How does one understand, and visualize, the global supply chain involved in building a building? The network of architects, engineers, contractors, clients, banks, construction workers, corporations, and conglomerates that creates, over years and across countries, a stadium or a museum or a skyscraper? For the past six years, the research and advocacy group Who Builds Your Architecture?, or WBYA?, based out of Barnard College’s Department of Architecture and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), has worked to document this complex global supply chain, with the hope of making architects more aware of their connections to others in it, including, most importantly, on-site laborers. “It’s very easy for architects to think that they have nothing to do with the workers. That it’s the subcontractors, or the sub-subcontractors, who really hire them,” says Kadambari Baxi, a professor of professional practice in architecture at Barnard and one of the founders of WBYA?. “Part of our mandate is to show these connections and links—to show that we do have something to do with this.”
By “this” Baxi means the series of human rights abuses that increasingly occur at large-scale construction projects around the world, including dangerous living conditions and unregulated sites, both of which lead to worker injuries and deaths. For example, a 2016 Amnesty International report on the renovation of the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha, Qatar, a FIFA 2022 World Cup site, identified more than 100 workers living in squalid labor camps who were, in many instances, subject to forced labor. And in 2014, The Guardian newspaper investigated the increasing numbers of Nepalese migrant workers dying from cardiac arrest and brain hemorrhages while working on construction sites, a phenomenon often called “labor murders.”
Untangling the global supply chain behind even a single building is no easy feat. WBYA? found it practically impossible, given the scores of industries involved. Instead, for its latest project, the group focused on a single aspect of construction: the supply chain for the façades of roughly 50 buildings in four cities (New York, Istanbul, Chicago, and Doha, Qatar). WBYA? teamed up with Graph Commons to visualize their findings in a series of intricate graphics, some of which were on display at the Art Institute of Chicago through June. The exhibition, titled “Who Builds Your Architecture?,” aimed to highlight the problem of unfair labor practices, and to identify ways that architects can respond.
“A lot of designers I talk to say, ‘I don’t know what I can do,’ ” says Mabel Wilson, an associate professor at the GSAPP and one of WBYA?’s founders. “They say, ‘This is so immense. I am just trying to manage my practice, and pay my employees, and keep good work in the office.’ ” While the sense of helplessness is understandable, WBYA? argues that architects have more leverage than they realize to influence the construction process. The group points to other labor movements as models. “Fair trade coffee is about maintaining adequate wages and fair working conditions when you drink your morning coffee,” Wilson says. “Why couldn’t the same be said about a building?”
The Panel that Gave Rise to a Movement
Baxi and Wilson originally set out to “start a discussion,” not an advocacy group. Inspired by Gulf Labor Artist Coalition—an arts advocacy group that began protesting human rights abuses in 2010 at the construction site of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, designed by Frank Gehry, FAIA—Wilson and Baxi organized a panel at the New School in New York to discuss labor practices. The panel included Bill Van Esveld, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, and Peggy Deamer, a professor of architecture at Yale University and member of the Architecture Lobby. The discussion was so lively, Baxi says, “we realized we had to keep going.” A workshop in New York followed, and then another in Stockholm. By the time Zaha Hadid uttered her famous remarks about migrant workers—“I think that’s an issue the government, if there’s a problem, should pick up. Hopefully, these things will be resolved.”—WBYA? was two years old. “Hadid was right,” Wilson says. “There are laws, and governments do have to negotiate and enforce those.” But laws don’t insulate designers from these issues, she says. “There are clearly relationships between architects and those who are building the buildings. Hadid’s comments made it clear that we have to make those relationships visible and recognizable.”
WBYA? conceives of the building industry’s global supply chain as consisting of two sides, or halves: a tightly conceived “design half,” and an opaque “construction half.” The design networks are so intricate and complex that, as Baxi puts it, “If something as small as a screw is in the wrong place, it can be traced back and forth, and eventually corrected.” By comparison, the construction networks are loose, leaving more space for exploitation. Since the people working on these two sides usually don’t come into direct contact, each side remains relatively unknown to the other. “The atomization of the building process occludes the ability to see the larger system or assemblage,” Wilson says.
