Since the Hamas attack on October 7, Israel has been escalating its military siege of Gaza. The list of crimes against humanity continues to grow: the killing of journalists and UN aid workers, the bombing of hospitals, the luring of refugees to specific sites only to bomb them, too. All of these combined equate to what scholars of genocide are calling exactly that. New images of profound suffering and mourning appear daily. The brutal reality of this war is inescapable. It cannot be hidden behind the engines of manufactured consent that set public discourse during the Iraq War. We can all see online the images of women searching for their children within seas of body bags, of babies being taken off incubation because of lack of electricity as doctors scramble to keep them alive while under constant bombardment. We can also see viral TikToks, like the one of the Israeli settler praying for a time when Gaza is replaced with Disney World and Starbucks. In a New Yorker interview with Isaac Chotiner, Daniella Weiss, a leader of Israel’s settlement movement, made explicit that the project was about expelling Palestinians from their land altogether, sending them to “Arab” nations. In response, letters of solidarity with Palestinian liberation have poured forth from high-profile corners of the art and publishing worlds. The London Review of Books published a letter with 750 signatories calling for a ceasefire. A similar letter, published by Artforum, gathered over 8,000 signatories and led to the firing of that publication’s editor in chief, David Velasco. Meanwhile, the most powerful voices in the architecture world have, so far, remained silent.
That the continued leveling of all of Gaza has architectural implications is obvious. In the field of architecture, those who immediately grasped this connection were overwhelmingly voices from the academy. One of the earliest responses denouncing the slaughter and calling for a ceasefire came from the editors of the Avery Review and its sister organization, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City. Soon after, statements appeared from activist groups: The Architecture Lobby, the The Funambulist, and Dark Matter University. Another open letter in support of Palestine was signed on October 20 by International Architectural Educators, a consortium of over one hundred academics teaching in architecture schools. Many of these educators are also practitioners, the most notable being Florian Idenburg, a cofounding partner at SO-IL. A similar letter, open to practitioners, also circulated in 2021 and had more than twice the number of signatories, including many high-profile academics notably absent from the new letter. I take this not as a sign of changed views but as one that widespread censorship, both by governments and private bodies, is working. Still, despite the backlash against anti-Zionist groups IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace—Columbia University, for example, just suspended student chapters of both groups—letters expressing solidarity with Palestine continue to be circulated. Over 1,000 academics signed a letter protesting censorship at Columbia and Barnard.
Despite such uproar in the academy and in the publishing and art worlds, very little has been said publicly on behalf of architecture firms themselves. Promises to not participate in redeveloping sites of ethnic cleansing in Palestine have yet to be made, a marked departure from, for example, the decision by Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) to pull out of work in Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. To its credit, the AIA released a statement surprisingly early, on October 10. Its message is definitively banal—“we believe that architecture is about more than just buildings; it’s about building communities, fostering understanding, and promoting peace”—but it does include links to a greatest-hits roster of human-rights organizations, including the United Nations and Doctors Without Borders, both of which have criticized Israel’s targeting of civilians and called for a ceasefire. What was most likely intended to be apolitical now reads more pointed. If academics and even practitioners speaking outside of their firms are willing to put their careers on the line to defend Palestinian rights, one wonders why architecture firms are so conspicuously silent. The last time there was an uproar about the ethics of building in occupied Palestine was in 2014, after another bombing campaign in Gaza. At the time, Archbishop Desmond Tutu urged the International Union of Architects to suspend the Israeli Association of United Architects; a Royal Institute of British Architects resolution proposing the same thing, put forward by then president Angela Brady, was previously tabled. Daniel Libeskind and Richard Meier led an immense backlash to these proposals, both of which ultimately failed. There has yet to be another attempt by a governing body of architecture to explicitly condemn the role architecture plays in the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine.
One of the reasons behind this silence is architecture’s overwhelming vision of itself as apolitical. Architecture’s business is one of value-neutral decisions. Even when political problems are raised directly, like when many pointed out the horrific labor conditions on the sites of ZHA’s stadium in Qatar, architecture and its practitioners claim that these problems exist outside of their capacity to deal with them, as though this absolves them of all consequences. This status quo has not gone unchallenged. In recent years, the Black Lives Matter movement spurred a reckoning with racism that extended to the firm level. Most of those efforts yielded not reparations but rather initiatives for diversity, equity and inclusion, but the issue did not remain an elephant in the room. The #MeToo movement felled many a star architect, including the likes of Meier and David Adjaye. Decades of organizing forced the AIA to insert language into its charter that prohibits its members from “knowingly designing spaces intended for execution and torture, including indefinite or prolonged solitary confinement.” Each of these examples works at a different scale—from the individual architect to the largest professional organization for American architects—but all of them are indications that the field can and will change under pressure.
The field’s hostility toward political statements, its hiding its workforce under the banner names of a few old men, its predilection for technocratic solutionism in the face of real political problems—all of these are merely symptoms of how that lack of distance manifests in practice.
Sometimes muteness on social issues is a simple matter of business. Open the Israel tag on Dezeen and you will see many large firms all too happy to do business there, including Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; Studio Fuksas; Foster + Partners; and Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. The projects in question are not small, either: they are supertall skyscrapers, convention centers, and university buildings. One could argue that this work, as well as work done in Russia and Saudi Arabia, to name just two examples, should be held to a more stringent ethical standard or that architects should refuse to work for prisons, fossil fuel companies, or the military industrial complex that produces the bombs being dropped on civilians at this very moment. These ethical quandaries in architecture are no new problem.
Still, the issue of Palestine and Israel has highlighted an inherent limitation within the practice of architecture. To be sure, there is a definite culture of fear surrounding this particular conflict, and any response requires tackling questions of workplace democracy and the role of activism in architectural practice. But there is also a more existential issue. When I write an essay, I do so in an environment where challenging the status quo is in some ways expected. Debates about free speech overwhelmingly tackle art, academia, and publishing because these have the greatest potential to be subversive, especially in positive ways. Each of these fields is at least somewhat insulated from the vagaries of capital. I can always self-publish my essays. No one has to buy my art in order for me to make it on my own time. Reported-on events are the news regardless of whether one gets paid to share them; most interviewees, for example, don’t, especially in our present era of media decentralization. Architecture, however, is different. Its practice is almost entirely tied to capital, power, and money, and as a result it can never subvert those systems, because it needs them to survive. The practice of architecture can never, even partially, divorce itself from the ruling class. It is held hostage by whatever shock capitalism and imperialism throw its way. The field’s hostility toward political statements, its hiding its workforce under the banner names of a few old men, its predilection for technocratic solutionism in the face of real political problems—all of these are merely symptoms of how that lack of distance manifests in practice.
This is not to say that architects shouldn’t take a stand on Palestine. Many individual practitioners already have, as evidenced by a new letter being circulated at the time of writing, signed primarily by landscape architects. What would be even better is for organization at the firm level to pressure employers to boycott projects in Gaza. Regardless, what cannot continue is the overwhelming silence. In the vacuum of silence, bombs continue to fall. Students and activists are bullied out of public life. Fatigue enters the hearts of bystanders. Images that once shocked us become too familiar. Silence and complicity are fellow travelers on the road of injustice. Even if there is something to lose, there are others who stand to lose more.