Ethics in Architecture

In this paper, I will discuss how the book 'The Ethical Function of Architecture' contributed to my quest for a way out of the aporia of teaching ethics in the design studio. In doing this, I shall put the book in the context of the existing literature of the field, at the time that it was written. I shall point out the explicit and implicit references that the book makes in relation to architectural education. Finally, I will suggest that architectural education is an initiation in a practice, a fact that can mediate ethics between the individual and the community.

"This study gathers and interprets the earliest extant references to architects in ancient Greek philosophy, as found in select works of Plato and Aristotle.  Throughout this review, Plato and Aristotle [are] shown to consistently present architectonic agents as exemplary civic and intellectual leaders, acting in awareness of their own (and others’) limits, with knowledge of the most appropriate archē, and with a view to the most comprehensive aims—the common good. This discloses an alternative and more accurate etymology of architects: not as master-builders but as leaders and makers of beginnings (archai). The aim of this essay has been not only to rediscover the discursive beginnings for a renewed philosophy of architecture, but to suggest how these philosophical 'archai' might help present-day architects reimagine the full relevance of their still contested role."

Salama, A. M. (1995). New Trends in Architectural Education: Designing the Design Studio. Tailored Text and Unlimited Potentials, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States. ISBN # 0964795000.

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This book presents a wide range of innovative concepts and practical ideas for teaching architectural design. It explores different aspects of studio teaching and what impact they have on the attitudes, skills, methods, and tools of architects. It offers a comparative analysis of contemporary trends that are committed to shaping and identifying studio objectives and processes. The book includes five chapters:

1) Introduction: Problems in the Practice of Architecture;
2) The Architect and Society;
3) Design Education and Studio Work in the Conventional Approach;
4) Revolutionary Concepts for Teaching Architectural Design - Design Studio Teaching Models; and
5) Expanding the Knowledge Base in the Architectural Design Studio.

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Review by Jon T. Lang, University of New South Wales, Australia

This is an invaluable guide to architectural educators because Dr. Salama has not only captured the body of knowledge about architectural designing and studio teaching and put it in a pithy form but he has also developed a typology of kinds of architectural studios, explaining what experiences each offers the student.

Güncel mimarlık pratiğindeki etik davranış biçimlerini söyleşi tarzındaki yazılarında irdeleyen yazarlar, mesleğin “her şeyi kapsamaya çalışan muğlak etik ilkelerle değil de, gezegen hakkı, barınma hakkı ve benzeri belirli sayıda etik ilke çerçevesinde” tartışılıp değerlendirilmesi gerektiğini belirtiyorlar.

In this thesis I have explored some of the ways in which the contexts of epistemology, ethics and designing architecture are each concerned with undecidable questions (that is, with those questions that have no right answers). Drawing on design research, second‐order cybernetics and radical constructivism, I have understood this undecidability to follow in each case from our being part of the situation in which we are acting. This idea is primarily epistemological (being part of the world we observe, we cannot verify the relationship between our understanding and the world beyond our experience as it is impossible to observe the latter) but can also be interpreted spatially and ethically. From this starting point I have developed connections between questions in architecture, epistemology and ethics in two parallel investigations. In the first, I have proposed a connection between design and ethics where design is understood as an activity in which ethical questioning is implicit. Rather than the usual application of ethical theory to practice, I have instead proposed that design can inform ethical thinking, both in the context of designing architecture and also more generally, through (1) the ways designers approach what Rittel (1972) called “wicked problems” (which, I argue, have the same structure as ethical dilemmas) and (2) the implicit consideration of others in design’s core methodology. In parallel to this I have explored the spatial sense of the idea that we are part of the world through a series of design investigations comprising projects set in everyday situations and other speculative drawings. Through these I have proposed reformulating the architectural theme of place, which is usually associated with phenomenology, in constructivist terms as the spatiality of observing our own observing and so as where the self‐reference of epistemology (that we cannot experience the world beyond our experience) becomes manifest.

