Horns of a dilemma.

ARCHITECTURE AND ITS ETHICAL DILEMMAS 

Edited by Nicholas Ray. Abingdon: Taylor and Francis. 2005. [pounds sterling]75 hardback, [pounds sterling]25 paperback

While not pretending to be exhaustive, this collection of essays based on a conference held at Cambridge in 2004 provides a timely reminder of the extraordinary range of ethical issues faced by architects on a daily basis; from conflicting responsibilities to client and contractor, to obligations to the greater public good and in particular to the natural environment. Whether most architects are conscious of all of the issues raised is clearly open to question, which makes their discussion here all the more important.

It isn't possible in the limited scope of a review such as this to do justice to all the individual contributions, which are consistently well written and thought provoking. I was struck, however, by what appeared to be a clear convergence between several of the papers; namely, the relationship between the individual designer and society at large. Richard MacCormac, for example, makes a compelling case for valuing individual intuition in the service of the common good, which seems to be consistent with Jane Collier's account of John Dewey's notion of the 'Moral Imagination'. Historian Andrew Ballantyne suggests that the only real temporal continuity we have as societies is shared habit, and Sjoerd Soeters describes his personal experiences in practice of using variations on established architectural types to successfully balance the unique and the common.

It may or may not be more than coincidence that the famously withering description of Stirling's History Faculty at Cambridge by the then Professor of Classics (discussed in Nick Ray's detailed account of the building process and its aftermath) was an apparent reference to its being based on the wrong shared architectural type, the 'hotel', rather than the 'library.' Whatever the case, resolving the relationship between the individual and the collective good seems to lie at the heart of the ethical issues raised in these papers. At a time when architects are being arrested in Japan for knowingly putting the public at risk for personal gain, this is an extremely timely publication which I would highly recommend.