Architecture and Human Rights: The Latest Architecture and News

Design for Freedom, an initiative launched by Grace Farms Foundation, has released an updated International Guidance & Toolkit designed to help architects and construction professionals source building materials ethically and avoid products linked to forced labor. The comprehensive online resource addresses the critical issue of forced labor within global supply chains, offering practical tools and strategies for implementation. The toolkit provides detailed information on twelve high-risk materials commonly used in construction, including glass, concrete, steel, timber, and bricks, highlighting the often inhumane conditions under which they are extracted and produced. The release of the guide coincides with Human Rights Day, further highlighting the urgency and global importance of addressing forced labor in the construction industry.

For this year’s 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, the Singapore Pavilion activates discussion on new methods of measuring and evaluating the intangible and asks explicitly: how much is enough? The exhibition explores a community’s interaction with its surroundings, suggesting that they are not currently measured within the same measurable, quantifiable and gradable standards that buildings and the built environment are designed and built to. Moreover, the pavilion suggests that connecting these two pillars of city architecture, it is essential to rethink innovation in design. The exhibition asks how architects can quantify the immeasurable values of architecture: agency, attachment, attraction, connection, freedom, and inclusion.

Hard times bring people together. In recent years we have seen how collective work can be a driving force to help those affected by natural or man-made disasters. After a disaster or displacement, a safe physical environment is often essential. Therefore, the need for coordination becomes a key factor in assisting people in times of need.

Architects, as "Shelter Specialists", play an important role in creating safe and adequate environments, whether it is individual housing, public buildings, schools, or emergency tent camps. But as architect Diébédo Francis Kéré says, "When you have nothing and you want to convince your community to believe in an idea, it may happen that everybody starts working with you, but you need to keep fighting to convince them."

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Zaha Hadid’s unfortunate comments in response to worker deaths on construction sites for the 2022 World Cup has made Qatar the eye of a storm that has been raging globally for decades. But it’s not just about Qatar. This has been an issue for as long as there have been construction sites and for as long as poor people have swarmed to them for a chance at a better life.

Construction booms and migrant construction workers have always been two sides of the same equation, both dependent on the other, and, by the twisted logic of the global economy, both are the reason for the other’s existence. No migrant labor pool = no global city = no fantastic architecture, or something to this effect. 

The migrant workers are the silent collaborators in global architecture, the invisible, faceless, “untouchables” who make the cost-effective construction of these buildings possible.

This article, by Martin Pedersen, originally appeared on Metropolis Magazine as "Governments, Not Architects, Should Shoulder Responsibility for Worker Deaths, Says Hadid."

Zaha Hadid set off a mini-shitstorm [the other day] when she declared that architects have “nothing to do with the workers” who have died on construction sites in Qatar, site of the World Cup in 2022. The Guardian had reported that nearly 900 workers had died in the past two years building the infrastructure required for the massive event. One of the projects under construction is Hadid’s Al-Wakrah stadium (above), a swoopy, curvilinear 40,000 seat facility that some critics likened to a vagina when the scheme was unveiled to the public. “It’s not my duty as an architect to look at it,” Hadid said, on the worker deaths. “I cannot do anything about it because I have no power to do anything about it. I think it’s a problem anywhere in the world. But, as I said, I think there are discrepancies all over the world.”

Her tone-deaf comments elicited a firestorm of predictable outrage, but I’d contend they had a near-truth about them. As I see it, Hadid had four possible courses of action, all of them limited in scope. 

When The Guardian recently asked Zaha Hadid about the 500 Indians and 382 Nepalese migrant workers who have reportedly died in preparations for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the architect behind the al-Wakrah stadium responded:

"I have nothing to do with the workers. I think that's an issue the government – if there's a problem – should pick up. Hopefully, these things will be resolved."