Meno: Can you tell me, Socrates, can virtue be taught? Or is it not teachable but the result of practice, or is it neither of these, but men posses it by nature or in some other way? Socrates: If then you want to ask one of us [the Athenians] that sort of question, everyone will laugh and say: “Good stranger, you must think me happy indeed if you think I know whether virtue can be taught or how it comes to be; I am so far from knowing whether virtue can be taught or not that I do not even have any knowledge what virtue itself is.” 1

"There were frequent and prolonged periods of silence, with only an occasional mutter from Wittgenstein, and the stillest attention from the others. During these silences, Wittgenstein was extremely tense and active. His gaze was concentrated; his face was alive; his hands made arresting movements; his expression was stern. One knew that one was in the presence of extreme seriousness, absorption, and force of intellect."
Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir.


This paper will discuss the topic of silence in relation to showing, through the role that architecture and ethics played in the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It has to be preliminarily noted that Wittgenstein practically remained silent about these two topics, since he wrote about them very scarcely. Nevertheless, it will be shown that they were both very important for the course of his life.

Tractatus Logico-Phiolosophicus, was Wittgenstein's first major work. The final line of this text was that "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.". Amongst the things that one should remain silent, for Wittgenstein, was ethics, the word of which appears only a couple of times in the entire book. Ethics is something that is mystical and inexpressible that can only be shown.

After the completion of this work Wittgenstein dropped philosophy overall and for a few years he worked as a gardener and school teacher. During the years 1926-28 he got involved in the design of his sister's house in Vienna together with his friend architect Paul Engelmann and for a short period he introduced himself as an architect. Wittgenstein wrote only a few sporadic lines about architecture. In one of them he noted that "Architecture is a gesture. Not every purposive movement of the human body is a gesture. Just as little as every functional building is architecture." (Ms. 126 15r)

After returning back to Cambridge in 1929 where he devoted  his life in his second major ouvre the Philosophical Investigations, there is hardly any appearance of the word ethics or discussion about the topic. Nevertheless, it has been claimed that ethics is the fundamental undercurrent in all Wittgenstein's work: “Both the early work and the late are fundamentally ethical in intention...” (Edwards, 1982, Ethics without Philosophy).

The paper will make a connection between the showing that is connoted in the ethical propositions of the Tractatus with the gestural character of architecture.

Often entitled International Health Experiences (IHE's), medical electives abroad in resource-poor countries have become ever more common within a medics education. The Lancet in 1993 citing benefits for doctors-in-training including: increased cultural sensitivity; enhanced community and social awareness; improved clinical and communications skills; and, a greater understanding of the challenges of working in scarce resources.

With continued interest in these global health issues, the British Medical Association has acknowledged the ethical concerns, and the risk of double standards when undertaking electives in unfamiliar societies and with vulnerable patients. However, unlike the architectural equivalent 'live international projects', our medical peers have begun openly discussing the potential hypocrisy in North-South international educational practices. As a result, medics have highlighted the important role and responsibility of university schools to foster and formalise professional ethical training for students intending to serve patients, no matter what context.

This paper thus looks to investigate what the architectural sister practices could learn from the medical education and their IHE criticisms. Perhaps, like the medics, universities that run international live projects need to examine and focus on the serious ethical issues that their current programmes perpetuate. If architectural educators really feel a justifiable need to conduct studio practice on vulnerable clients, then surely they also need to find a way of properly understanding and incorporating the ethical consequences of encouraging design beyond standard practice too?

