Soy el Diseñador.Mi cliente el autocrata.

I’m the Designer. My Client’s the Autocrat.
By ROBIN POGREBIN
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 sanction the client’s actions or collaborate in symbolic mythmaking?
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 completed, China’s censorship of the airwaves might well have changed. (The building is almost finished.)
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.”
He cited his two-million-square-foot Linked Hybrid housing complex in Beijing, which will be heated and cooled by a 660-well geothermal energy system. “We are 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 Frederic M. Bell, the executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. “I think that’s a little bit disingenuous. Sometimes it’s very 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.”
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 housing, but the promise ultimately proved hollow.
“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.”

Fuente : Architecture, New York Times