28) Hate architecture.

I call ‘hate architecture’ any architectural project that aims to eradicate ‘differences.’ Hate architecture serves and is often motivated by a desire of a group to protect their territory or react to a perceived attack against their own group and social identity.

There is no duty or law to legislate against an architecture that incites hatred directed towards a group of people, that is threatening, that is insulting or that aims to stir up racial hatred. Architects should always question whether their design solutions involve prejudice or hostility that may not contravene any legal requirement, but which may result in harm or may escalate into a form of emotional, or physical humiliation.

We can hear inhabitants claiming to suffer health problems and depression from spending time inside certain buildings. We produce identities and develop our sense of reality through our interaction with architecture.

Architecture can be a cruel strategy of institutional violence built into public space at the cost to society’s most vulnerable, something designed to be specifically hostile to them yet camouflaged into the normal fabric as permanent barriers.

From an urban poor, immigrant, homeless perspective, architecture is a kind of warfare. People are captives of the spaces they inhabit and victims of powers and biases or exclusions. For those who are pushed toward the outside, an arch is a space alteration that sustains their permanent exclusion. Such architecture achieves a centrality of prejudice. Prejudice is any attitude, emotion, or behavior towards members of a group that directly or indirectly implies some negativity or antipathy toward that group. Does this oppressive ethic count as architecture? In a sense, it does. We use the means of architecture not primarily to solve the problem of social living, but primarily to serve the interests of a privileged minority.

The perpetration of stereotypes is one of the many form of discriminations. The seeds of prejudice are to be found in the way architects process information as they seek to simplify, make sense of, and justify their architecture, for example in the design of a bench that no homeless person can comfortably sleep on.

Hate architecture need not actually be motivated by hatred for a ‘victim.’ Rather it can be the expression of a more generalized prejudice or bias that probably characterized such an architectural offense. 

When architects attempt to make sense of the world around them, they tend to create stereotypes about other people. Such a perspective has several drawbacks. It assumes that design operates autonomously and independently of people and remains unaffected by whether the groups are in conflicts with each other. The victims of hate architecture are often defined by their race, disability, or sexual orientation.

Hate architecture not only alters individual lives, it creates buildings and spaces that can oppress entire communities. Threats can consist of tangible conflicts of interest such as competition over resources or perceived threats that certain groups of people pose to one’s own intergroup. Hatred erodes rights and it drives wealth and power up towards the top, so it enables the powerful to further entrench their power.

How do we account for architecture that endorses discrimination, racism, and aggressive or violent expansion? At first sight, the obvious way in which architecture and urban planning can avoid hatred, intolerance, and discrimination is by involving people in the planning and design process. Greater harmony can be generated by cooperating with excluded groups rather than by conflict with such groups. Our emphasis in designing is still too often for people rather than with people.

When confronted with the hate architecture I see so often in our cities, it doesn’t surprise me that those who might not have thought very deeply about universal rights might think this is good architecture. Architecture can be used to break down prejudices, enhance sustainability, and transform communities. It can also influence how people treat each other.