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Architecture as Disaster:Business as Usual

Turkey Architecture News - May 28, 2014 - 12:03   4403 views

by Eray Çaylı

 

Architecture as Disaster:Business as Usual

This month 301 miners were killed in the town of Soma in Western Turkey. According to Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the disaster was just another “ordinary work accident”. This “business as usual” attitude has met with claims that the disaster was in fact wholly preventable, claims which rest on conflicting views of the role of architecture.

The architecture in question concerns two specific sites: the mine itself and the Istanbul skyscraper Spine Tower. The mine lacked the 20 rescue chambers which, at a cost of $250,000 each, would have helped prevent nearly all of the 301 mortalities. The skyscraper, recently built in Istanbul’s financial district Maslak by the same company that operates the mine, is home to 80 super luxury flats each priced at $1,350,000. The comparison is self-evident: the cost of saving the miners would have been less than the price of 4 flats in Spine Tower

Architecture as Disaster:Business as Usual

Istanbul’s Spine Tower

That mega-projects such as skyscrapers are often undertaken at the expense of human life is by no means a revelation (as the 1990s heavy metal band Acid Bath sang, “skyscrapers look like gravestones”). However, the question of where architects ought to stand within that relationship indicates a relatively underexplored topic of discussion. This recently became all the more evident when Zaha Hadid was asked about the construction workers’ deaths in Qatar (currently numbering around 1000) where a series of projects are being undertaken in preparation for the 2022 World Cup, including the starchitect’s Al-Wakrah stadium. Hadid’s reply was that “it’s not my duty as an architect to look at it; I cannot do anything about it because I have no power to do anything about it.”

Architecture as Disaster:Business as Usual

Zaha Hadid’s Al Wakrah Stadium, Qatar. ©Zaha Hadid Architects

Many have discussed such controversies as a question of moral responsibility. I would like to explore the idea that in the case of large-scale projects—architecture as (big) business—the profession’s link with social and material destruction has become so inextricable as to require an altogether new definition of what falls within its professional domain—in not just ethical but also practical terms.

First, a bit of history is in order. After all, the close relationship between violent losses of human life and architectural mega-projects such as skyscrapers goes back many years. Consider William A. Starrett, the contractor who was involved with the construction of many of America’s best-known skyscrapers including the Empire State building. Having started his professional career as a colonel in the US army, Starrett was responsible for all construction activity that the army undertook during World War I. About a decade after starting his civilian life, the contractor would expose the close link between the two consecutive halves of his professional career that may otherwise seem unrelated. “Building skyscrapers is the nearest peace-time equivalent of war,” Starrett suggested in 1928:

“. . . the analogy is startling, even to the occasional grim reality of a building accident where maimed bodies, and even death, remind us that we are fighting a war of construction against the forces of nature.”

In other words, according to Starrlett and others like him, architectural projects driven by mega-investment and the latest building technology are sacred causes. In contrast, human life is inferior, its loss is expected.² This was indeed the implication that characterized the way in which government authorities in Turkey negotiated the disaster in Soma. “This is in the nature of this business,” argued Prime Minister Erdoğan. He called the victims “martyrs,” a term coded in the popular psyche in Turkey as a status granted to soldiers who die in combat....Continue Reading

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