The Architecture of Ethics

Thomas Fisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351065726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Ethics is one of the most important and least understood aspects of design practice. In his latest book, Thomas Fisher shows how ethics are inherent to the making of architecture – and how architecture offers an unusual and useful way of looking at ethics.

The Architecture of Ethics helps students in architecture and other design disciplines to understand the major approaches to ethics and to apply them to the daily challenges they face in their work. The book covers each of the four dominant approaches to ethics: virtue ethics, social contract ethics, duty ethics, and utilitarian ethics. Each chapter examines the dilemmas designers face from the perspective of one of these categories. Written in an accessible, jargon-free style, the text also features 100 illustrations to help integrate these concepts into the design process and to support visual understanding.

Ethics is now a required part of accredited architecture programs, making this book essential reading for all students in architecture and design.

Chapter 1

Breaking rules

I grew up in the 1960s and often heard people say that “Rules are meant to be broken.” That idea appealed to my rebellious teenager mind, but as I have thought about it since, the phrase seems much more complex and much less evident. What rules? Made by whom? For what reason? And why are they “meant” to be broken? Broken by whom, in which situations? Those questions raise all sorts of ethical quandaries and they lie at the heart of architecture, the field I have pursued since becoming an adult.

Creative people, of course, have always broken rules; societies move forward when some have the insight to see a new and better way to do something and the courage to act on those ideas, regardless of what the rules allow. Indeed, the most important innovations make the old rules seem absurd and almost impossible to return to, even if we chose. But something changed in many Western societies after World War II. Breaking the rules became not something for the exceptional few, but something that became the norm and almost expected of us, wisely or not.

I saw this in my own education. My architect grandfather, Harold Fisher, trained in the methods of the École des Beaux Arts, saw our field as one of applying well-established rules to new situations. He did not question the validity of the rules and he saw the creative act in terms of how well he chose which rules to use. My architect professors urged the opposite. For them, the originality of our work as students and the unprecedented and even uncanny nature of what we produced marked the difference between the ordinary and extraordinary projects – the B and C grades versus the As.

The same has characterized the architecture of our time. The architectural media cannot get enough of rule-breaking work, as I saw in the years that I worked as a magazine editor. If architects did too many buildings too much alike, magazines like mine seemed to tire of them and look for new people to publish, as if practitioners not only had to the break the received rules of our field, but also their own rules, which had governed their previous production. Originality reigned and it required continuous renewal or the architect no longer seemed original.

That also seemed to work when pursuing commissions. I once served on the architect-selection committee for a major museum project, which required that the architects come to the interview to talk about their relevant experience and qualifications for the project, without any design drawings or models. All of the architects did as requested, except one, who hand-carried into the interview a model of what he would design and who subsequently received the commission (and ended up doing an exceptional building).

Figure 1.1  My grandfather was hired just before the Crash of 1929 by architect Bertram Goodhue, the architect of St. Thomas Church in New York City, who, like many of his generation, saw architecture as an evolutionary development of traditional forms.

I supported the client’s request that architects not do any design work up front since in minimized the uncompensated work of the firms competing for the commission, and the museum director liked the idea as well, since he did not want the architect to design the building without the input of his staff and board members. But that experience made me wonder if rule-breaking had become almost expected of creative people. When is it acceptable to break the rules and when is it not? Ethics tells us that being good and doing what is right usually means following the rules, while in aesthetics – at least in the modern era – those who do the unexpected or the outlandish seem to succeed. So how do we balance ethics and aesthetics, cooperation and creativity? The answer to such a question depends, in part, in how we think about ethics.

Those who measure the ethics of an action according to its consequences might say that the architect who won the job did the right thing. His decision to break the rules and bring a model to the interview was a good one, at least for him. And, since he did an exceptional building, his receipt of the commission proved to be a good decision for the client and the people who use the facility. Utilitarian ethics asks that we consider the greatest good for the greatest number, and in that sense, the greatest number – the many users of the building – did receive the greatest benefit with the selection of that architect.

That brings us to another way of thinking about ethics: Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative: that we judge the rightness of an action according to whether or not we would want it to be universal. If we let one person break a rule, Kant would argue, then we have to let everyone break that rule (Kant, 2016). You could argue that every competitor, in this case, was equally free to ignore the request of the selection committee, although that committee did not say that its interview requirements were just a suggestion or that respecting them was voluntary. Which raises the question of where responsibility in this case lies. In society at large, we not only hold people responsible for obeying the law, we also hold officials responsible for enforcing it, and so, by awarding the commission to the architect who ignored their requirement, the selection committee ended up rewarding the very behavior they did not want, which is not a good signal to send at the beginning of an architect-client relationship.

In this case, the architect so impressed the selection committee that they overlooked the very requirements they had imposed. And, because the architect produced an exceptional building, you could argue that it does not matter what happened during the interview. If something ends in great architecture, do the means of getting there really matter? That question echoes the disconnection between aesthetics and ethics that has existed in Western countries for at least a century. Good art comes from good artists, who may or may not be good people, and history offers us plenty of examples of this, of despicable behavior on the part of those who created delightful masterpieces.

Ethics also demands that we make distinctions between unwise actions and illegal or unethical ones. In this case, no one other than the architect himself would have been harmed had his decision to bring a model to the interview backfired on him and led to his disqualification. Which also helps explain why we accept a degree of separation between aesthetics and ethics. A painter who takes an aesthetic risk in a painting does no harm except perhaps to his or her own reputation, and so healthy societies accept and even encourage such violations of the rules in order to realize something new and important.

