The 24 of April 2013, the Rana Plaza garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed due a structural failure, killing 1,134 workers.
The 14 June 2017, a fire erupted in the Grenfell Tower, a residential block in North Kensington, London, UK, resulting in 72 deaths, 70 other persons injured and 223 homeless.
The 14 of August 2018, 210 meters of the highway bridge Morandi in Genova, Italy, crumpled, killing 43 people and injuring 9.
The 4 August 2020, the ignition of 2,700 ton of ammonium nitrate, stored in a warehouse in the port of Beirut, Lebanon, caused an explosion that has damaged half of the city, leaving 300,000 persons homeless, with 220 confirmed fatalities and 5,000 persons injured.
These disasters have caught the attention of the international public opinion for their magnitude, but also for a conspicuous degree of spectacle, often vehiculated via infinite streams of digital media. They are just some of a continuous sequence of occurrences where it can be said that the buildings and infrastructures have provoked destruction. With the exception of the blast in Beirut, where the main cause was the careless storage of highly explosive material, in the cases of Dhaka, London and Genova, it was the condition itself of the construction and its decay to become fatal. If we were to shy away from these damning milestones, and instead devote our time to register minor occurrences, where citizens are maimed or seriously hurt because of failures in buildings and infrastructure, we would have to establish a dark and almost unbearable record of quotidian incidents. Minor earthquakes or landslides that in some places are easily resisted, become mortal in other contexts were seismic regulations or hazard zoning are either weak or not properly enforced. The effects of heavy rains, storms, and tornadoes are exacerbated by the fragility of the buildings that are hit or the inadequacy of the measures taken against them, such as the levees in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina in 2005. Unsanitary conditions of dwellings and places of work are the primary sources of chronic diseases.
The collapse of ageing residential compounds has become a frequent feature, as it happened the 5th of November 2018 in Marseille, where two old blocks were reduced to dust in a few seconds, leaving 8 persons dead. Only in that city, in a wealthy country that is a proud founder of the G8, it is calculated that 100,000 citizens inhabit dwellings below standard, and in the days following the disaster, 4500 were evacuated from 578 buildings in the adjacent areas all of a sudden declared as “dangerous”.
Adding to that already grim set of data, the uncessant toll of workers who die or are seriously injured on the construction sites across the world, day after day after day, further corroborates a disconcerting impression: architecture kills.
Of course, historically, it has never been one of the objectives of architects to generate damage, all the contrary, the ethics that has been since centuries imbued within education and practice proposes exactly the opposite that architecture aims to provide shelter and protection for humans. We can also let ourselves slip into interminable games of semantics, exploring the chasm of architecture as a discipline or a practice, differences between architecture and building, the objective fact that the collapse of a singular building cannot be elevated as a generalization. We can identify responsibilities that need to be properly attributed to a multiplicity of culprits, not just designers, but also developers, engineers, administrators and landlords, consultants, and numerous public bodies that failed in their regulatory roles and oversight. But we cannot avoid to notice a quite general blanket of silence around such matters, a silence, even if pierced by occasional and singular voices, that makes architects, either as individuals or as organized collective bodies, complicit with that same system that allows such events to happen over and over (1).