How can architecture be ethical

A further issue is determined on the basis of judging architecture to be a service or product. Taking architecture as service means that architects do not have a stake on copyright, as they would then be creators-by-contract; tradition has it that rights to expression of ideas so created accrue to the contracting party.

Copyright raises other concerns. Alternatively, we might view this as a routine episode in the history of architectural copying without attribution or permission. The challenge is to define relevant obligations of one architect to others, present or past.

Architect as judge in owner-contractor disputes. Architects have a dual role, serving as designer and administrator of architectural projects, and in this capacity may adjudicate between owner and contractor in matters of dispute. Standard issues concern conflicts of interest, grounds for adjudication, and criteria of fairness. Architectural objects often develop over time in cumulative and mutable fashion, through additions and alterations that—perhaps more frequently than not—change the design of a different, original architect or that of a prior alteration.

For any particular changes, or in consideration of design changes overall, we may stipulate obligations to respect original or prior intent and execution. One brand of such obligations, recognized in historic preservation and landmark laws, requires that aesthetic concerns in the public interest trump private interests. Key conceptual questions concern how to determine the source and conditions of any such obligations—and the sorts of responsibilities architects should have to existing structures.

Those responsibilities may extend to commitment to the integrity of work by fellow architects. While all artforms admit of a certain social character, architecture enjoys a particularly social nature, and may even be said to be an intrinsically social artform. There are two prominent candidate reasons as to why this is so.

For one, a central aim of architecture is to design shelter and so meet a variety of social needs. For another, architecture as practice is a social process or activity as it engages people in interpersonal relations of a social cast.

The first candidate reason stands or falls on whether, in fulfilling social needs, architecture is thereby rendered a social art. For an artform to be intrinsically social, any such need fulfilled should be critical rather than discretionary or extravagant. Thus, for example, addressing housing demands overall meets the criticality test—though addressing design demands for a third home does not.

The first reason looks right because architects often integrate social needs into design thinking. Armed with socially minded intentions, they create built structures which serve myriad social ends.

A difficulty arises, however, in consistently upholding such intentions as a mark of the social if a such intentions are unclear from experiencing architectural objects, instantiations, or representations thereof, b built structures are repurposed, or c there are architectural objects with no corresponding relevant intentions.

A second candidate reason that architecture is a social art is that processes of making architecture are thoroughly and ineluctably social phenomena, constituted by interactions of social groupings created and governed by social conventions and arrangements. On this view, the social nature of architecture consists in the status of the discipline as shaped by social convention—where such convention is designated by, and guides actions of, architects and other relevant agents.

Architectural phenomena are social, then, because they occur as a result of contracts, meetings, firms, charettes, crits, juries, projects, competitions, exhibitions, partnerships, professional organizations, negotiations, workflow organization, division of labor, and myriad other conventional and agreement-bound purposive actions and groupings of architects and other architectural stakeholders.

One might object that, on an institutional theory, all artforms are social in just these ways. However, as played out in art worlds, institutional theories tell us what counts as an art object rather than how such objects are constituted to begin with. Either view is temporally sensitive. Architecture as object and pursuit produces a great range of effects on social structures and phenomena, in particularly acute fashion in relation to housing, land use, and urban planning.

In turn, architecture is shaped by such social concerns as scarcity, justice, and social relations and obligations. Some of this shaping results from social group and institution requirements for space and the structured organization thereof, to promote group or institutional function and identity Halbwachs Causal direction. We might see social forces as primarily shaping architecture or else architecture as primarily shaping social forces.

Detractors counter that we cannot shape society through the built environment—or we ought not do so. What rests on directionality is how we parse not only theoretical relations but also practical consequences and perspectives concerning a host of social phenomena. To take one example, how we gauge and address the possibilities that architecture offers relative to social inequality is likely a function of whether architecture contributes to, or instead reflects, social classes and social hierarchies.

