When There Is No More Fee

An architectural firm designed a project according to program and budget of an institutional client. The client, though, had a hard time raising all of the funds needed for the project and so asked the firm either to redesign the project to reduce its size or help fundraise for the project to reach the original budget, all without any extra fee to cover the time involved.

Professionals have a duty to serve their clients and to help them achieve their goals within the quantitative, qualitative, and financial constraints of a project. And with that duty comes another one: letting clients know that they must often chose between two of those three constraints. Unless a client has the rare gift of modesty with ample means, most projects have to sacrifice the quantity of some things, reduce the quality of some features, or increase the amount of money in the budget. In design, as in life, we can rarely have it all, and the sooner that conversation takes place in a project, the better it goes.

If it doesn’t occur or if the client doesn’t listen when it does, situations like the one here can happen. Architects can design a building according to the quantitative and qualitative requirements and the financial capacity of the client, but if the funding for a project doesn’t come in as expected, something must give. Either the project gets redesigned to reduce costs or the participants in the project must raise the money needed to complete it as initially conceived.

Of course, at this point, the fees to do this extra work often don’t exist, given the deficit the client already faces. So professionals have to make a decision: put the project on hold until the client can raise more money to build it as designed or help the client either do that fundraising or reduce the expense of the building to fit within the money available. That decision demands weighing two types of duty: to others and to ourselves. Professionals have a duty to their clients, but they also have a responsibility to their colleagues, co-workers, and ultimately to their businesses. It does no good for a practitioner to go out of business donating too much time to help other’s business.

The firm in this example might decide to keep working on the project without pay if the client seems likely to raise more money in the future and recompense the office for its extra work, or if the effort seems likely to lead to future work from that client or others. Some projects become “loss leaders,” generating new projects that can more than compensate for the earlier loss. And some clients have connections and reputations that can make their recommendations to future clients especially valuable.   

        

The dutiful decision also may turn on the nature of the client’s business. If a business has plenty of financial capacity and yet asks a firm to do work for free, the donation of time can quickly become a form of exploitation by the client, and the professional must say no. We all have a duty to stop exploitation, whether of ourselves or of others. But if, as in this case, the client is a non-profit without the money to move forward, the donation of services and the offering of help to raise money for the project become ways of giving back to a community and of paying forward the help others have given us. We all have a duty as citizens, and donating time and money in such cases always pays personal dividends.

Fulfilling an Obligation

An architectural firm prepared a master plan for a suburban civic center and yet struggled with the city and its selected contractor in completing the city hall on schedule and with the desired quality of construction. The city, with the same contractor, wants the firm to design the buildings in the second phase of the master plan, but the firm, having lost money on the first phase, wonders if it should do so.

Do we have an obligation to finish what we started? It depends. Duty ethics would have us do our duty and fulfill our obligations regardless of the inconvenience or possible negative consequences in doing so. But does that extend beyond our contractual duties? Do we really have to follow through on something over which we have choice, with no requirement to carry it forward and especially when we have had a previous bad experience?

The architects here had reasons for wanting to do the second phase of the work: to see their master plan for the civic center completed as they envisioned, to complement the existing city hall with compatible buildings, and to continue the relationship that they had developed with the city. The firm, though, also had reasons to walk away. The city had decided on the contractor – a politically well-connected company – without giving the architects a say in the matter, and while the building had come in on budget, making that happen had led the architects to spend far more time on the project than what their fee had covered.

The firm might want to do the next phase of the work in order to recoup its losses on the first part of the project, although it also risked the possibility that this client and contractor represented a financial black hole for the firm, in which only further losses could follow those already endured. Clearly the duty to follow through on what one has started must get weighed against the duty to look after the financial health of the operation. And contrary to the tendency in ethics to seeing duty as an absolute, the reality of practice requires that we balance our duty to our clients with the our duty to our employees and partners, bringing to situations like this virtues such as the prudence to know when to say no and the courage to stand up to the contrary expectations of others.

A situation like this also raises a virtue rarely thought of as such: the virtue of creativity in seeking out a way to accomplish seemingly contradictory goals. How might this firm ensure the proper completion of its master plan while insulating itself from further losses? One option might involve charging more to do the second phase of the work, based on the firm’s knowledge of what the first phase actually cost them, and letting the client decide if it wants to pay those fees. That option allows the firm to remain open to continuing to do the work, while ensuring that it won’t expose itself to another loss if the client decides not agree to the higher price for services.

