Architectural Ethics

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Ray
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Decision Making ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Relationship Building ◽  
First Century ◽  
Managerial Values ◽  
Architectural Practice ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Face ◽  
Twenty First Century

The practice of architecture, a discipline that is inescapably contingent on the particular, but that is also required by society in some way to represent an ideal, raises a number of specific ethical issues. Following an essay by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, this paper argues that it is intrinsic to professional judgement that this involves the prioritizing of unquantifiable ‘goods’. A twentieth-century case study is examined, which exhibits the choices made by a well-known architect. The changed nature of architectural practice in the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century is then described, whereby the privilege of making such judgements has been severely limited by the substitution of managerial values for professional values. In the face of different ethical imperatives – most obviously to design responsibly within pressing ecological concerns – it is argued that the task for architects now is to re-establish a context within which sound judgements can be made, which of course implies a degree of professional trust. Their ability to balance managerial values (technical competence for example) with ethical decision-making is what may prove to be most valuable. There are implications for architectural education, which in the past has either pretended to be a science or has retreated into aesthetic speculation, providing training in the skills of persuasion rather than relationship-building. The conclusion is that ethical thinking is inescapable for the profession of architecture in the twenty-first century.

“Is an Archive Enough?”: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Genre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-165
Author(s):  
Bradley J. Fest
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
First Century ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Rachel Blau Duplessis ◽  
Film And Video

In the twenty-first century, digital technologies have made it possible for writers and artists to create massively unreadable works through computational and collaborative composition, what the author has elsewhere called megatexts. The ubiquity of texts appearing across media that are quite literally too big to read—from experimental novels to television, film, and video games—signals that the megatext is an emergent form native to the era of neoliberalism. But what happens to other long forms, such as the twentieth-century long poem, when written in an era of megatextuality? Rachel Blau DuPlessis's work, including Drafts (1987–2013) and Traces, with Days (2017–), readily suggests itself as a case study for thinking through a megatextual impulse in the twenty-first-century long poem. Though her work is plainly indebted to its modernist precursors (H.D., Pound, Williams, etc.) while disavowing at every level of its composition a patriarchal will toward totality, DuPlessis's various experiments in the long poem are also thoroughly contemporary and respond to the economic, military, political, and environmental transformations of the neoliberal era by drawing upon and producing fragmentary, megatextual debris. This essay positions DuPlessis's work amidst a larger twenty-first-century media ecology, which includes both the megatext and the big, ambitious novel, and argues that rather than simply (and futilely) resist the neoliberal cultural logic of accumulation without end, DuPlessis hypertrophically uses the megatext's phallogocentric form against itself in order to interrogate more broadly what it means—socially, culturally, economically—to write a long poem in the age of hyperarchival accumulation.

The Grimmness of Contemporary Fairy Tales: Exploring the Legacy of the Brothers Grimm in the Twenty-First Century

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Zipes
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
South America ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
First Century ◽  
Brothers Grimm ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
North And South America ◽  
North And South

This chapter explores some of the more salient contemporary Grimm variants, primarily in the fields of literature and poetry that have appeared in North and South America, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia during the twenty-first century. The chapter endeavors to choose and discuss works that represent, in the author's opinion, significant artistic contributions to our understanding of the Grimms' folk and fairy tales and are furthermore innovations that seek to alter our viewpoints on how these tales relate to current sociopolitical conditions. Alongside a discussion of these contemporary fairy tales, the chapter also touches upon its use of the terms “Grimmness” and “Grimm.”

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