project, how would you grade it? Use the stars below to indicate your assessment, five stars being the highest rating.
CS: I think that they [feel that way]. I don’t know why, maybe it was the backlash of the 70s and Pruitt-Igoe and the architects took a lot of blame for failures in social housing. Maybe it’s that the 80s and 90s were so wrapped up in the glamorous approach of architecture that it just wasn’t a great topic of conversation for getting jobs. It’s like survival. When I speak with top architects off the record, they’re very supportive of AFH and our vision.
AB: And how does AFH point to a different approach?
CS: I think we point to the opportunities that are out there. Part of my argument at the Barbican was in reference Nicolai Ouroussoff’s article in December 2008, where he said this recession’s great because suddenly all these star architects can suddenly start doing socially-responsible work.
Our response was: that sort of statement it is ridiculous. For the last decade, while they’ve been doing these skyscrapers in Dubai, there’s a generation of young architects working on socially responsible projects. It’s disingenuous and wrong to overlook their participation and influence in the profession.
My role in the organization is about being a sort of catalyst for this conversation. Those seven or eight words at the Barbican were just part of a much larger one-hour debate about the role of the architect. I think the most important part of that debate was about the ethics of working in the Middle East and doing work knowing that the labor practices are, at times, inhumane and ethically questionable.
That was an exciting conversation because it was about all architects, not just the do-good architects. As architects, we seem to remove ourselves from the building process to such an extent that we don’t feel complicit when these issues arise.
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