Palestine as the place of origins -The body of the territory-Landscapes of the soul-Palimpsest and emblem

Globalization and apocalypses-The perception of space in the world-The sentiment of liberty-The sentiment of fear

Palestine as the heart of the world-Wounds-The power of architecture-Scars, fabrics, regenerations

Achieving reconciliation with Mother Earth -Principles for an ethic of responsibility in architecture-Principles for architecture as a language of peace

Call for Papers Montreal Architectural Review (Volume 6, 2019)
Special Issue: “Thinking Architecture”
Guest Editor: Dr. Lisa Landrum
Closing Date: September 1st, 2019 (now closed)

Thinking Architecture

In Thinking in an Emergency (2011), Elaine Scarry exposes a fallacy: that in emergency situations thinking must cease for quick action to prevail. She returns to this false opposition of thinking and acting in the closing chapter of Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom (2016). While the thrust of her argument is that weapons of mass destruction are fundamentally incompatible with democracy, her underlying premise – that thinking does not oppose action but orients action – is significant for the democratic art of architecture. Deliberative thinking enables action in the right direction. This capacity for deliberation, which Aristotle called bouleusis and aligned with phronēsis (prudence or practical wisdom), is essential for good decision-making, where the goal is not simply to act, but to act well in the midst of particular complex situations.

Scarry’s call for thinking resonates with Hannah Arendt’s insights on action and the faculty of judgment, as sketched in The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind; and as elucidated by Jacques Taminiaux in The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker (1997). At a time when architects are advocating for more immediate and impactful agency in view of global crises, and calling for less talk/more action, it is timely to patiently reflect on the agencies of careful and imaginative architectural thinking, and to recover thoughtful speech as a form of architectural action.

This Call for Thinking, for the sixth volume of the Montreal Architectural Review, invites papers exploring crucial manifestations, modalities and milieus of architectural thinking.

Contributions may probe any combination of the following themes, considered through analysis of specific discursive practices and/or built works from around the world and across time:

• the inherently embodied, situated, social and material modes of architectural thinking;

• ensemble thinking, or thinking in concert (and in tension) with plural agents in dramatic situations;

• places for thinking, which, as Marco Frascari argued, enable quests for wonder, truth, justice, happiness and a beautiful life;

• philosophical models for architectural thinking, such as interpretations of what Aristotle called in Nicomachean Ethics “architectonic phronēsis” [see MAR, vol. 2 (2015) > http://mar.mcgill.ca/article/view/17 ]; and

• habits of thinking fostered via architectural education. Alberto Pérez-Gómez has argued that the architectural education should focus not on solutions, but on “tactics for thought” nurtured through creative dialogue and critical debate. What are the best pedagogical strategies to cultivate these tactics for thought, so as to best prepare future architects to think and act well – even in an emergency?

We hereby invite submissions related to the history and philosophy of architecture on the above theme in one of three formats: scholarly essays (5,000 – 7,500 words, including endnotes); book reviews (1,000 – 1,500 words); or discursive experiments in deliberative or poetic dialogue (1,000 – 1,500 words). Each submission should be accompanied by a 100-word biography, and, in the case of an essay submission, an abstract of not more than 300 words.

The Montreal Architectural Review welcomes illustrated submissions but stresses the responsibility of the author in both providing the images and securing permissions to reproduce them. Please read the Review’s Copyright Notice before making a submission.

Submissions must be made through the Montreal Architectural Review website:
http://mar.mcgill.ca/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions - where you will be asked to register and to complete the online submission process. A guide to the online submission process is available on our website. All submissions must be in English and adhere to the Montreal Architectural Review Author Guidelines, also available on our website. You will be asked to follow a Preparation Checklist before making a submission.

Any queries should be made through the Montreal Architectural Review website.

‘Ethics cannot be taught,’ asserted Plato in one of the first steps of Western philosophy, an argument that was reconfirmed also in the twentieth century by Wittgenstein, who pointed out the ineffable character of ethics. If this argument is correct, it means that schools of architecture face a great problem; they cannot teach the most important aspect of architecture: its ethical function. The question examined here is: having abandoned any hope to teach a theoretical course on ethics, can still philosophy play a role in overcoming this problem?
This paper suggests that philosophy is still valid and it overcomes the ineffability of ethics by suggesting the concept of gesture (as a showing). Gesture, here, is a praxis that points towards, what theory fails to define. The relationship between theory and practice then becomes critical in order to understand and overcome the problem. The paper argues that the origin of the problem is the established relationship between the two terms (as it has been crystallized since Aristotle), prioritizing theory over practice. In this sense, whenever the teaching of ethics in architecture is separated from the praxis of design itself –by becoming an autonomous theoretical subject that looks for abstract rules that should be applied on practice— it is an attempt to talk about the ineffable, that, which, according to Wittgenstein, we should be silent about. Abandoning, thus, any attempt to solve the problem in theory and then apply it on practice, what remains to be done is to start from practice itself. This means, in terms of architectural education, that the only way of teaching the ethical function of architecture takes place through the practical module of design, and not through courses of theory or philosophy. Design, being the core of architecture, should become the main way (the language), that articulates a gesture. There is no doubt that this gesture can spring from a deeply philosophical background, this background, though, should be paradoxically denied in terms of theory, in order to be able to show the ineffable –the ethical function of architecture.