Not so with ethics, which involves the effect of our actions on others. If that same painter forged a famous painting and passed it off as the original, we would not chalk that up to creativity and excuse it as artists just being artists. A faked painting breaks not an aesthetic rule, but an ethical one and it damages not just the painter’s reputation, but also the people who buy or sell the copy thinking it authentic. Aesthetic rule-breaking may challenge our expectations or change our perceptions, but ethical rule-breaking can harm others and ultimately the ethical violators themselves; we allow that behavior – or look the other way – at our peril.

Figure 1.2  Frank Lloyd Wright epitomized the dilemma of the great artist as a not-so-great person. After designing this house for Edwin and Mamah Borthwick Cheney, for example, Wright and Mamah ran away together to Europe.

Reference

Kant, Immanuel. 2016. The Collected Works of Immanuel Kant. London: Delphi Classics.

Chapter 2

Built environments

Although the word aesthetics has the letters for the word “ethics” embedded in it, the former has long buried the latter, at least in architecture school, where I quickly learned that pragmatics, physics, and aesthetics seemed to matter most. How a building functions, how it stands up, and what it looks like – its commodity, firmness, and delight – remained the central concerns of us as students, as they have for architects since at least the time of the Roman architect, Vitruvius. In my school, at least, the equally vital questions of ethics rarely got asked, questions such as: what good does a building do, for whom, and in what way? The ethical implications of buildings seemed to me then as they do now to be as relevant as function and form, but because few architects ever receive even a basic grounding in ethics, its questions go unanswered, even though they would help us produce a better, more equitable, and more resilient built environment.

This ethical lacuna seems odd since the ethical dilemmas of our lives all happen in physical space, in the interactions of individuals and groups in particular places: in the enclosures in which we live or work, the streets on which we travel, and the landscapes which we enjoy. These places may not cause our behavior, good or bad, but neither do they play a neutral role. The design of an office may make it easier for a boss to hide his sexual harassment of an employee, the location of a community may signal that some people are welcome and others not, and the layout of a city might separate neighborhoods in ways that allow people of different socio-economic levels to never come into contact with each other.

Physical space, in other words, has more than a coincidental relationship to our behavior; it creates the opportunities to do right or wrong and as such, we need to take ethics into account when we design spaces. Most designers, though, don’t do this, at least consciously and intentionally. Architectural ethics, for instance, mostly deals with issues of practice and the contractual or professional obligations that architects have to the public, to clients, to colleagues, and to the natural environment. The ethical implications of what architects create – the spaces in which we spend our days – rarely gets discussed and hardly gets mentioned in architects’ code of ethics. The same seems true of ethics as a branch of philosophy: space rarely gets mentioned in the ethical literature and ethics has remained largely a-spatial over most of its history, even though ethical dilemmas have a clear spatial aspect.

Take the famous Trolley Problem in ethics. In this thought experiment, a person in control of a train switch has to decide whether to let a run-away trolley kill several railroad workers along one track or to pull the switch to kill one person tied to the other track. That classic ethical dilemma has value in showing how utilitarianism, by seeking the greatest good for the greatest number, can lead to the obviously unethical act of murdering a person, but the Trolley Problem also remains vague about the actual space in which this dilemma occurs. Are the workers on the track within shouting range to warn them of the run-away trolley? Does their freedom of movement – as opposed to that of the person tied to the track – give them more agency and make their fate less determined by the person at the switch? And does their acceptance of an element of danger as track workers make this a story more about an occupational hazard than about an ethical dilemma? (Cathcart, 2013).

Figure 2.1 Philippa Foot’s original 1967 formulation of the Trolley Problem dealt with the ethical dilemma of sacrificing one person to save many rail workers in the way of a runaway train. Judith Thompson’s 1976 variation forced us to ask: would we push an innocent bystander off a bridge if that would stop the trolley?

The relative neglect of the spatial aspects of ethics and the ethical aspects of space may stem, in part, from the intervention of the law in situations in which conflicts occur in physical environments. We can all think of scenarios in which spatial conflicts raise contractual or legal issues: of tenants who damage their apartment or office, of property owners who fight over the boundary that separates their land, and of nations that close their borders to immigrants out of prejudice or fear. Such situations often get addressed through arbitration, litigation, or deportation, rather than through ethical debate or spatial design. In one sense, we have come to define space so often in terms of property – who has or hasn’t the right to do what where – that we don’t always see the connection between space and human agency – what is the meaning of what we do where.

And here, design has a useful and often unrecognized contribution to make. Unlike the law, which encourages us to view conflicts in black or white and property as public or private, design sees the world and its human interactions in more nuanced ways, as shades of gray. While architects and landscape architects, for instance, respect the boundaries between public and private property, their designs also acknowledge that people continually cross those boundaries and that these spaces exist within gradations of public, semi-public, semi-private, and private realms.

Likewise, while the law often frames a situation into a set of right-or-wrong, win-or-lose scenarios, design does the opposite. It seeks ways to enable both sides to win or at least have enough of their concerns addressed to make the situation less adversarial. In response to the scenarios above, a designer might try to design an apartment to minimize the potential for damage, to demarcate more clearly the boundaries between properties, or to accommodate refugees in ways that meet their basic needs. Design, in other words, becomes an anticipatory and precautionary way of addressing spatial conflicts, helping us avoid legal ethical conflicts and to keep us out of court.

But what role has ethics played in the formation of built space? From what we know of how humans lived for most of our history as a species, our ancestors had great ingenuity in making their shelter from what they had at hand and in stewarding the flora and fauna upon which they depended in order to ensure that they had enough for the next season. While homo sapiens clearly had negative effects on the environments, including the extinction of other species and the elimination of competitors, the minimal impact that human shelter had on the ecosystems we occupied also brings to mind the deep ecology ethic of Arne Naess. For most of human history, architecture remained an integral part of the natural envir...