Architecture and its Ethical Dilemmas

Nicholas Ray

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415348683
• eBook ISBN: 9781134274710
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Architettura generale

A cast of leading writers and practitioners tackle the ethical questions that architects are increasingly facing in their work, from practical considerations in construction to the wider social context of buildings, their appearance, use and place in the narrative of the environment. This book gives an account of these ethical questions from the perspectives of historical architectural practice, philosophy, and business, and examines the implications of such dilemmas. Taking the current discussion of ethics in architecture on to a new stage, this volume provides an accumulation of diverse opinions, focusing on architects' actions and products that materially affect the lives of people in all urbanized societies.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The purpose of this book is to examine some of the implications of the ethical dilemmas that are special to architecture. Architecture intersects with ethics in numerous ways, and although this book aims to examine some of them, it cannot pretend to be comprehensive. Ethical dilemmas arise for all of us as individuals and in every kind of work, since we all make decisions daily which imply a scale of values as to where to place our energy or our resources. At a global scale the huge disparities in affluence between differing parts of the world, and between differing sectors of society in the so-called developed world, raise awkward issues of judgement that have led many who are trained in the design disciplines to feel that the exercise of their skills is irrelevant, at least until such disparities are substantially reduced. But the focus of this book is on the particular professional dilemmas that architects face, broadly within the context of the developed world. Within this topic there is plenty to concern us.

Like any professional activity, the practice of architecture involves codes of behaviour (discussed by Tom Spector in Chapter 10), but the results are visible artefacts which necessarily reflect society’s values, and this makes for particularly interesting problems of interpretation and judgement, across a very broad field. Among the many issues which are entailed and which are discussed in the following pages are the following.

How should architects attempt to resolve what might be called a central paradox in their activity – that, since it “intends what ought to be, it has a quasi-theoretical character; yet because it is a solution that is ‘right in these circumstances’ it is also non-theoretical”?¹ The activity of architecture is inescapably contingent on the particular, but at the same time the result is frequently required to represent an ideal: how should architects position themselves in relation to that dilemma?

Following on from that question, how is it proper to behave as a designer in relation to the user, the client, one’s fellow designers or one’s employees? Do architects deserve a privileged position, as artists of some kind, or are they servants of society? Have the needs and aspirations of society in the twenty-first century changed in such a way as to invalidate previously held notions of the architect’s role? Indeed, does the ‘professional’ architect–client relationship have a place in the twenty-first century?

Then, if the artefacts they create are to be enjoyed by more than the privileged few, what are the responsibilities of architects to the public at

The mention of style raises the question of aesthetics, which is more frequently the locus for the theoretical discussion of architecture. But can aesthetics be disassociated from ethics? Some of the historical confusions between the two are disentangled by Andrew Saint in Chapter 2, but Neil Leach (Chapter 13) argues that aesthetic attitudes often mask or act as a substitute for ethical judgements.

The contributors to this book are not exclusively architects and architectural theorists, but include philosophers with broader interests. Most were participants in a conference with the same title as this book, which I organised at New Hall, Cambridge, on 22 and 23 March 2004. This was arranged jointly through the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities and the Continuing Professional Development Unit of the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Eastern Region. The conjunction of academic and professional sponsors mirrored the ambition of the conference, and indeed of this book: to bring together academics and practitioners to analyse questions of theory and practice, which are too often considered quite separately.

It is debatable how far theoretical discussion affects matters of practice, and the contribution of empirical evidence to the most fundamental philosophical issues is also problematic. In an article in the London Review of Books many years ago, Thomas Nagel, the American philosopher, to whose Mortal Questions I refer in Chapter 3, put this rather cogently:

If I had to give a general characterisation of philosophy I should say that it was the examination of whatever is so basic that we must simply take it for granted in almost every aspect of life in order to function at all – whether we are merely living, talking, perceiving and acting, or are engaged in sophisticated scientific enquiry. An ordinary citizen or a research scientist can’t constantly be asking himself: “What is a number?” “What is thought?” “What makes my words mean anything?” “How do I know that my experiences provide any evidence whatsoever about the world outside my own mind?” “Does anything have any value at all?”