We might wonder whether architects can design so as to promote class equality—or solidarity, justice, autonomy, or other social phenomena as we might foster. On a third, holistic option, causality runs in both directions. Two examples of such are a systems analyses, which take built structures as social systems that contribute to social function, and b urban sociology, which takes the city en gros as social structuring of space which shapes its habitants, who in turn shape the city Simmel As expanded to environmental sociology, the suggestion is that built environments promote patterns of living, working, shopping, and otherwise conducting commerce among groups and in relation to other individuals.

Other social science domains suggest attendant conceptual issues. For another, sociology of architecture also studies the profession: the backgrounds and relations of architects and other stakeholders, norms governing behavior, and social structures of an architecture world constitute a species of artworld. This last suggestion prompts the question as to what influence we should attribute to an architecture world on the status of architectural objects. The architecture world raises issues beyond those motivating Danto or Dickie, engaging many parties whose interests and preferences are not primarily aesthetic or even economic but driven by social, commercial, engineering, planning, and various other factors.

For a third, a Science and Technology Studies perspective Gieryn investigates how architecture—primarily in its optimization focus, qua engineered technology—shapes knowledge formation for example, in laboratory or university design and organizes social behavior for example, in architecture for tourism or retail sales.

Conceptual issues here include whether there are global principles of optimization of architectural design for social advancement, and what sorts of moral constraints are appropriate to such optimization. That architecture has some political aspects is a widely held, if not entirely uncontested thesis, with weaker and stronger variants.

One weak version suggests that designing built structures entails political engagement through interactions of architects and the public. For example, architects solicit political support of government officials for development projects, governments engage architects to design built structures that express political programmatic messages, and citizens do political battle amongst themselves over architectural designs or preservation decisions.

A stronger version highlights a possible role for architecture as an instrument of politics. In other words, designing built structures entails political engagement through the control by force of behaviors and attitudes of people who interact with those structures. That architecture might have any significant role in politics, or the other way around, calls for explanation. One account stresses that the two domains are oriented around utility-maximization.

Utility criteria deployed to judge the worth of architectural objects are exemplary subjects of democratic debate, policy analysis, or community consensus. Further, traditional architectural promotion of urban and social planning may be linked to social utility criteria for architectural quality; that relationship might run in either direction. In distinct progressive and utopian traditions in architectural thought Eaton , advancement of social utility is a central motivation in architectural attempts to realize idealistic visions of modes of living and societal organization.

For a critique, see Harries Power, control, and change. This is not an obvious use in societies where individuals freely choose dwellings or other structures with which they interact.

Prominent such architectural types include prisons and refugee camps. Some see potential in architecture for more globally promoting maintenance of power through behavior regulating norms that such built structures represent Foucault Even in generally free or open social settings, though, at the level of urban planning architecture indirectly determines behavior in politically shaped ways.

Architects and others planning urban or other densely settled environments take into account such political aims as honoring community values, promoting civic virtues, maximizing social utility, fulfilling professional or public responsibilities, and respecting citizen or leadership preferences Haldane , Paden , Thompson The politically hued results of such planning and design efforts, whether pursued in authoritative, consultative, or participatory processes, are architectural objects that change, encourage, or reward particular behaviors.

Ideology and agency. Architecture is also used to promote political views, culture, or control, by conveying symbolic messages of power, nationalism, liberation, cooperation, justice, or other political themes or notions Wren cs. In government commissions, the architect generally cedes design control, at a certain point, to the government.

Yet the architect is the creator of record. This leaves open whether architects so engaged are promoting the given ideology—or else merely acting as proxies for such promotion.

It may seem odd to suggest that, from an aesthetic standpoint the design is of architect X but from a political standpoint the same design is not attributable to X. Political agency among architects is a special version of the more general issue of architect agency relative to clients, including as well corporate and individual clients.

One question is what scenarios or conditions would need to pertain to justify apportioning more or less agency—and, correspondingly, political or moral responsibility—to the architect or to the client, in design and build phases of realizing an architectural object.

The phases matter. The design phase appears, at least initially, to be the agency-wise province of the architect, and any post-build phase appears to be generally the province of the client and any relevant user-base until any such renovation or repurposing as may occur. What happens in phases en route to post-build is murkier, though. Architectural Failure. Failed architecture is not a straightforward subspecies of failed art or failed artifacts.