The Art Institute exhibition showed how these halves intersect by visualizing the movements across the globe of the materials and people involved in the design and construction of six building façades, all for major international projects, including Hamad International Airport in Doha and BAM South Tower in Brooklyn, N.Y. (An online database documents all 50 façades the group researched.) Laura Diamond Dixit, another member of the group and a Ph.D. candidate at the GSAPP, combed design journals, newspaper articles, and lawsuits to identify the firms and workers involved in these façades. The data reveals concentrations of influence: A handful of companies appear frequently in the supply chain, including Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and the construction firm Skanska; Permasteelisa Group and AECOM supply materials. The Trump Organization figures prominently too. Frequent controversies around Trump projects, including unpaid workers and deaths on sites, have left long paper trails, Dixit says.
In nearly every project, the workers at construction sites were the most difficult to trace. Basic information, including where workers came from and how much they were paid, was, in some instances, impossible to find. “It proved our question mark,” Wilson says, referring to the group’s name. “You can’t find out about the worker. It’s a black hole.”
A Field Guide to “Human Sustainability”
When WBYA? began to think about what architects could do, it turned to the AIA’s Code of Ethics, where it found one brief statement dedicated to human rights: “Members shall not engage in conduct involving fraud or wanton disregard of the rights of others.”
By contrast, WBYA? discovered extensive guidelines about the environment. For the group, this discrepancy was both problematic and hopeful: If environmental advocates could succeed in persuading the industry to adopt meaningful standards, so too could WBYA? succeed in bringing greater awareness to human rights—or, as Wilson reframes it, to “human sustainability.”
For now, WBYA? believes it can wield the greatest influence by supporting hands-on education efforts and activism. In February, on its website, it published “a critical field guide” to the ethical questions surrounding migrant labor. The guide asks architects to think about how to improve worker housing, particularly at sites in the Middle East and Asia, where workers often live in crowded, poorly constructed tents, or even on the bottom floors of the building they are constructing. As Wilson puts it, “Why couldn’t you think about how you house the workers as you’re planning the staging and phasing of a project?”
The field guide also asks architects to conceive of construction sites as sites of knowledge-transfer; that is, as places where laborers develop skills (how to read drawings or handle sophisticated machinery) that they can bring back to their home countries and villages. By encouraging architects to facilitate this kind of information exchange, WBYA? implicitly asks designers to think of themselves as workers, too. “You have to see yourself as a worker to even think about your relationship, in solidarity, with the people you’re working with to build a building,” Wilson says.
With its Art Institute show, the group hoped to expand its audience beyond just architects. Zoë Ryan, the curator of architecture and design at the Art Institute, learned of the group’s work when she curated the Istanbul Design Biennial in 2014. The group responded to the biennial’s call for entries by posing a provocative question: “If low-cost labor enables architects’ uninhibited creative expression, what is the human cost?” WBYA? designed maps of global migrant workforces and visualizations of designers’ roles in the global supply chain. The installation was so well received, Ryan says, that she asked the group to develop a show closer to home. “It’s a conversation that needs to happen.”
As the group has traveled to share its work, it has learned how widely labor practices vary across sites and countries. In the Middle East, workers are not allowed to unionize, and therefore lack basic protections. Closer to home, activists are increasingly concerned about the rights of undocumented workers. A few weeks ago, Baxi and Wilson spent a day giving a workshop at Studio Gang’s Chicago office. It was WBYA?’s first workshop at an architecture firm, and it focused, in part, on undocumented workers. Jeanne Gang, FAIA, the firm’s founding principal, says the session was “so productive”: “We look forward to continuing the dialogue with our colleagues and collaborators toward helping affect positive change in our city.”
Helping architects think more critically about their own role in the global supply chain is central to WBYA?’s mission, Baxi says. “People always want to talk about the workers. And we say, ‘Yes, the workers. But architects have to do some work, too.’ ”