It is, in fact, a mark of the philosophical nature of these questions that you can go through life without thinking about them: it shows how fundamental they are. What is examined and called into question by philosophy is simply used in ordinary life. This makes philosophy a peculiar activity: when you try to subject to critical examination your most basic forms of thought and grounds of action, there is very little left that you can use in conducting the investigation. All your accustomed tools and methods are under the microscope, and you may have to use some of them anyway.

It is usually fruitless to try to answer the most basic philosophical questions by reference to the results of an empirical science – either because these results are based on methods and concepts and forms of evidence that are themselves the objects of those questions, or because the questions remain even if the results are accepted, as with sociobiology and ethics.²

Despite the final section of this book, which does examine some more general philosophical issues (namely the pervasive influence of the thinking of Heidegger and Kant), the kinds of dilemmas raised in the following pages are not ‘fundamental’, and mostly revolve around ‘everyday’ ethical issues – what is it right to do in these circumstances? It therefore aims to inform the practice of architecture, to encourage a more self-reflective professionalism, and to assist in a broader understanding of issues of practice by those who theorise.

Footnotes

¹ Leatherbarrow 1993.

² Nagel 1987.

Part 1
The historical perspective

The concept of professionalism as we understand it is relatively recent. In this section, Andrew Saint examines British architects’ engagement with ethical issues over recent centuries, and I contribute an analysis of a problematic building of the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Up until the 1970s architects were expected to act as impartial professional arbiters, to be the “intermediate agents”, in Soane’s words, between employers and contractors. That role, with its attendant ethical complexities, has all but disappeared, but Saint believes that “architecture is the only liberal profession whose welfare – possibly its very survival – depends on its ability to enunciate and rally around a set of moral principles”.

In Britain, he argues, architecture is a weak or even marginal profession, because realistically architects are “bit-part players” in the process of meeting society’s needs, and always have been. In the past they have claimed authority for their activity as transcending mundane requirements to create art, and the argument for art has involved ethical justifications. The propaganda of A. W. N. Pugin, with its famous insistence on “truth” to materials, was no less sincere for being congruent with the social and economic opportunities of the time: minimal explicit construction was valued as both an architectural and an economic good.

The mission of architects can be expressed personally and collectively: on a personal level it can tend to arrogance – the architect as arbiter of taste and values. But architects in public employment from the 1870s onwards, and later the members of the Modern Movement, proclaimed a wider social mission, which reached its fulfilment in the post-war schools and housing programmes. The most obvious collective cause which architects today would espouse is that of sustainability: not surprisingly this is mentioned in the text of several of the contributors here. Andrew Saint predicts in conclusion that, in Britain, which has always suspected arguments about architecture as art, ethical justifications for an ecologically responsible architecture constitute the most compelling arguments for the importance of the profession.

I use the case study of James Stirling’s History Faculty building at Cambridge, a notorious building of the 1960s, to examine architects’ ethical dilemmas in the twentieth century. The Cambridge History Faculty building was highly regarded by architects on its completion, and continues to be admired for its formal inventiveness, but has never won the affection of its users or the public. In undertaking a review of Stirling’s monograph in 1985, I had recourse to an essay by Thomas Nagel in which he identified five conflicting values that might be present in any social enterprise. In artistic productions there are issues of perfectionist ends, and philosophically these pose a quandary, since it seems ‘immoral’ behaviour might be retrospectively justifiable if it leads to a masterpiece – the architect might benefit from ‘moral luck’. This was a problem which eng...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustration credits
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Part 1 The historical perspective
• Part 2 The professional context in the twenty-first century
• Part 3 Accountability and the architectural imagination
• Part 4 Personal and public ethos
• Part 5 Ethics and aesthetics
• Index