Architectural objects may rate as aesthetic disasters yet in some overall sense as successes, unlike non-architecture art objects. And architectural objects may cease to function—or never have functioned at all—yet count as overall successes, unlike a range of though not all non-architecture artifacts.

Another feature of architectural failure—in keeping with general design phenomena—is that architectural objects may count as successes or failures depending on different states of affairs, context, or remarkably small differences. Thus, a given architectural object may be a failure as an active and integral built structure but not as a ruin or vice-versa.

This suggests that background intentions may matter at one early stage, and less so at later stages in the life of a built structure—and that failure may have one criterion for architectural abstracta and other criteria for counterpart concreta.

Further, among architectural objects with standard, closely related variants, some may fail while others succeed—perhaps because of a minor distinction such as a garishly painted exterior. A viable account of architectural failure accommodates such features or else devolves failure to the level of some single dimension of architectural objects, such as their putative nature as art objects failed or otherwise.

Corruption, Ruins, and Preservation. Architectural objects as physically instantiated are corrupted or fall apart over time, and may develop new forms in disrepair or as ruins. From an inclusivist, concretist standpoint, a ruin is not any lesser an architectural object than its corresponding newly built structure.

An inclusivism is available to the abstractist, too, though she will not see them as the same object—and will rate them both as somehow lesser than the originary object. If we take them as the same architectural objects, we need an account as to how they relate to one another—apparently not by reference to intentions. Even if an architect designed a path to a ruin state, the actual ruin-state would likely take on a wholly different shape.

Some may take this as an argument against inclusivism. Architects typically embrace the Vitruvian premium on firmitas and reasonably assume that built objects should endure—and that they serve intended functions for as long as is desirable. That pair of assumptions in design thinking is at odds with concretism, given corruption and decay of physical constructions as well as routine repurposing in the lives of built structures. The first assumption is consistent with an abstractist vision of everlasting architectural objects.

Endurance of serving intended functions is another story: for architectural abstracta, stipulation of repurposing may not change the nature of a given, selfsame object. Corruption brings not only total destruction and absence of previously intact built structures, but also enduring ruins or flawed, damaged structures.

There is a longstanding premium on ruins in architectural culture as promoting historical perspective, nostalgia, and at least one style Romanticism.

Yet ruins fit awkwardly, if at all, into standard architectural ontologies. The cultural premium is hard to explain for the abstractist, for whom ruins represent defective physical instantiations, which are already substandard in the abstractist worldview. Corresponding intentions instead typically concern preservation, restoration, or elimination.

Preservation and conservation possibilities prompt additional considerations, such as whether restoration or maintenance of a built structure sustains it as an authentic architectural whole—and if this is independent of functional integrity, or holds for wholesale reconstructions Wicks ; what conditions warrant preserving or conserving a built structure; and what principles guide warranted alterations or completions of built structures—and whether other considerations may include creativity, fancy, or sensitivity to contemporary needs and context Capdevila-Werning As concerns completing unfinished structures, one issue is whether it is possible to discern original design intent altogether.

Taken together with contemporary norms that shape our understanding of past architecture Spector , preservation and conservation are at least partly bound to present-day design conceptions. Built Versus Natural Environment. We typically take built and natural environments to be clearly distinct.

This distinction does at least two kinds of work in philosophy of architecture. For one, it helps establish what sorts of things we would discount as architecture even on an inclusivist conception—and even there, we might accept lived-in caves as found architecture but reject most other elements of the natural environment as non-architecture because neither built nor found.

For another, we get a defined sense of natural contexts into which built environments fit or not , without which any such notions of fit are incoherent. If this is a viable and desirable distinction, it is perhaps less clear in what it consists. One candidate view is that we may distinguish the kinds of environments by their different sorts of objects and properties: we find columns in built environments and trees in natural environments and never the other way around.