Another option might involve playing more of a consulting role, enabling the city to hire another architect to do the work, but within the guidelines and oversight established by the master plan. That maintains the relationship, ensures compliance with the master plan, and protects the first firm from financial exposure. One of the paradoxes of duty ethics is that our greatest duty is to ourselves, for without that, we will not be around to do our duty to others. 

Deceptive Job Searches

In the world of academic job searches, especially for well-known faculty and experienced administrators, there remain more posts than people, which in turn can lead some to engage in job searches without any intention of taking the position if offered. There is nothing illegal about this, but is it ethical?

Colleges and universities go to considerable expense in searching for people to fill their leadership positions. This may odd in locations where unemployment remains relatively high and in fields like architecture and design, which have felt the impact of recessions more than some other disciplines. Economists might say of such a situation that it simply reflects supply and demand. In parts of the economy where the supply of people outstrips the demand, unemployment will stay high and compensation low. And where demand outstrips supply, as often happens in the area of academic leadership, the opposite occurs.

Even in high-demand parts of the job market, however, it remains relatively rare for people to go through the effort of pursuing a position, especially when that involves traveling and often-grueling two-day interview processes during the search for academic leaders, without intending to take the job if offered. What accounts for the surprising frequency of this? To outsiders, such insincere job applicants can seem selfish, as if they go through this process to stoke their egos rather than to seek new employment. And to critics of the cost of higher education, it certainly represents a waste of time and money on the part of both the institutions seeking new leadership and those whose existing leaders engage in such deceptive job searches.

This seems especially true when the process leads to a failed search. A lot of time and money gets spent on all sides only to have the best candidates decline the job offers, leaving the institution to start over again. Of course, no employer wants a reluctant leader, someone who really doesn’t want the position or who feels forced to take it out of a sense of obligation because of the effort taken by the institution to fill the post. But why, then, do prospective academic leaders start the process to begin with?

The economic reasons remain clear. In many institutions, the salaries of the faculty and staff often increase slowly. And so often the only way to beat the system – particularly among those who have a national reputation, a track record of effective leadership, or a demonstrated ability to attract research dollars – involves getting job offers from other places, which can trigger a “retention” pay raise if the current employer wants to keep a valued employee from leaving. This also involves risk, of course. An institution might not make a retention offer, at which point the people who engage in such deceptive practices might find themselves either having to take a position they don’t really want or to stay with their existing employer who didn’t care to retain them and so doesn’t really want them all that much either.

Ethics has long argued that deception or a lack of honesty in dealing with others doesn’t pay. In the case of academics deceptively seeking jobs in order to get retention offers, however, that doesn’t seem true. It clearly pays for at some, given the number of academic leaders who have successfully secured job offers and had salary increases or received other perks from their existing employers as a result. But word gets out if done too often, and eventually such deception no longer works. The job offers and the retention packages stop coming when neither side believes a person’s sincerity.

Property Wrongs

A glass-roofed museum, with a roof-top sunscreen that blocks out all but the even northern light into the galleries, had a condominium tower built to its north with reflective glass that bounced light directly into the galleries, threatening to damage the artwork within. The museum wants the developer to alter the exterior of the tower to prevent the reflections, while the developer claims he has city approval to complete the tower as designed.

Property law upholds our property rights, while also recognizing that one owner does not have the right to damage the property of another. We typically deal with such conflicts through zoning regulations and the approval processes surrounding them, pre-empting the possibility of one property owner’s paradise becoming a neighbor’s problem. No law or regulation, however, can anticipate every possible conflict, and in such cases, ethics can offer one path to a resolution.

In the case of this new tower shining unwanted sunlight into a museum, no one did so with malice in mind. Indeed, the proximity of the museum made the tower’s location particularly appealing to the developer and presumably, the buyers of the condominiums inside. As so often happens, though, our desire for proximity to what we most value can end up damaging it in the process.

We have seen this with suburbia, in which the desire to live close to nature has largely destroyed the natural environment that drew us to the suburbs in the first place. This tower seems like a high-end version of the same paradox. The very act of wanting to overlook the museum and its adjacent sculpture garden brings with it the very reflections that threaten to burn the garden’s plants and fade the museum’s art. Yes, we can have, as Shakespeare said, “too much of a good thing.”

Like the law, ethics acknowledges precedent. The museum preceded the tower and so the onus remains with the architect and developer of the tower to fix the reflectance problem they have caused. The latter’s claim that city approvals give him to right to build the tower as designed remains, if not dishonest, at least disingenuous. The government’s approval to carry a fire arm does not give us the right to shoot an innocent bystander, any more than the government’s approval of a building gives its developer the right to damage a neighbor’s property.

