The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) announced today that it has nixed a controversial student competition to design an immigrant detention center.
The brief asked participants to design a “Humanitarian Refugee (Detention) Center.” When it was announced, the competition received an avalanche of negative feedback, which the ACSA called “justified criticism” in its statement.
“[While] the organization is committed to engaging important issues in our society, we regret our decision to publish the category,” it added.
ACSA deleted its own publicity tweet about the competition, and subsequent tweets from @ACSAUpdate on the topic redirect to broken URLs.
A new building category for the spring semester will be announced in a few weeks.