‘Η ηθική δεν διδάσκεται’ φαίνεται να δηλώνει ο Πλάτων σε ένα από τα πρώτα βήματα της Δυτικής φιλοσοφίας, μια άποψη με την οποία ήρθε να συμφωνήσει και ο Βιτγκενστάιν στον εικοστό αιώνα επισημαίνοντας τον άρρητο χαρακτήρα της ηθικής. Αν αυτή η πρόταση είναι ορθή, τότε οι αρχιτεκτονικές σχολές βρίσκονται μπροστά σε ένα μεγάλο πρόβλημα, δεν μπορούν να διδάξουν την πιο σημαντική διάσταση της αρχιτεκτονικής: την ηθική της λειτουργία.
Απέναντι στο άρρητο της ηθικής, η παρούσα εισήγηση προτείνει την έννοια της χειρονομίας (ως δείξη), σαν μια πρακτική απάντηση στο θεωρητικό αυτό πρόβλημα. Η χειρονομία αποτελεί μια πράξη που μπορεί να περιγράψει αυτό που η θεωρία αδυνατεί να ορίσει. Μετασχηματίζοντας λοιπόν το πρόβλημα στη συσχέτιση των εννοιών της θεωρίας και πράξης, διαπιστώνεται ότι το παγιωμένο σχήμα, που (από τον Αριστοτέλη και έκτοτε) ιεραρχεί την θεωρία ως σημαντικότερη της πράξης, αποτελεί την απαρχή του προβλήματος. Με αυτήν την έννοια, όταν η διδασκαλία της ηθικής της αρχιτεκτονικής αποκόπτεται από την πράξη του σχεδιασμού και αυτονομείται σαν θεωρητικό αντικείμενο αναζητώντας αρχές και κανόνες οι οποίες θα καθοδηγήσουν την πράξη, είναι καταδικασμένη να προσπαθεί να μιλήσει για το άρρητο, αυτό για το οποίο, σύμφωνα με τον Βιτγκενστάιν, θα έπρεπε κανείς να σιωπά. Εγκαταλείποντας λοιπόν την προσπάθεια να λύσουμε το ζήτημα στο επίπεδο της θεωρίας και στη συνέχεια να το εφαρμόσουμε στην πράξη, αυτό που μένει είναι η αφετηρία από την πράξη καθαυτή. Στο επίπεδο της αρχιτεκτονικής εκπαίδευσης αυτό σημαίνει τη διδασκαλία της ηθικής λειτουργίας της αρχιτεκτονικής, όχι μέσα από μαθήματα φιλοσοφίας και θεωρίας, αλλά μέσα από το πρακτικό μάθημα του σχεδιασμού. Ο σχεδιασμός, όντας η καρδιά της αρχιτεκτονικής, οφείλει να αποτελέσει το κυρίαρχο μέσο (τη γλώσσα) μέσα από την οποία δομείται μια χειρονομία. Έτσι αυτή η χειρονομία μπορεί να γεννηθεί από ένα βαθύτατο φιλοσοφικό υπόβαθρο, το οποίο όμως αρνείται σε επίπεδο θεωρητικού λόγου, προκειμένου να δείξει το άρρητο ---την ηθική λειτουργία της αρχιτεκτονικής.