The disingenuous aspect of blaming the government comes at a time when it seems popular to blame the government for almost everything, and then using that as an excuse to starve the government of the funds it needs to do its job, thus giving more cause for blame. No doubt at least some of the wealthy individuals involved in the construction and purchase of the expensive condominiums overlooking the museum have participated in the anti-government rhetoric of right-wing politics. To then blame the government for not doing more to prevent the reflectance problem seems like the height of hypocrisy.

If anything, the lack of reflectance on the part of the developer equals the excess of it on the part of his building’s exterior. Antagonizing the museum and its many patrons lacks both utility and virtue, damaging the public perception of the project to the point where fixing the window problem pales in comparison to the cost of fixing the tower’s reputation and thus its marketability. The tower might have met the letter of the zoning code, but it so violates the social contract embedded in zoning of not harming the property of neighbors, that no one would win such a case in the court of public opinion.

Applying Pressure

An architectural firm, seeking a commission at a university, contacted a major donor of the school that the partners in the firm knew, to use his leverage to get the firm hired, even though the building committee and the dean wanted to hire another architect for the job. The dean acquiesced to the donor’s wishes, but was furious at the firm for applying pressure like that.

In the competitive marketplace for services, enterprises often use whatever advantage they have to convince a customer or client to choose them over others. That often takes the form of persuasion, convincing the client in an interview, for example, that one’s firm will do the best job. But in cases like this, in which the partners know a donor who has some leverage with the client, the competitive advantage takes the form of pressure, a kind of quid-pro-quo in which the favor of donating money gets returned as a favor of hiring the donor’s architect.

In most cases, complying with a donor’s wishes turns out fine; the architect does a good job and everyone ends up happy. But in the situation here, in which the dean and building committee had already decided to go with another firm, the pressure applied by the donor at the request of the architects made the latter an unwelcome interloper in the selection process. The dean and faculty, of course, did not have to acquiesce to the donor’s wishes, but doing so would have harmed that relationship, which clearly the school did not want to do.

The dean and faculty also could have directed their annoyance at the donor for agreeing to apply the pressure in the first place. But, when the school’s leadership heard that the donor had done it as a favor to the firm, the dean focused her anger on the architects, even though she agreed to commission them to do the project.

There was nothing unethical in what the architects did. The commercial world works this way, sometimes pressuring clients when persuasion doesn’t work. But while not unethical, the architects’ actions put them in the unenviable position of starting a relationship with an angry and distrustful client. That raises the bar on what the architects have to achieve, proving that, despite the unfortunate start to the project, they will do the best job. And it also raises the bar for the client, in setting aside the initial anger to build a relationship of mutual trust with the architects and to remain open to what they have to offer.

This leads to what the philosopher H. J. N. Horsburgh has called “the ethics of trust.” The dean has to trust the donor’s judgment in accepting his recommendation of the architectural firm, the donor has to trust the architects in their doing a good job so as not to harm the school he has contributed to, and the architects have to earn the trust of the dean in going forward. Earning and keeping the trust of others requires that we act with the utmost ethical as well as professional care, being absolutely virtuous (fair, prudent, and honest, for example), attending to all aspects of our duty (to the client, school, and community), and weighing the consequences of everything we do (in terms of the budget, schedule, and the greatest good of the students and staff). Ethics, in other words, offers a roadmap for winning and keeping others’ trust. And if they can’t meet that bar, this firm would be better off declining the commission, for the anger and distrust of the client will only grow.

The Trolley Problem

In 1967, the philosopher Philippa Foot wrote about a hypothetical situation in which the driver of a runaway trolley, unable to stop it but able to switch it either to one track with five men working on it or the other, with only one. This thought experiment has produced a lot of debate in ethics, but it also says a lot about abductive thinking and the role of design in such a dilemma.

When Philippa Foot first imagined this problem related to a runaway trolley or “tram” as she wrote it, it highlighted both the strengths and weaknesses of utilitarian ethics. Arguing that we should always seek the greatest good for the greatest number, a utilitarian would switch to the track with one man on it in order to save the lives of five. But life rarely offers us such simple alternatives. The philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson offered a variation in which an observer watching from a bridge could push a fat man, also watching from the bridge, on to the track and stop the trolley. Most people would argue that’s wrong because it involves intentionally murdering someone as opposed to the unintended accident of the runaway trolley. (Why yelling from the bridge to alert the people on the track to their danger never seems to occur as a option, I do not know.)