Alternatives highlight the ascribable functions and intent that mark built environments but not natural environments; or different sorts of behavior and obligations attached to the two kinds of environments. While an artifact-centered view of architecture weighs in favor of functions and intent as the most relevant distinction, decaying value of design intent over the life of a built structure may give pause. Human and Non-Human Architecture. This raises the question as to whether human architecture is assimilable to a larger class of animal-built structures.

That would suggest, in turn, that we could assess human architecture—including settlement patterns, individual structures, and built community environments—in ecological, animal behavioral, and evolutionary terms Hansell If these are fundamental vantage points for understanding human architecture, that would suggest a need to translate all going accounts—whether focused on aesthetics, utility, or other concerns—into corresponding biological terms.

One way to resist this move is to mark human architecture as a particularly human endeavor and creation—likely by reference to intentionality, as flows into aesthetic focus. However, this may just forestall the question as to how to account for that wrinkle—a particularly talented animal builder with notable design intent—in the larger story of animal builders most of whom have less or no such intent. Environmental Psychology as Magic Pill.

Another scientific challenge to traditional philosophy of architecture emerges in environmental psychology, which identifies ways that environmental factors such as color, shape, light, and circulatory pattern shape our visual reactions and behavioral patterns within and around the built environment.

From such empirical insights, we can fashion constraints on architectural design principles that guide architectural creation, and devise corresponding solutions to particular design problems. As architects learn to exploit this information to advance design, we may ask whether an architectural object may be optimized by the lights of environmental psychology yet—and even consequently —deficient in some other, architecturally central respect. By contrast, moral or aesthetic deficiencies where environmental conditions are optimal seem real possibilities.

I thank reviewers of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for critical comments on previous drafts of this article, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for a generous grant in support of this work.

Philosophy of Architecture First published Wed Sep 9, Central issues include foundational matters regarding the nature of: Architecture as an artform, design medium, or other product or practice.

Architectural objects—what sorts of things they are; how they differ from other sorts of objects; and how we define the range of such objects. Special architectural properties, like the standard trio of structural integrity firmitas , beauty, and utility—or space, light, and form; and ways they might be special to architecture. Architectural types—how to consider abstract groups of architectural objects and their instances.

Meaning and other language-like phenomena in architecture and its objects. Formation of and warrant for our basic grasp, and considered judgment, of architectural objects. Social and moral features of architectural objects and architectural practice. Introduction 1. What is Architecture? Metaphysics 3.

Architectural Language and Notation 5. Free Content. More Information. MLA Abusaada, Hisham. Abusaada, H. Ethics of Architecture or Ethical Architecture?.

Abusaada, Hisham. Available In. Ethics of Architecture or Ethical Architecture? DOI: Current Special Offers. No Current Special Offers. It begins by discussing possible relationships between ethics and aesthetics. This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.

Rent this article via DeepDyve. Peirce Society 29 IssueID 2 — Google Scholar. Article Google Scholar. Dewey, J. Fesmire, S. Pierce Society 35 IssueID 3 — Haskins D. Pierce Society 31 IssueID 3 — We view the avant-garde as ahead of its time, but in this case I see it as profoundly conservative. AIA just had its convention in Las Vegas, one of the most poorly designed, wasteful cities I can think of.

What are the ethical implications for a choice like that, on the part of our professional association? Does ethics have a place in deciding where to have a convention? In Vegas, there was a resolution on architects taking dramatic action on climate change, which passed overwhelmingly.

And here we are in windowless rooms, in this carbon-consuming city, walking past open-door casinos pumping air conditioning out onto the sidewalk. In a digitally connected world, why fly 15, people around the country to interact? It really affects sustainability, as projects are overbuilt for the sake of hiding dirty money.

Ethically, how is an architect to respond? The paradox is that dirty money has fueled the construction of whole parts of cities. There are all kinds of negative impacts: you end up building too much, with materials that are resource-intensive, raising land values that lead to gentrification.

Ethics in the profession should make you pause and think: What are the implications of doing this or that? Sometimes, you just have to say no. Donate to CommonEdge.