Architects Debate Building For Autocratic Clients - The New York Times

11/11/2019 Architects Debate Building for Autocratic Clients - The New York Times
ART & DESIGN | ARCHITECTURE
I’m the Designer. My Client’s the

Autocrat.
By ROBIN POGREBIN JUNE 22, 2008
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.” His remarks raised hackles in his profession, with some
architects accusing him of hypocrisy because his own firm had recently broken
ground on a project in Hong Kong.
Since then, however, 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 rights.
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.
Debate abounds on architecture blogs, and human rights groups are pressing
architects to be mindful of a government’s politics and labor conditions in accepting
commissions.
The ideological issue is as old as architecture itself. By designing high-profile

buildings that bolster the profile of a powerful client, do architects implicitly
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Or in the long run does architecture transcend politics and ideology? If the
architect’s own vision is progressive, can architecture be a vehicle for positive
change?
For the most part, the issue is not a concrete one for the field’s top practitioners;
no architect interviewed for this article except Mr. Libeskind has publicly rejected
the notion of working for hot-button countries. Yet the debate underscores the
complex decisions that go into designing architecture — from the basic financial
imperatives, to public access, to the larger message that a building sends — and is
prodding architects to reflect on their priorities.
“It’s complicated,” said Thom Mayne, the Los Angeles architect, whose projects
include a corporate headquarters in Shanghai. “Architecture is a negotiated art and
it’s highly political, and if you want to make buildings there is diplomacy required.”
“I’ve always been interested in an architecture of resistance — architecture that

has some power over the way we live,” added Mr. Mayne, who said he had recently
been interviewed for projects in Abu Dhabi, Kazakhstan, Russia, the Middle East and
Indonesia. “Working under adversarial conditions could be seen as a plus because
you’re offering alternatives. Still there are situations that make you ask the
questions: ‘Do I want to be a part of this?’ “
There is little question that this is a highly charged global moment for the
profession: a building boom in Asia and the Middle East, combined with a hunger
for designs by name brands, has created unparalleled opportunities for architects to
make their mark. Every city wants its own Bilbao, the saying goes, a reference to the
explosion of excitement over Frank Gehry’s 1997 Guggenheim museum there, and
every architect craves the recognition that comes with a high-profile commission.
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
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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.
“I have often found Rem Koolhaas’s provocatively ideological neutral stance

problematic,” said Barry Bergdoll, the chief curator of architecture and design at the
Museum of Modern Art. “I want to hear architects try to think that through. I want
to know that they’ve grappled with it.”
Mr. Koolhaas declined to be interviewed for this article.
Architects face ethical dilemmas in the West too. Some refuse to design prisons;
others eschew churches. 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.”
Some architects argue that architecture is more important to them than politics.
“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.
Architects like Steven Holl cast their decision to build in China as a way of
promoting a connection between East and West. “Certainly I question working
anywhere,” Mr. Holl said. “But my position as an architect is to work in the spirit of
international civilization and cooperation. You have to make a contribution.”
10 He cited his two-million-square-foot Linked Hybrid housing complex in Beijing,

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which will be heated and cooled by a 660-well geothermal energy system. “We are
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making the largest green total community in the history of Beijing,” Mr. Holl said.
“This is an example for many kinds of urban work.”
Others go even further, arguing that their projects will be an emphatic force for
social change. The Swiss architect Jacques Herzog has asserted that by supplying
acres of public park space to city dwellers in the long term, his Olympic stadium in
Beijing, designed with his partner, Pierre de Meuron, “will change radically —
transform — the society.”
“Engagement is the best way of moving in the right direction,” he said.
Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum in London and the author of “The
Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World” (Penguin, 2005),
agreed that Herzog & de Meuron’s Olympic stadium sent a signal of openness. “In
that stadium people see each other, rather than being looked down upon by a
leader,” he said. “It is a space which people can use in a way which is a shared
democratic experience.”
He contrasted its visual message with that of a new opera house in Beijing
designed by Paul Andreu. “The opera house sits in a lake like a fortified moat — an
enclosed frame — which says, ‘Keep out,’ ” he said.
Mr. Andreu said in an interview that he intended the opera house to be inviting,
not intimidating. “I wanted the building not to be just an imposing building, showing
its face like a castle or an official building, behind the trees, beyond the water,” he
said. “It’s a promise. It’s something you will get.”
“This is a building built at a certain moment in the history of China,” he added.