Other variants of the situation have also arisen. One asks what should the driver do if the one person on the track is the driver’s mother? (Most people would argue that ethics sides with saving one’s own mother as opposed to five strangers.) Another variation has the one person tied to the track by the five on the other track. (Here, too, saving the one person and killing the five seems justified given the latter’s murderous intent.)

In each one of these cases, though, we see abduction in action. Abductive thinking occurs whenever we create a situation or idea that has productive results, which clearly applies to Foot’s trolley problem. She imagined a circumstance that has proven not only durable in its usefulness, but also provocative in the number of variations it has spawned. We can even frame that in utilitarian terms: the best abductive thinking produces the greatest number of useful consequences for the greatest number of people.

What, then, does this have to do with design? Abductive thinking underlies all good design. Not all design, since there exists plenty of design that we might more aptly call decoration, which mainly involves the expression of a person’s taste. Decoration, of course, has its uses in personalizing something and possibly creating something more pleasing to others, and if that leads to its greater use, then that, too, can have useful as well as tasteful consequences.

But usefulness and tastefulness, function and form, pragmatics and aesthetics – these constitute the poles around which we define good design. But the trolley problem suggests something more. Just as Philippa Foot used abductive thinking to create such an ethically productive problem, so too do designers use such thinking to anticipate problems like this and then put in place the precautions to ensure that they not occur.

In other words, designers work in the opposite direction of ethicists. The latter seek out conflicts that highlight the difficult dilemmas we face in life, while the former seek out those same conflicts in order to prevent those very difficulties and dilemmas from occurring. To the designer, the trolley problem offers a different kind of lesson: observing what went wrong and designing trolleys and tracks to prevent it from ever happening again.

Maternity Leaves

A designer working for a U.S. firm in one of its overseas offices became pregnant and expected to have the same maternity benefits that she would have had in the United States. She discovered, though, that the Family and Medical Leave Act, which grants up to 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave and requires that the employer have an equivalent job for the returning employee, does not apply to workers outside U.S. territory. 

In a global economy, in which people increasingly work in foreign countries, the ethics of employee rights becomes complicated. As this designer discovered when she became pregnant, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) does not cover “extraterritorial” situations, and so she had none of the job protections that the American firm she worked for would have had to provide her in the U.S. Many American companies, of course, extend these laws to all of their employees, but no American law requires them to apply FMLA protections beyond U.S. borders.

Some who advocate for the minimal regulation of the marketplace may see no ethical problem here. Libertarians might argue that this employee made the decision to work for this firm and she has the freedom to walk away and find employment in another one. Or pragmatists might say that she can always make arrangements for childcare so that she can return to work as soon as she is medically able to do so, taking personal responsibility for the consequences of her becoming pregnant.

Such positions, though, do not look very far ahead to the real consequences of such hard-nosed and rather hard-hearted arguments. Consider the effect such behavior has on a firm’s reputation. I heard this story at a dinner party from someone who had heard it from someone else in the city in which this firm has its home office. While such story telling has real value in warning people about which employers to avoid, it can have a devastating effect on the firm in question, making it hard to attract the best employees and, even worse, creating a negative impression of the firm among prospective clients and within the communities in which it practices. A decision that might have given the firm a short-term business advantage – not extending FMLA to its overseas employees – can have terrible long-term implications for its business worldwide.

Inside the firm, employees will not want to work in the firm’s overseas offices if that means a loss of benefits. Firms, instead, should incentivize workers to take posts in foreign countries, given the inconvenience and disruption this can cause in a employee’s private life. Also, having dramatically unequal treatment of staff within the same organization can create all sorts of tensions that lead, in turn, to a discouraged and disgruntled workforce – not a formula for success in an increasingly competitive global economy. If anything, firms with overseas offices should offer as many benefits and perks as possible to find the very best employees as possible, regardless of what the law allows them to avoid.

You could argue that governmental requirements that a firm obey a law like FMLA or marketplace incentives that it does so in order to compete and to protect their reputation both lead to the same outcome, raising the question of whether it matters how we achieve such a goal. But there is a difference: depending on the marketplace alone does not guarantee that a firm will see what is in its best interest. Nor does it prevent a lot of individuals, like this designer, from suffering the unfortunate consequences of a firm’s shortsighted and self-destructive decisions.

