Sharon Prince, founder and CEO of Grace Farms Foundation in New Cannan, Conn., has launched Design for Freedom, a new initiative aimed at “eradicat[ing] modern slavery from the built environment,” according to a press release from the organization. Prince developed the original idea for Design for Freedom alongside the late Architect’s Newspaper founding editor-in-chief Bill Menking following a conversation where the pair discussed strategies for eliminating forced labor from the building materials supply chain.
Noting that industry professionals rarely acknowledged or prioritized the issue of forced labor despite its prevalence, Prince and Menking organized a team of principals across the architecture, engineering, and construction sectors, eventually knitting together a group of more than 60 experts and industry leaders committed to raising awareness of instances of forced labor and cleaning out the building materials supply chain.
“Examining our building materials supply chain is a moral and legal imperative,” Prince says in the same release. “Almost all modern construction projects are subsidized with slavery, due to unchecked forced labor that permeates thousands of raw and composite materials sourced both locally in the United States and globally. While initial attention concentrated on developing ethical labor practices on construction and job sites, we now seek to extend these regulations to the building materials supply chain, including oversight of sub-contractors, manufacturers, and commodities-level providers in such areas as forestry, fiber, and mining.”
Courtesy Design for Freedom
To accompany its launch, Design for Freedom has published its first report, a 96-page call-to-action assessing the built environment’s dependence on slave labor in its many forms. Authored by Prince, Luis C.de Baca, and Chelsea Thatcher, the report also include contributions from Yale School of Architecutre dean Phil Bernstein, FAIA; senior principal and managing director of MASS Design Group Christian Benimana; SO–IL founding principals Jing Lu and Florian Idenburg, and artist Carrie Mae Weems, among others—more than 30 in all.
Design for Freedom will also release a series of free, public webinars co-hosted by Grace Farms and Pratt Institute. The webinars, which will focus on topics ranging from tools for fostering ethical building materials supply chains to what AEC professionals can learn from other industries committed to eradicating forced labor, begin on Oct. 29 and can count towards AIA continuing education credits.
Design for Freedom has also spearheaded a number of partnerships with universities including the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, New York University and Parsons in New York, and Princeton University in Princeton, N.J., to organize a number of symposia and lectures aimed at introducing the issue to the next generation of designers. This fall, Yale University in New Haven, Conn., will introduce one of the first programs: a class focused entirely on forced labor in building supply chains.
A following version of this article described Grace Farms Foundation as SANAA-designed. SANAA designed the firm’s River Building, not the entire preserve.