On October 3, The Architecture Lobby (TAL) and DAARNA released a statement urging AIA president Evelyn Lee, and AIA leadership more broadly, to adopt a resolution from the International Union of Architects (UIA) regarding Palestine. AIA did not respond to AN’s request for comment.
TAL is “a grassroots organization of architectural workers that advocates for just labor practices and an equitable (built) environment.”
DAARNA is a refugee advocacy group led by Seattle-based community architect Rania Qawasma that offers architecture and urban planning services. In a 2024 interview with AIA, Qawasma, a third-generation Palestinian refugee, shared how she works with displaced people.
The AIA is the representative body of the U.S. to the UIA. The UIA adopted its Palestine resolution on September 20.
The joint statement from TAL and DAARNA arrived days before the two-year anniversary of the October 7, 2023 massacre. On October 8, 2025, Israel and Hamas agreed to the first phase of a peace deal.
In their statement, TAL and DAARNA, accused AIA of “complicit silence” despite “two years of aggression by Israel that have led to over 75 percent of all buildings in Gaza being destroyed and over 65,000 Palestinians killed,” adding, “AIA has not yet condemned the genocide occurring in Palestine, nor called for its members to refrain from furthering illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.”
The groups also cited a controversy from 2022 when AIA fired Ali Lari, then AIA Middle East chapter president, for inviting historian Ilan Pappe to lecture in a webinar about Palestine. “AIA has suppressed discussion and discourse around architecture’s complicity in the urban destruction and ethnic cleansing of Palestine,” TAL’s Rand Lemley told AN. “We see it as the AIA’s responsibility and duty to adopt the [UIA] resolution.”
“AIA members have been involved in the design and construction of a U.S. Embassy on disputed land in Jerusalem, a project that many in the international community have called illegal. As a professional, this means my colleagues are complicit in the settler-colonial project that is ongoing in Palestine,” Lemley elaborated.
“The UIA’s statement is extremely late, yet the AIA’s is non-existent,” Lari added. “It is this level of complacency and political expediency that has enabled these systems of power to affect unprecedented live-streamed genocide. Had the leaders we entrusted our institutions with acted upon our agreed values, we would have witnessed a different reality.”
Requested Actions
The UIA, based in Paris, is led by UIA president Regina Gonthier. On September 2, the UIA passed a council resolution “concerning the situation in Palestine” submitted by UIA member Mohamed Sahby Gorgi, a Tunisian architect. On September 20, UIA voted to:
- Condemn the genocide committed by Israel in Gaza.
- Request an end to starvation by allowing the entry of food and medicine and ensuring the fair and safe distribution to citizens.
- Call for an immediate ceasefire and cessation of hostilities.
- Condemn the destruction of Palestine’s built heritage.
- Appeal to architects worldwide to refrain from any participation in the illegal colonization of Palestine.
- Request an international assessment of the destruction.
- Offer the UIA’s moral and expert support, through its Working Bodies, at every stage: damage assessment, technical expertise and reconstruction.
- Contribute to improving living conditions in Gaza and restoring dignity to the Palestinian people.
TAL and DAARNA’s statement included five demands for President Lee and AIA leadership. TAL and DAARNA want AIA to:
- Publicly adopt the September 20, 2025 UIA resolution on Palestine
- Censor in the form of disqualification from awards, leadership, or AIA media coverage of AIA members who participate in projects that promote occupation, colonization, or erasure of Palestinians or in illegally occupied territory, unless it is for the benefit of Palestinians in their land
- Support international efforts to rebuild Palestine for Palestinians and center the voices of Palestinians within that rebuilding process
- Disclose AIA ties to Israeli state institutions—whether through funds received or services provided
- Divest from any funding from and to Israeli state institutions and those firms complicit in the illegal occupation, colonization, and erasure of Palestine
“We find ourselves in a moment, after two years of ongoing genocide and decades of illegal Israeli occupation, to once again stand with Palestinians and acknowledge that this atrocity is connected to the oppression of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people’s worldwide,” DAARNA told AN.
AIA’s Values
AIA has not officially addressed the violence in Gaza since October 10, 2023, when it released a statement that encouraged relief donations to reputable groups. The text stated that “the war is causing unimaginable suffering for civilians on both sides, destroying homes, infrastructure, and lives.”
Lari, a registered architect in Bahrain and New York, said, “The AIA’s stance today, in refusing to stand for equity and human rights in Gaza and Palestine and especially currently in the face of genocide, is not new. In fact, the AIA has declared values, that which are on its website, and undeclared ones.”
Lari continued: “In a meeting with then president of the AIA Peter Exley and vice president Daniel Hart along with others on their censoring of a statement by the AIA Middle East on the Gaza ethnic cleansing and onslaught in 2021, another set of values prevailed: ‘It would damage our relationships in Congress.’ So it appears that the AIA’s values include another that overshadows the others: political expediency.”
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