Bullying

A large firm had a growing amount of turnover in its staff and when the managing partner investigated, he heard many staff members and former employees talk about the bullying behavior of a couple of the other partners in the firm. The managing partner wanted to preserve his good relationships with his partners, but also wanted to stem the turnover and address what many saw as abusive behavior in the firm.

Bullying has reached almost epidemic levels among children and adolescents, especially with the rise of social networks allowing people to spread rumors, slander, and even private photos or videos of those who they don’t like. An often more subtle form of bullying can also occur in the workplace among adults, in which people mock, undermine, or dismiss the efforts of others. Many reasons, no doubt, underlie this behavior, ranging from growing job insecurity to increasing workplace competition to rising levels of rudeness in a fast-paced world. The question is: what to do about it?

The managing partner in this firm knows that he has to do something, given his knowledge of the situation, but what to do isn’t exactly clear. His partners could claim that the comments of disgruntled or former employees simply represent sour grapes. They could also see his confronting them about this issue as, itself, a form of bullying, abusing his role as the managing partner. Therein lies the paradox of bullying. To stop bullying, you have to become a bit of a bully yourself, which can make the real bullies look like victims and start a whole new round of bullying on their part as a result.

Although the question of how to deal with bullying can be confusing, the ethics of the situation remain clear. Bullying almost always represents an abuse of power, with the bullies usually more senior or of higher rank than their victims. As such, bullying violates the most fundamental rule in ethics, that of reciprocity, which would have us do to others as we would want them to do to us, as the Bible puts it, or to treat others as ends in themselves and not means to our ends, as Kant phrased it. Ethics serves us best as a decision-making tool, guiding us to do the right thing in situations like this. And that notion of reciprocity offers perhaps the best advice on how to deal with bullies.

You should treat bullies, in other words, as you would want them to treat you. Don’t bully them, but speak to them about their behavior calmly and directly, conveying the facts about how others see them as bullies and asking them how they plan to change their behavior accordingly. Some bullies do not see themselves as such and so they have the right to know how others see them and to have a chance to alter their behavior. Bullies, of course, may try to bully the conveyor of this message, which no one wants to endure. But if that happens, it offers an excellent opportunity to point out to them the very behavior under discussion.

If the bullying doesn’t stop, then the reciprocity has to take another form. Do for the victims what you would want them to do for you if you were in their place. That might take a variety of forms, from withholding compensation increases to bullies until they stop, isolating them in ways that minimizes their ability to abuse others, and even looking for ways to force them out of the organization. Unfortunately, bullies sometimes only respond to the bullying of others, the ultimate in reciprocity.

Safety

A client of a high-rise building in a country with hostile neighbors asked the architect to design a disguised anti-missile installation at the top of the tower. While the architect felt obliged to accommodate the client – and the country’s – request, it raised questions about whether or not the inhabitants of the building should know about the installation and about how people would feel working in what would become a possible military target.

Safety ranks, along health and welfare, as one of the primary responsibilities of architects. While design professionals often think of safety in terms of ensuring the stability of a structure, the accessibility of fire exits, and the security of every element in a building, the concept can extend to the protection of a facility from attack.

Since 9/11, the possibility of an air-borne strike at a building has become a definite possibility, particularly if the structure carries symbolic importance to an enemy. As a result, the design of especially high-rise or high-security structures now often includes a simulation of how the building would withstand a direct hit by, say, an airplane fully loaded with fuel.

Installing anti-missile devices in a building that doesn’t otherwise have a military purpose seems to take this to another level, however. The architect here has gone from ensuring the safety of the building’s inhabitants to engaging in defensive tactics, which could possibly increase the security of the occupants should the structure come under attack or just as likely decrease it by making the structure a target.

Such an extreme case highlights a common dilemma in the production of architecture. The architect has a professional duty to accommodate the needs of a client as long as those programmatic requirements lie within the law and do not endanger occupants or passersby. At the same time, the architect has an obligation to protect people’s health, safety, and welfare, even if they never know how the architect has done so.

But does the architect also have an obligation to inform the inhabitants of a building about aspects of it that could endanger them? That certainly happens with signage that, for instance, warns people not to leave fire doors ajar, not to lean over railings in high-up locations, or not to access spaces that contain potentially hazardous materials. Such warnings constitute reasonable safety precautions intended to protect people and most of us no doubt welcome such advice. However, there remain myriad examples of architects protecting people’s safety that go unstated: preventing falls on stair with slip-proof treads and readily accessible handrails, for example, or protecting against electrical shock with grounded outlets and switches.

