Thread by @m_hotmessghandi

The #AIA professional ethics guidelines reside as a kind of side dish next to their main course offering: the suite of standard contracts nearly universally employed by the USconstruction industry to govern responsibilities betw architects, owners, & contractors (A113,B111,B112)

In effect, however, the AIA Code of Ethics & Professional Conduct may be the more essential document. . .

Issuing from the profession’s foremost membership organization, it bridges between the profession’s humanistic self image & its complicity in the rapacity of the global economy, providing ideological edifice and moral credibility in the guise of ethical guardrails. . .

But what it admonishes too faintly, it condones, while mollifying the profession’s unease over its tacit complicity in global crimes perpetrated far far away.

Aiming to apply to the widest range of possible clients, practitioners, project types, & locations, the language of the AIACOE&PC is intentionally general & open-ended. . .

Its function however, is highly precise. Architects’ role is hereby framed & positioned, fixing the locus & responsibility of upholding morality as a matter of professional propriety, a function of the choices & performance of individual professionals. . .

"Rule 6.501 Members shall consider with their clients the environmental effects of their project decisions."
content.aia.org/sites/default/…

The Code’s noncommittal wording (“recognize”, “promote”, “consider”) underscores and dictates the limits of architect’s power in relation to, and their role as moral guide to, clients and employers. . .

“Considering" ethical goals with clients & employers gently smooths conflict, suggesting aligned interests, and a meeting of minds bewteen equals. . .

Ultimately, however, deference must be accorded the client once the cleansing ritual of “recognizing,” “promoting,” and “considering” has been performed. . .

Assigning to architects the responsibility of voicing moral conscience absolves both investors and the state, serving to excuse a deregulatory position, and promoting the assumption that industries will voluntarily self govern. . .

Consider the breadth of the global economy. Consider how deep its ideology is entrenched in popular consciousness. . .

Consider the force of its seemingly immutable incentives: growth (spatial expansion), maximizing returns (seeking rent, controlling markets), minimizing costs (avoiding regulatory oversight), increasing productivity (employing dead labor/technology) . . .

. . . finding efficiencies (squeezing labor), opening new markets (creating consumers via enclosure, and the instrumentalization of human needs and desires).

If, in the face of the ever expanding scope and power of global capital, architects are increasingly uncomfortable with their legitimizing function as court advisers, that unease may be boiling over.

If the AIACO&PC has been the most prominent moral pass, fig leaf, & sleep aid, for educated professionals who haven’t wished to become aware or disturb their masters, increasingly, as crises over global environmental & labor injustice have grown increasingly dire, . . .

. . . architect are rejecting “recognize, recommend, advise” to be so grossly insufficient and ineffectual as to constitute malpractice according to the AIA's own tenets.

"Rule 1.402: Members shall not engage in conduct involving wanton disregard of the rights of others."
content.aia.org/sites/default/…

The exploitation & extraction at the heart of globalized commerce can no longer be tolerated tacitly by our profession. Climate & labor justice cannot be left to the voluntary beneficence of international business interests . . .

Designers should not have to be in the position of discouraging clients from benefiting from slave labor & impending climate catastrophe. If we are to credibly consider our profession ethical, global justice must evolve from a "nice-to-have'' to a "we-won't-participate-unless".

It is in that spirit of refusal that we offer the Architecture Degrowth Manifesto as a framework for an alternate code of ethics….