Every profession needs to learn ethics, and architects are no exception.  While there might be better ways to teach ethics to architecture students, this assignment could be a powerful illustration of the proclivity of architects to blithely accept assignments without considering their broader consequences.

Did the architect who designed the bars around the Cabrini Green housing project consider whether doing that would enrich the lives of the project's residents?  Did the architect who designed a supermax prison modeled the size of the cells on veal pens consider the ethics of his actions?  How about the architect who designed the all-glass office building, which requires both air conditioning and heating to run year-round, depending on who is getting sunshine?

Consider this criticism:  "Architecture should be about enriching our lives culturally and lifting the spirits of the people who live or work in the buildings we create."  Exactly; but isn't it necessary, then, to teach students how to recognize when architecture meets those goals, and when it does not?

Over time, perhaps, an architect is trained to accept projects and turn them around without consideration as to the architect's moral culpability in what the buildings are used for.  If you hit young architecture students with a lesson this outrageous at the beginning of their careers, they might be better equipped in the future to approach their projects from an ethical perspective.

I thought that much of the torture that's practised these days were done with readily available resources and without specialized equipment (such as handcuffing someone into a position that makes it hard to breathe, or using water to force the victim into believing they will be drowned).

A torture device seems medieval in thinking.  I did attend an exhibit a few years ago that was solely on torture devices, most of which were from the medieval period.  At first, they seemed a little laughable...kind of what you hear about, the casket with needles, the iron mask, the little ease cage.  But as I progressed through the exhibit, I found myself becoming increasingly nauseous.  After about an hour or so, my friend and I had to flee from the exhibit.  

So, I can understand why any architecture student might not want to design such a device.

It requires the students to design a fully operational torture device.

Barbara Streisand iPod.

If I enroll at the University of Kent's School of Architecture would they make me design a new fully operational torture device, or could I use the fully operational torture device design I came up with in high school?

I agree with the critics of this school assignment that it is just too susceptible to misinterpretation.  The act of designing a torture machine does not in itself imply a revulsion toward torture, it might suggest the opposite.  There could be people whose dislike for torture and whose respect for human rights would be further enhanced by this exercise, but there could equally well be sadists who would take pleasure in contemplating torture and who indeed, might even wind up actually using the machines that they build.  Aside from that, even if you wanted to include some kind of museum of horrors for the new Amnesty International building, plenty of torture machines already exist, it is hardly necessary to invent new ones.

A somewhat equivalent idea would be to assign a class of aspiring artists to paint pictures which depict people being tortured.  However, a picture depicting a child being tortured might be interpreted as illegal child pornography, with the artist becoming liable to arrest.  So the machines, which actually could be used to torture people, are probably the safer option to create.  (You might also say, no big deal, just paint adult victims, but then, how can you be certain of the age of a fictitious person in a painting?  They have no actual birth certificates.  And some people will go to great lengths to find others guilty of immorality.)

I think that we as a species are very far from having the dispassionate objectivity that we should have if we want to play around with the idea of torture.

"This is a 12-story block combining classical neo-Georgian features with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive here and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these..."