Ethics
A Pervasive and Often-Overlooked Presence in Architecture Education
The study of architecture raises many ethical questions
around the four dominant approaches to the subject: virtue ethics, social
contract ethics, duty ethics, and utilitarian ethics.1 The design studio, for
instance, has served as an ideal venue for imparting virtue. While
less-than-virtuous behavior can occur in studio—as students of the lazy, greedy
architect Mr. Pecksniff in Charles Dickens’s novel Martin Chuzzlewit witnessed—studio education has proven remarkably
effective in instilling in students classic virtues such as good judgment,
self-control, honesty, and courage.
Social contract ethics play an
equally fundamental role in architecture education. The question of what
constitutes a good society and how architecture can aid in—or interfere
with—the achievement of social virtues such as justice and fairness has
underpinned such areas of study as urban design and environmental behavior. The
fact that architects so often find themselves aiding and abetting unjust
allocations of resources or unfair presumptions of privilege, however, suggests
that this approach needs better integration into the wider curriculum.
The third branch of normative
ethics, duty ethics, also figures in architecture education. Students
frequently learn in design studio to do “what is right” regardless of the
consequences. While that has kept alive a sense of architecture as a
calling—something easily sacrificed in a primarily utilitarian culture—the
focus on good intentions has also had negative consequences, among them the
scant attention paid in most schools to the evaluation of buildings after their
occupation.
Utilitarian ethics too have a role
to play in architecture education. Courses in technology and sustainability,
with their emphasis on functionality and effectiveness, address the
consequences of design decisions on the physical or environmental performance
of buildings. While scarce funding for architectural research has limited the
ability of architects and others to assess building performance broadly and
systematically, the public still largely judges the ethics of what architects
do according to the utility of their designs and the practical consequences of
their decisions. An increase in financial support for architectural research,
both within academia and outside it, thus remains one of the major ethical
challenges the field faces.
The silent presence of
ethics
Despite the pervasiveness of ethics, the subject had a
mostly silent presence in the schools for the first century of architecture
education in North America; it was rarely written about and not formally
required as part of the curriculum. One reason may have been its very ubiquity.
The discipline of architecture had for so long aspired to improve the quality
of the built environment, and with it the quality of people’s lives, that the
ethics of doing so may have gone without saying.
Another reason for the absence of
an explicit study of ethics may have had to do with the aesthetic orientation
of many architects. Throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
the proponents of the art of architecture often felt the need to defend it
against ethical criticism, leading to an estrangement between ethics and
aesthetics that largely coincided with the rise of architecture education in
North America.
The Beaux-Arts pedagogy that
William Robert Ware embraced when he established the first North American
architecture program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1868
institutionalized this estrangement in the schools. While providing an
effective way of teaching architecture, the Beaux-Arts system also inculcated
in students a genteel aestheticism that avoided troubling problems: the unquestioning
papering over of the pollution and poverty of industrial cities, for example,
with neoclassical facades. Nor, from a broader philosophical perspective, did
the writings of ethically driven nineteenth-century thinkers such as Nietzsche,
who saw architecture as “the will to power by means of form,” have much impact
on North American architecture schools until late in the twentieth century,
when institutional critiques began to become prevalent in architectural
discourse.
Changes in ethics itself may also
have contributed generally to the silence on the subject in architecture
schools.2 Arguing that the good is indefinable and so un-analyzable, G. E.
Moore’s famous Principia Ethica, published
in 1903, reflected a growing skepticism in philosophy about the very
possibility of ethical debate. Meanwhile William James’s popular book Pragmatism, which appeared in 1908,
aligned the good with “what works,” lending support to those in architecture
who wished to sidestep ethical questions in favor of aesthetic or technical
ones. The first AIA code of ethics, promulgated in 1909, reflected that
pragmatist approach in focusing almost exclusively on the profession’s
relationship to clients and contractors and on the regulation of design
competitions.3
Ethics became a somewhat more
visible presence with the arrival in North America in the 1930s of former
Bauhaus educators such as Walter Gropius and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. While still
not a required part of the curriculum, ethics infused the programs that they
established at Harvard and the New Bauhaus, which schools across North America
widely followed. The utilitarian aesthetic and socially relevant projects that
emerged from the Bauhaus-inspired studios of that era reflected the growing
recognition by modern architects of their ethical responsibilities.
