# WEAPONIZED ARCHITECTURE /// TEMPLE GRANDINSHUMANE SLAUGHTERHOUSES AND THE ARCHITECTURALPOLITICS OF THE LESSER EVIL

Dr. Temple Grandin is a professor at Colorado State University who wrote several books aboutautism and animal science. Her autism allowed her to a detailed perception of the animal behavior andthe factors that influence it. Grandins architectural inventions were created in reaction to particularlybrutal and insensitive means of bringing the cattle to their ultimate slaughter. Her designs provide amultitude of material and spatial apparatuses based on a deep understanding of cattles inherentbehavior and tendencies that leads it to death without stress nor indication of what is about to happento it. The drawings that follow this article demonstrates of this precise care for the animals that seemsto integrate the totality of factors that could potentially affect them on their way. Such an exhaustivecare associated to the generous sharing of the totality of plans, techniques and advice is by all meansadmirable, and I dont think that her design is problematic in the way it functions but rather, in what itreveals about architecture in general.

Let us begin by saying that a design that is created in view of bringing bodies from a point A to a pointB strongly suggests the anticipatory aspects of its conception. Even in the case of a simple corridor likethe ones we experience on a daily basis already holds a certain degree of authority enforced byarchitecture through the material means it uses to effectively brings body from one side of the corridor

to another, leaving little option to this body. For each corridor we experience, there was atranscendental entity (architect, engineer, politician etc.) that, not only anticipated this movementwhen conceiving the space that contextualizes it but also had an interest in having this movementeffectuated.This anticipatory aspect of architectural design is admittedly difficult to fully suppress inthe creative process since it mostly defines its essence; yet, understanding the degree of violence that itallows the designer is an important step in the awareness of architectures weaponized characteristics.

We should go even further in the examination of what Grandins design suggests about architecture.Her scheme intervenes within the cogs of a death machine that is accepted as a postulate Ipersonally eat meat so I accept it too. For someone who considers the industrialized death of an animalas ethically problematic, the quest for ameliorating its conditions without changing its output (death)places it in the always complex realms of the choice for the lesser evil. In this specific case, we can saythat a slaughterhouse can be conceived as a death machine whose process conditions are in accordancewith its violent output (what is commonly called evil) or can be conceived as a death machine whoseprocess conditions are contradictory to its violent output (what is commonly called lesser evil).Tragically, when talking about the process of slaughterhouses as death machines, it is difficult not tothink of the industrialized death machine that the holocaust enacted. The gas chambers disguised intocommon shower rooms by the Nazi administration can be considered as the most extreme architecturalexample of the relentlessness of the output in the case of a choice for what some would understand asthe logic of the lesser evil. This horrifying historical example also illustrates how such a choice oftenreinforces the output by constituting a deception that do not even allow a form of resistance against ithowever hopeless it might be. Such an argument is made by Hannah Arendt (The Eggs Speak up,1950) cited by Eyal Weizman in The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violencefrom Arendt to Gaza (Verso, 2011) when she controversially describes the forced yet resignedadministrative collaboration of Jewish councils during the holocaust to avoid panic, to minimizesuffering or for the larger good' (Weizman, p36). Recognizing the complexity of the situation, Arendthowever asserts that when nothing else was possible, to do nothing was the last effective form ofresistance, disorder was preferable to order, and the practical consequences of a refusal to cooperatewere nearly always better than collaboration (Arendt quoted by Weizman, p36).

What Weizman does not explicitly discuss however, is the fundamental void of sense that the conceptof lesser evil constitutes. What we call dilemma corresponds to a difficult choice (usually ideologicallyreduced to two options). I wont shock anyone by stating that a difficult choice can only emerge whenall options are considered as more or less equally good or equally bad. The idea that one couldhesitate between evil and lesser evil is therefore impossible, since if the term of lesser waseffectively meaningful, the choice would become easy. If a choice is truly difficult to be made, it meansthat there is an hesitation between evil and evil (we should say bad and bad to avoid speakingwithin a moralistic realms). The term of lesser evil therefore intervenes as a sort of retrospectivelegitimation that hides the choice for a bad option and thus blurs the fact that some unconsidered

options existed.

In the specific case of architecture, such a problem goes back to the question that I have often ask onthis blog, which has to do with the paradigmatic commission of a prison given to an architect: should(s)he refuse it or try to improve its conditions from the inside? The ethical answer to this question isinvariably linked to the ethical consideration for the output. In other words, an architect could considerthat prison is an inevitable means of regulation of society as a postulate, in which case, it is her/hisethical obligation to indeed accept such commission and to improve its conditions like Grandinimproved the conditions of a program that she did not fundamentally refused as such. On the contrary,another architect can consider that prison, in its very essence, constitutes an ethically unacceptableprogram within a given society, in which case (s)he will have to systematically refuse such commission.In any case, when facing a situation where all options seems to lead inexorably to the same ethicallyunacceptable output, one can remember Arendts words according to which disorder [is] preferable toorder and a refusal to cooperate [is] nearly always better than collaboration.

Following images are designs by Temple Grandin (see many more on her exhaustive website):

Following images are screenshots from the film Temple Grandin by Mick Jackson (2010):