“It has been ordered by the power and paid for by the government, but it’s made for
the people of China, and I was never asked to compromise on that thinking.”
Some architects argue that it is unrealistic and self-serving for them to presume
that they can transform a society or distance themselves from a patron’s conduct.
“Sometimes architects like to think they’re above the political fray,” said
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Frederic M. Bell, the executive director of the New York chapter of the American
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Institute of Architects. “I think that’s a little bit disingenuous. Sometimes it’s very
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difficult to take commissions from countries with positions with which one
disagrees.”
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.”
Examples abound of clients whose political ideology was considered inseparable

from the buildings they commissioned, from Louis Le Vau’s palace at Versailles
(Louis XIV: “L’état, c’est moi”) to Speer’s Nuremburg parade grounds, based on
ancient Greek architecture but magnified to colossal scale for Hitler’s Nazi Party
rallies.
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.
“It’s a problem as old as architecture and empire,” said Mr. Bergdoll of MoMA.
“Architects in the end are selling design services.”
Architects readily point out that dictators — or powerful central governments

like China’s — can be among the most efficient in getting architecture built, as the
boom in China attests. “The more centralized the power, the less compromises need
to be made in architecture,” said the architect Peter Eisenman. “The directions are
clearer.”
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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. You have to believe in it.”
Still, the distinction between political and nonpolitical architecture can be hard
to draw, whether the focus is ground zero in Manhattan (think of the “Freedom
Tower”) or China’s new buildings for the Olympic Games, which are a source of deep
nationalist pride.
Abu Dhabi hopes to position itself as a cultural destination for the Middle East
and Asia with a Guggenheim satellite designed by Frank Gehry, a classical museum
by Jean Nouvel that would house visiting exhibitions from the Louvre in Paris, a
performing arts center by Zaha Hadid and a maritime museum by Tadao Ando.
Human rights groups have warned that these architects risk being linked to what
they contend is the United Arab Emirates’ chronic exploitation of construction
workers from poor nations.
“We’re urging them to take steps to make sure they or their contractors are
complying with best practices,” said Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights
Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division. “Typically their response is, ‘We
comply with national laws,’ and our response to that is, national laws don’t cut the
mustard.”
The architect Tod Williams, who with his wife and partner, Billie Tsien, is
working on an Asia Society branch in Hong Kong, said, “We could not work in Abu
Dhabi unless we were clearly helping the people.”
Mr. Sudjic of the Design Museum in London suggested that the ambitions of
architecture have changed significantly over the last century. In the early Modernist
movement, he said, architects were encouraged to embrace utopian goals like social
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“I suppose there was a kind of sense of disillusionment that architecture was

about building better societies,” Mr. Sudjic said.
“Now architects are careful about making emotional political stands about
anything. That can seem like sophistication, or it can seem like evasion.”
Rather than come down on one side or the other of the broad ethical issue, some
architects make their own case-by-case peace with it. “In France I refuse to work for
the extreme-right party,” Mr. Nouvel said. “But all around the world you have good
reasons to say yes, because you don’t build only for a client. You build for a city.”
As for Mr. Libeskind, whose remarks rekindled the wide debate last winter, he
said he had not sought any projects in mainland China but had designed a
multimedia building for the City University of Hong Kong, because Hong Kong has a
firmer rule of law. “There’s a public process my building had to go through,” he said.
He added that he had not closed the door to working for the Beijing
government, however.
“If they said, ‘Can you build us a center for democracy?’ “ he said, “I’d be the
first to line up.”
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: I’m
the Designer. My Client’s the Autocrat.
© 2019 The New York Times Company
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11/11/2019 Architects Debate Building for Autocratic Clients - The New York Times

ART & DESIGN | ARCHITECTURE

I’m the Designer. My Client’s the

With a growing number of prominent architects designing buildings in places

The ideological issue is as old as architecture itself. By designing high-profile

“I’ve always been interested in an architecture of resistance — architecture that

“I have often found Rem Koolhaas’s provocatively ideological neutral stance

Mr. Koolhaas declined to be interviewed for this article.

10 He cited his two-million-square-foot Linked Hybrid housing complex in Beijing,

“Engagement is the best way of moving in the right direction,” he said.

“This is a building built at a certain moment in the history of China,” he added.

William Menking, the founder and editor of Architect’s Newspaper, wrote

Examples abound of clients whose political ideology was considered inseparable

Architects readily point out that dictators — or powerful central governments

Bernard Tschumi, former dean of Columbia’s architecture school, said, “Some of

“Architecture is always related to power and related to large interests, whether

Yet “there is a moment when the buildings are conceived as an expression of a

“I suppose there was a kind of sense of disillusionment that architecture was

© 2019 The New York Times Company

10 Subscribe to The New York Times. SEE MY OPTIONS

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