"Ai Weiwei, who helped design the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing, stayed away from the opening ceremonies because he said he wanted his building to represent freedom, not be a trophy for an autocratic regime uninterested in change." — hyperallergic.com
Are we even delineating the role of the Architect in the construction process? Especially in the case where the clients are a monarchy and the problem cited is endemic to the entire region and not limited to the construction industry?
Quoting Ai Weiwei and not Herzog and de Meuron seems almost tactical in an attack on the architect's lack of empathy compared to an artist's. Maybe a reader should be as personal in their critique of the journalist and question his ethnicity and entitlement, compare them to Zaha's story and probably fatigued de-sensitivity (as opposed to insensitivity) to the repression of the Other and then decide if we want to use the words "Awful Human Being".
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“It’s not about money, it’s not about profit, it’s about controlling a large foreign workforce,” McGeehan said.
Which means it's about money.
Moralizing aside, these are very shocking numbers of worker deaths, by any standard.
I don't know what RIBA might require of Ms. Hadid within the UK, but I understand my responsibility as an American architect when visiting a construction site to specifically exclude "supervision" or "management" but to ethically require my immediate reporting, and (within my power) stopping of any situation hazardous to worker safety, even though that worker is in no way contractually bound to me personally.
Perhaps she does not visit the site? Undoubtedly, the fact that the authorities are complicit in the abuses makes reporting them all but irrelevant. It still should be done.
Each year, mostly out of curiosity, I try to read the cover of my local paper 100 years earlier. Among these January 1910s news items I was shocked to find an accounting of the previous year's "accidental" deaths in my city (with a then-population of half a million): double digits each of a dozen varieties of fatality, people killed in construction, at railway grade crossings, in elevators.
We've made the bargain that in order to support our safe, wealthy standard of living in the first world; to fuel our cars, and assemble our clothing and toys, the other 80% must live essentially as we did before the progressive reforms of the first part of this century brought us to lives of comfort and plenty.
We as a profession ought to at least be mindful of that. And think about what we say.
Excellent post, Matt Diersen. That's an interesting exploration, to read the news from 100 years ago.
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