Creating Communities

A building is more than a structure: it is an invitation to citizens, whether or not they live or work in a given buildings. This chapter queries whether buildings can be said to create community, and if so, how. It argues, in effect, that “If you build it, they will come” is an insufficient and maybe misleading slogan when it comes to the real world of architecture.

Built Forms and Ethics: The General Issues

How do we begin to think about architecture in ethical terms? This first chapter sets out the terms of reference for this volume’s approach to that question. The view is intended to be expansive, with ethics understood in a broad sense to include various kinds of professional and social obligations.

Epilogue: Afterthoughts, or Thoughts After Walking

This final chapter argues that walking remains the best way to experience architecture in its fully temporalized conditions, works of art and politics that must be lived with to be appreciated (or deprecated, as the case may be). Architects therefore shoulder heavy and complicated burdens of ethical responsibility. They do not tread lightly on our environments, natural and otherwise. A noble profession is made nobler by its best exemplars, and pulled down by its mediocrities. Only by appreciating all dimensions of this responsibility can we say that we are performing an “ethics of architecture.”

Creating Buildings

What are the basic issues of responsible building? This chapter addresses that question by analyzing not only the codes and conduct necessary to produce buildings of “commodity, firmness, and delight,” but also buildings that speak their site and surroundings. Ethics building is simply good design in the abstract, but appropriate and perhaps even harmonious design—or, when thought possible and necessary, design that is disharmonious to good effect.

Creating Art

Ethics and aesthetics are not always conjoined, but this chapter argues for a close connection between. Good design is its own kind of responsibility: to the norms of architectural history, but also to the possibility of elegant innovations that can, just a revolutionary work of art in another medium, alter the conversation. Some architects do not consider themselves artist, but the greats ones did and do so still.

Creating Environments

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of current building practices is the impact that long-standing creations have on the environment, even as they are slotted into existing networks of functionality. LEED certificates are just the beginning of environmental responsibility in current conditions. This chapter examines both what is currently being done in building practice and what the future might hold, or demand, from designers.

Creating Justice

Beyond community and aesthetics lie deeper, and sometimes murkier, responsibilities. Can the built environment facilitate or even create more just conditions? Can it, by the same token, create injustice, whether wittingly or otherwise? This chapter addresses those questions using traditional notions of social justice theory and of public goods. Elements of risk distribution likewise are addressed, with respect to the uneven spread of both happiness and suffering enabled by buildings and urban planning.

Creating Being

Heidegger is well known for his arguments that architecture “shelters being,” and allows us to “dwell” in order that we may “think” in his special ontological sense of the term. This chapter takes serious these reflections on the relationship between the built environment and the question of the meaning of Being. Without endorsing such views wholesale, the argument is that there is indeed an existential dimension to buildings—how could there not be?—and therefore that architects have a special responsibility to consider this issue of Being in their work.