Abstract
This contribution presents architecture as a complex activity with no optimal design solution. Architecture and the built environment form a complex whole, consisting of many different elements serving various functions. This precludes the possibility of finding a single optimal solution. Thus, the problem of architectural design typically revolves around normative choices and a response to typically contradictory demands. By introducing descriptive ethics (what is appropriate to the built environment, which “moral beliefs” are embedded in it?) and normative ethics (how do we propose it is best to live or to address our environmental issues?), we can introduce a higher precision in design decisions.
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Notes
1. For example, Alison and Peter Smithson worked with the findings of sociologists Young and Wilmott in the 1950s. Design methodologies were central to many of the North American schools of architecture, MIT in particular.
2. The same thing can be said about aesthetic choices. The modernist argument on the “spirit of the age” notwithstanding, one would be hard-pressed to find a definitive causal connection between scientific analysis of design problems and the aesthetic proposition in a design solution.
3. Interestingly, the process for European project bids attempts to quantify various incommensurable aspects of architectural design by attributing a numerical value scale to such diverse characteristics as size of the organization, experience with a type of building, and design quality. Recently, the architecture office Kempe Thill has done research on this form of project bids and a proposition for improving them. The study is available online at http://www.atelierkempethill.com/0077_nl.pdf
4. The mid-century critique of dogmatic modernism demonstrated some crucial problems, but was equally reductive in its principles of sociability in architecture (Schrijver 2009, pp. 85–94).
5. One might also distinguish between the meta-discourse of ethics as relevant to architecture discourse and education, and applied ethics as relevant to specific designs or case studies, following the distinction by Fox (2000).
6. Nigel Cross has argued that metaphor and analogy are approaches that properly belong to the humanities, which concern human experience. In his classification of design science, it is pattern seeking and modeling that are essentially design approaches.
7. These two approaches together may help study contemporary developments, such as the increasingly economic interpretation of value. The current assumption that if something sells, it must be valuable uses economic value as an indicator of general value. For example, in a discussion of a housing project on Ypenburg by Christian Rapp, the criticism was directed primarily at the fact that over a fifth of the apartments were not yet sold. “Duur, saai, en niet eens een balkon” (“Expensive, boring, and not even a balcony”) NRC Handelsblad, 17 November 2007. Assessing examples like this for their underlying assumptions on value may help reconsider current practices, such as the intervention of project managers who make decisions in the design process based primarily on economic considerations.
8. Spector, for example, uses the Vitruvian terms as his basis and expands them with “context” and “site” (Spector 2001).
9. This was famously put forward by Charles Jencks as the definitive end of modernism in architecture (Jencks 1977, p. 9).
10. For example, there is a general tendency toward physical determinism to be found in the history of twentieth-century architecture, particularly in the manifestoes and position statements.
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Schrijver, L. (2013). Architecture as an Object of Research: Incorporating Ethical Questions in Design Thinking. In: Basta, C., Moroni, S. (eds) Ethics, Design and Planning of the Built Environment. Urban and Landscape Perspectives, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5246-7_5
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