Architects and Human Rights
by tristero
Apropos a recent blog post, Graeme Bristol, Executive Director of the Centre for Architecture and Human Rights wrote me the following email:
I appreciate your Hullabaloo post this morning linking to the Andrew Ross op-ed. The Zaha Hadid quote in his article reflects a prevailing attitude among professionals: “I have nothing to do with the workers,” she said. “It’s not my duty as an architect to look at it.”
After all the reports from Human Rights Watch about the abuses of migrant construction labourers in the UAE (2006), the Beijing Olympics (2008), Russia(2009), Abu Dhabi (2009), Bahrain (2012), and the construction of the World Cup venue in Qatar (2012), this is still the common response from the architectural profession when I talk to them at conferences about the relationship between human rights and architecture and, more specifically, the abuse of migrant construction workers . Legislated professions are expected to work to a higher standard and they are expected to have the ‘common good’ as their first interest.
Sadly, this is not, nor, I expect, has it ever been the case. And yet, back in 2011, a group of international artists began a boycott of the Guggenheim in response to the conditions migrant workers faced in the Guggenheim construction site in Abu Dhabi. Any architects? Any representative architectural associations – the UIA? the AIA? Not a peep. Indeed, they give those architects awards for their stellar work in architecture.
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky,
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby don’t cry
Don’t cry,
.