At the same time, the Bauhaus
pedagogy inculcated an idealistic, neo-Hegelian ethic. Hegel’s belief in the
inevitability of personal freedom, in the centrality of visionary individuals,
and in the uniqueness of every historical period greatly influenced North
American architecture education after the 1930s. Architecture students learned
to emulate the work of “great masters” such as Le Corbusier, Aalto, and Mies,
whose use of the “free plan” seemed to embody the Hegelian ideal of maximum
freedom and whose use of new technology captured the Hegelian spirit of the
modern age.
An Anglo-American skepticism of
ethics remained dominant in North American culture in the mid-twentieth
century, however, and may have hampered a fuller and more explicit discussion
of the subject in architecture schools. Many North American philosophers agreed
with their English colleagues that ethics involved the subjective or “emotive”
expression of personal preferences, and so lacked the clarity or objectivity of
linguistic or logical analysis. The Anglo-American bias also had certain
positive consequences for North American higher education. For example, C. L.
Stevenson’s distinction in his 1944 book Ethics
and Language between beliefs based on facts, which can be mandated, and attitudes
toward behaviors, which should remain advisory, echoed the division of
architecture curriculums around this time into required courses and elective
ones.
Not all American philosophers
dismissed ethics as subjective. The ethics of John Dewey, for example, had an
enormous influence on education in North America, above all his “laboratory
method” of experimentation as a way of resolving moral as well as social and
political dilemmas. Dewey’s ethics, at once progressive and pragmatic,
contributed to the belief of many design educators that the studio should be
less a place of pupilage and more a laboratory for the exploration of new
ideas.
By the 1960s the belief in the
value of experimentation took more radical forms. Just as Marx’s ethical
materialism had turned Hegel’s ethical idealism on its head, so a growing
number of architecture students and faculty in the 1960s overturned the
Hegelian idealization of the modern masters and modern technology to embrace a
more Marxian interest in the needs of the working class and the poor.
Meanwhile, the emerging youth culture of the era reflected an ethics that was
at once nihilistic and idealistic: Nietzschean in its confrontation with power
and Rousseauian in its yearning to return to a state of nature.
Ethics as an explicit
curricular requirement
In the mid-1970s, ethics finally became a required subject
for architecture school accreditation in North America.4 The formalized
coverage of ethics typically occurred in the mandatory professional practice
course, although ethics sometimes also got discussed in other classes where
individual faculty members had a particular interest or expertise in the
subject. At the same time, the rise of postmodernism saw ethics permeate architectural
thinking, as it did in other academic fields, from the humanities to the social
sciences. Postmodernism in architecture represented not just a historicist
approach to style; it ushered in an “ethical turn” in higher education that
represented a reconciliation of aesthetics and ethics in an effort to reunite
art and life.5
This ethical turn did not entirely
reverse what had come before. The formalism and aestheticism that characterized
midcentury modernism continued to thrive in the 1970s, but it no longer held
the same privileged position. If anything, postmodernism embraced a diversity
of approaches, including ones that rejected its very premises. But across the
ideological spectrum, ethics played a more central role, making its requirement
for accreditation not just professionally useful but symbolically important.
The resurgence of interest among
educators and practitioners in architectural history at this time paralleled a
revived interest among philosophers in historical approaches to ethics. John
Rawls, in his seminal book A Theory of
Justice (1971), made a compelling
argument about the need to attend to the needs of the least advantaged members
of society, prompting a revival among
philosophers of the social contract ethics that had last flourished in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Similarly, in architecture, the rise of
participatory planning and protests by historic preservationists against urban
renewal had strong repercussions in architecture schools during the 1970s, and
reflected a like commitment to questions related to the architect’s “social
contract” with the public.
