# WEAPONIZED ARCHITECTURE /// TEMPLE GRANDINS

HUMANE SLAUGHTERHOUSES AND THE ARCHITECTURAL

POLITICS OF THE LESSER EVIL

Dr. Temple Grandin is a professor at Colorado State University who wrote several books about
autism and animal science. Her autism allowed her to a detailed perception of the animal behavior and
the factors that influence it. Grandins architectural inventions were created in reaction to particularly
brutal and insensitive means of bringing the cattle to their ultimate slaughter. Her designs provide a
multitude of material and spatial apparatuses based on a deep understanding of cattles inherent
behavior and tendencies that leads it to death without stress nor indication of what is about to happen
to it. The drawings that follow this article demonstrates of this precise care for the animals that seems
to integrate the totality of factors that could potentially affect them on their way. Such an exhaustive
care associated to the generous sharing of the totality of plans, techniques and advice is by all means
admirable, and I dont think that her design is problematic in the way it functions but rather, in what it
reveals 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 point
B strongly suggests the anticipatory aspects of its conception. Even in the case of a simple corridor like
the ones we experience on a daily basis already holds a certain degree of authority enforced by
architecture 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 a
transcendental entity (architect, engineer, politician etc.) that, not only anticipated this movement
when conceiving the space that contextualizes it but also had an interest in having this movement
effectuated.This anticipatory aspect of architectural design is admittedly difficult to fully suppress in
the creative process since it mostly defines its essence; yet, understanding the degree of violence that it
allows 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 I
personally eat meat so I accept it too. For someone who considers the industrialized death of an animal
as 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 say
that a slaughterhouse can be conceived as a death machine whose process conditions are in accordance
with its violent output (what is commonly called evil) or can be conceived as a death machine whose
process 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 to
think of the industrialized death machine that the holocaust enacted. The gas chambers disguised into
common shower rooms by the Nazi administration can be considered as the most extreme architectural
example of the relentlessness of the output in the case of a choice for what some would understand as
the logic of the lesser evil. This horrifying historical example also illustrates how such a choice often
reinforces the output by constituting a deception that do not even allow a form of resistance against it
however 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 Violence
from Arendt to Gaza (Verso, 2011) when she controversially describes the forced yet resigned
administrative collaboration of Jewish councils during the holocaust to avoid panic, to minimize
suffering or for the larger good' (Weizman, p36). Recognizing the complexity of the situation, Arendt
however asserts that when nothing else was possible, to do nothing was the last effective form of
resistance, disorder was preferable to order, and the practical consequences of a refusal to cooperate
were 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 concept
of lesser evil constitutes. What we call dilemma corresponds to a difficult choice (usually ideologically
reduced to two options). I wont shock anyone by stating that a difficult choice can only emerge when
all options are considered as more or less equally good or equally bad. The idea that one could
hesitate between evil and lesser evil is therefore impossible, since if the term of lesser was
effectively meaningful, the choice would become easy. If a choice is truly difficult to be made, it means
that there is an hesitation between evil and evil (we should say bad and bad to avoid speaking
within a moralistic realms). The term of lesser evil therefore intervenes as a sort of retrospective
legitimation 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 on
this 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 is
invariably linked to the ethical consideration for the output. In other words, an architect could consider
that prison is an inevitable means of regulation of society as a postulate, in which case, it is her/his
ethical obligation to indeed accept such commission and to improve its conditions like Grandin
improved 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 unacceptable
program 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 ethically
unacceptable output, one can remember Arendts words according to which disorder [is] preferable to
order 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):