SOCIAL ETHICS AND

CONCERNS IN
ARCHITECTURE

THE ‘E’ WORD

-BY MAHIRA BHATIA

IN GUIDANCE OF
-AR. DEEPAK KUMAR
According to Janice Turner, a columnist of ‘The Times’ (26.05.2015):

Architects have a higher moral duty than other artists, since they have the
greatest power to shape society. When J-Lo sings for a million dollars for the
president of Turkmenistan or Beyoncé for the Gaddafis, they are gilding
dictatorships, but their performances are fleeting.

Are architects merely players in someone else’s game?

There is a gradual hollowing out of the architectural profession, with
architects merely players in someone else’s game. Yet, despite this, it is the
architect who is still held up as culpable, sometimes wholly responsible, when
something goes wrong, aesthetically, structurally, even commercially. We
could certainly add morally too. When there are questions over workers’
rights, for example, it is the architect who very often has to answer them, and,
e.g. in the case of Zaha Hadid Architects’ work in Qatar, repeatedly. When
another luxury residential development pops up with flats for sale at millions
of pounds, it is the architect who takes the criticism, not the building’s owner,
even if the architect’s design succeeds on its own terms as an impeccable
response to the brief. 

An architect’s worry and concern

As an architect, the bigger you build, the more you have to worry about the
moral and ethical consequences of your work. It is one thing to make a house
for a single person, or even a small office building, and perhaps tear down a
nice old structure or destroy a garden to do so. It is another to use up vast
amount of resources in making large buildings, both because of the effect of
that expenditure on our environment and its future, and because the kinds of
clients who can command such resources have power. Evil dictators and
rapacious corporations make the best clients. But at a cost.

Is it right to hold the architect wholly responsible when

something goes wrong?‘
All this is why ‘ethics’ – which we might define as the application or practice
of a moral position – has become such an important and recurring issue for
architects. And at the ‘Architectural Ethics’ debate at the Royal Academy, part
of a season on ‘Architecture and Freedom’, it was pretty clear that the
architects in the audience wanted some answers.

Ethics and architecture should not inhabit the same

sentence
At the ‘Architectural Ethics’ debate at the Royal Academy,
the writer and broadcaster, Jonathan Meades, kicked off proceedings by
claiming that ‘Ethics and architecture should not inhabit the same sentence’,
taking aim, essentially, at the claims for architecture’s exceptionalism. Why,
he asked, should architecture be different from other professions or creative
pursuits that are apparently unconcerned with questions of ethics? It is a
reductive argument, perhaps, but one with some validity. Having ethics
implies architects have a power that extends well beyond the confines of their
brief. What, Meades’ argument goes, gives architects the right to say that
their concern or influence should extend beyond that which they are
contracted to do? The answer is to do with architecture’s ‘public-ness’. And it
was along those lines that the writer and researcher, Anna Minton, cleverly
reframed the question and spoke very convincingly about how the ‘public
interest’ has disappeared from the lexicon of planning and policy in favour of
the broader ‘economic interest’, as if the latter is automatically coterminous
with the former. 

Ethics are a relative concept

But, just as in the more explicitly architectural aspects of the debate, one is
forced to grapple with the inevitable question of what ‘ethical’ actually means
in practice. Ethics are, after all, a relative concept – the manifestation of a
moral ideal – and one need not have to delve too far into the annals of human
history to discover that one person’s morality is another’s immorality, and
vice versa.

‘Process’ is the architectural object, rather than the building

So where does this leave us? A clue, I think, was in the contribution of Jane
Hall of Assemble. In Assemble’s work, it is the ‘process’ that emerges as the
architectural object, rather than the building. Similarly, what, I would argue, is
important in the ethics debate is not the end product – perhaps a set of
regulated ethical codes that an architect must abide by or risk being struck off
the register – but the debate itself. Why, despite Meades’ protestations, are
architecture and ethics discussed together? Because architects think they
should be. There is no more compelling reason. The question now is how to
keep the debate moving forward and ensure that architects are equipped to
make ethical judgements that they feel they can defend and hold to. There is
usually no right answer to an ethical dilemma, but there are certainly right
ways of dealing with them.

Architects continued to be blamed: some examples

Piers Taylor of Invisible Studio said

‘Even though architects are involved in as little as 10 per cent of all new
buildings, they continue to be blamed.’

As recently reported by The Guardian, hundreds of migrants workers have

died in Qatar the last two years as result of the construction boom
surrounding the 2022 FIFA World Cup. At the center of the controversy is Zaha
Hadid, Hon. FAIA, who designed the Al-Wakrah stadium.
 The fig. above shows Al-Wakrah stadium during & after construction

Wouter Vanstiphout, a Dutch critic, tweeted: “Qatar Stadium, the Burma

Railroad of Parametricism.” Likewise, horrible living and working conditions on
the sites of the cultural projects designed by Frank Gehry, FAIA, and Jean
Nouvel, FAIA, in Abu Dhabi, have made it clear that this is not an isolated case.

Another dig at Hadid was over the budget on the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Stadium
Times columnist Janice Turner was unwilling to let Hadid – and fellow
architectural stars such as Norman Foster – off the hook.
She writes: ‘Architects have a higher moral duty than other artists, since they
have the greatest power to shape society.’

  

Whether architects should take an ethical stance is an important issue to

come out of the BBC’s erroneous Zaha interview.

Despite the RIBA Royal Gold Medal, Hadid maintains the British establishment
does not like her. 
Architect Alan Berman of Berman Guedes Stretton said
‘False accusations should not be bandied about, and need correcting, but it
raises the issue of architects’ relation to society and to whom they owe
moral allegiance.  

What should architects/ architecture bodies do?

‘All too often, architects consider themselves free to design whatever their
personal artistic urge leads them to – the wilder and wackier the better, with
the design media egging them on.’
With all this pressure, Piers Taylor thinks there needs to be more guidance for
architecture practices to help them avoid the ethical pitfalls.

‘Undoubtedly, architecture bodies such as the RIBA need to assist architects

with the tools to change clients’ behaviour, and need to do more to lobby
politicians and create a change of culture in the delivery of new
buildings,’ he said. 

‘Architects need to become more critical in practice to help bring about this
change by standing their ground, interrogating clients, processes and prevailing
cultural conditions.’ 
Hadid could point out that, when it comes to dealing with despots, other
architects are at it too, not to mention the International Olympic Committee,
multinational businesses, respected cultural institutions, the mayor of London
and chancellor of the exchequer.
In today’s building procurement process of construction managers,
contractors, project managers and sometimes professional client bodies, the
design architect is rarely influencing the actual day to day method of
construction seen on site. In many ways this is a good thing, because with site
safety methodologies being undertaken by professional construction experts,
this then leaves the designer to focus on producing great and long-lasting
architecture.

It is clear that architects should avoid working on some structures

in which their very architectural skills will be used for oppression and violence.
For that reason I support the petition created by Architects/Designers/Planners
for Social Responsibility calling on architects to refuse to design maximum-
security prisons.