A revival of other philosophical
traditions with ethical implications also emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, two
of which had great influence on architecture education. The first,
phenomenology, derived from the work of philosophers like Martin Heidegger and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who linked both architecture and ethics back to the
latter’s Greek root word, ethos,
meaning “accustomed place.” The embrace of phenomenology also reflected a
revival of the pre-Socratic philosophers’ focus on the existential meanings of
the material world. A new focus on experiential qualities and particularities
of places, which became a central focus of architectural and urban design education
in many schools after the 1970s, showed the influence of phenomenology and
existential ethics that continues to this day.
A second philosophy with roots in
an ancient tradition of moral analysis, virtue ethics, also witnessed a revival
in the work of a number of philosophers, many of them women—Elizabeth Anscombe,
Susan Wolf, Iris Murdoch, and Philippa Foot, among
others. Their questioning of the rigidity and absolutism of modern utilitarian
duty ethics led to a more modest, contextual, and character-based approach to
morality. Within architecture schools of the 1970s, such an approach translated
into a new interest in the context and character of buildings. This sensibility
too remains in force today.
Postmodernism
led to new understandings of architects’ ethical responsibilities as well. The
ethics of care that emerged in the 1980s in the work of feminist philosophers
like Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings resonated with the thinking of many
architecture educators who had become increasingly critical of the repressive
qualities of the built environment and the need for more diverse and flexible
ways of accommodating people’s lives. The incursion of feminist ethics in a
once male-dominated field like architecture also had consequences for the
quality of life in many schools, making them less like fraternity houses and
more open to a plurality of student backgrounds and values.
Finally,
postmodernist revisions of ethical philosophy contributed to architecture’s
expansion of its purview beyond its traditional subject—human beings—to embrace
the good of other species and the planet as a whole. Thinkers such as Arne
Naess, Peter Singer, and Bill McKibben enlarged architects’ sense of obligation
to ecosystems and the deep interconnections existing among the parts of “one
world,” to use Singer’s term. The growing number of sustainability programs in
architecture schools and the addition of an environmental canon to the AIA’s
code of ethics give evidence of the widening influence of environmental ethics.
As architecture
educators look ahead to the next century, ethics will likely become an even
more essential subject of instruction.6 Faced with ongoing environmental
damage, an exponential increase in human population, rapid depletion of finite
resources, and extinction of irreplaceable species, architects may find less of
a call for one-off custom design solutions and more demand for conserving
energy and stewarding natural resources, for serving the needs of billions of
ill-housed people, and for preserving the habitat of other species upon whose
survival humankind depends. A deep understanding of ethics can help architects
make decisions about how to address such challenges in as fair and effective a
way as possible, and there may be few forms of knowledge more important for
architecture students in the future to have.
Endnotes
1. Books
that cover the range of ethical issues encountered in architectural practice
include Ethics and the Practice of
Architecture by Barry Wasserman, Patrick Sullivan, and Gregory Palermo
(John Wiley & Sons, 2000), The
Ethical Architect: The Dilemma of Contemporary Practice by Tom Spector
(Princeton Architectural Press, 2001), and Ethics
for Architects: 50 Dilemmas of Professional Practice by this author
(Princeton Architectural Press, 2010).
2. Works
that cover the history of ethics clearly and succinctly include A History of Western Ethics edited by
Lawrence and Charlotte Becker (Routledge, 2003) and A Short History of Ethics, A History of Moral Philosophy from the
Homeric Age to the 20th Century, Second Edition by Alasdair
MacIntyre (Notre Dame, 2002).
3. Code of Ethics & Profession Conduct,
The American Institute of Architects.
4. From
a conversation with Andrea Rutledge, Executive Director of the National
Architectural Accrediting Board.
5. A
good overview of recent ethics occurs in Postmodern
Ethics by Zygmunt Bauman (Wiley - Blackwell, 1993).
6. Ethics and the Built Environment edited
by Warwick Fox (Routledge, 2000) and Architectural
Design and Ethics, Tools for Survival by this author (The Architectural
Press/Elsevier, 2008) both deal with the ethical implications for architects of
our environmental challenges.
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