Should an architect stay equally quite about a less imminent and yet gravely serious threat, such as a missile attack? The client likely does not want to alarm or scare away tenants and the country, just as likely, might not want others to know of the installation, evident in the request that the architect disguised it. But does an architect have a duty to inform people of the potential danger and the precautions taken to protect them?

Utilitarian ethics can help answer such questions. What constitutes the greatest good for the greatest number? The citizens of the country certainly know of their hostile neighbors and of the possibility of missile attacks, so the architect has no need to inform them of that. But the architect does have an obligation to not only do as the client asks, but also to lay out the pros and cons of informing the building’s occupants and to say what he or she would do. Honesty is the safest bet.

Ethics in Architecture Education

I wrote the following as introductory comments as part of a panel discussion at the ACSA Annual Meeting in Boston, March 1-3, 2012, among a few of the authors in Architecture School, edited by Joan Ockman and Rebecca Williamson (MIT Press, 2012).

The value of ethics lies in its asking uncomfortable questions about our often-unchallenged assumptions about power and privilege and about our often-unexamined responsibilities to others who have neither. This is particularly an issue in architecture, which Nietzsche called “the will to power by means of form,” a field that because of its difficulty and expense often finds itself complicit in accommodating and reinforcing the power and privilege of those who have the money to commission it.

Because of the questions it asks, ethics can seem like a threat to architecture and so ethics has largely had a marginal role in architectural education. The rise of architectural education in the second half of the 19^th Century coincided with an effort, led by the critic Oscar Wilde, to separate the realm of aesthetics from that of ethics. We see that separation in the formalism and aestheticism of 19^th and early 20^th century Beaux Arts architecture, in which the focus on the creation of classical facades and idealized interior and exterior environments papered over the industrial pollution, environmental destruction, and social inequality that enriched the public and private clients of those buildings.

Architects themselves played a somewhat paradoxical role in this. On one hand, the profession had become complicit in enabling those in power to feel good about themselves, with the discourse in schools of architecture largely focused on the skill with which students could learn this classical disguise. One the other hand, the profession itself found itself increasingly exploited by those in power, which led, in 1909, to the AIA’s first code of ethics. The prohibitions in that first code against the exploitative practices of clients wanting architects, for example, to give away their design ideas in unpaid competitions or to compete for work based on who had the lowest fees, shows how much the unfair treatment that had enriched those who commissioned buildings had gotten applied to those who designed them. 

The rise of modern architecture in the schools in the 1920s and 30s might seem like a ripping away of the Beaux Arts façade and the recognition of the needs of the working class. Certainly modern architects’ admiration of industrial architecture, emphasis on transparency, and attention to new kinds of programs, like worker housing, all reinforce that appearance. But modern architecture actually represented a new kind of ethical slight of hand, based on what the philosopher William Barrett has called “the illusion of technique.” While modern architecture seemed more sympathetic to the plight of the working class through the use of industrial materials and methods, the profession and the schools did little to challenge the social, economic or political power of clients. In addition, the “international style” ignored differences of culture or climate, turning the idea of universal rights into a form of repression.

Ethics finally emerged in the late 1960s as an explicit area of study in architecture education, becoming part of the accreditation process in the 1970s. And since then, we have seen a flourishing of ethical questioning in the schools, be it challenges to the dominance of men and male ways of thinking on the part of feminist ethics or challenges to the dominance of humans over other species on the part of environmental ethics,  challenges to the dominance of capitalism and its exploitation of workers on the part of Marxist ethics, or challenges to the dominance of reason and abstract rationality on the part of phenomenological ethics.

This “ethical turn” in architecture education has greatly enriched the intellectual life in our schools, although it has had relatively little impact on a profession still dependent on those individuals, organizations and communities with enough wealth and power to commission architects. And that has washed back over the schools of late, as architectural education has seen the resurgence in aestheticism and the illusion of technique as a result of the digital revolution, in which computer-generated form-making and digital fabrication methods have become an end in themselves, with the needs of the global population, future generations, and other species on the planet largely overlooked.

So pay attention to what issues are not addressed in a design, to what questions don’t get asked in a review, and what goes unsaid in the stories we tell about ourselves as a profession and a discipline. That is where you will find the “will to power” in our field and where you will discover the real power of ethics.

Ethics in Architecture School

A heavily edited version of my essay on ethics has come out in the book Architecture School, Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America, and so I thought I would include here the essay as I originally wrote it.

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 20^th 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.