Moral meanings of architecture and adaptive reuse

Abstract

After modernism’s failure and postmodernist critiques, mainstream architecture turned away from ethics. However, over the last decades, the ecological challenges introduced a paradigm shift and re-introduced ethical awareness. Yet, the crisis within architectural ethics remains. There is no consensus about the relation between ethics and architecture, a comprehensive framework or language for dealing with ethical issues within architecture is still absent and architectural ethics is very often pragmatically oriented. Additionally, the ethical foundations and values of architectural codes, awards, architectural contests, and briefs are not made explicit. Within the emerging subfield of adaptive reuse, this is not different. Although the architectural interventions adaptive reuse entails show them to be meaning-constitutive and moral acts, that communicate about values and places and alter their meanings, their ethical dimension is not made explicit or substantially scrutinized. In our view, reflections regarding the ethical dimensions of architectural interventions in built heritage can function as a spearhead for understanding the ethical nature of architecture in general.

If architecture relies on ethical choices based on conceptions of the good, we should recognise that the ethical underpinnings that ground and guide our deliberative design decisions is what we should reflect about in the first place (cf. Fisher 2019, xix; xxiii). Our deliberations about what objectively matters and how to correspondingly design, is the essence of the architectural practice. This is why D’Anjou (2020, 7) emphasises that design and architecture are ethically engaged actions that shape human being and our being-in-the-world. Wasserman, Sullivan and Palermo (2000, 34; 80) summarise it by referring to architecture’s intentionality being its ethical force. To address the ethical within architecture more substantially and explicitly, we must attend to the long overdue role of moral philosophy within architecture. Our suggestion to turn to moral phenomenology contrasts with mainstream architectural-ethical writings produced over the last decades and demonstrates, as Spector suggested, that “moral philosophy could be fruitfully pursued in an ongoing effort to bring a sense of unified purpose back to architecture” (2005, xi). This kind of analytical phenomenology, which Düchs and Illies (2018, 98) described as a practically non-existent research field, may contribute in a substantial way to the development of architectural ethics.

In this talk, we would like to discuss the upset of our recently started research project concerning the ethical nature of architectural interventions in built heritage and show some preliminary results of a view that phenomenologically describes in what sense architecture is a moral and symbolic enterprise. This strengthens the idea that architectural education and the profession, as Spector (2005, 10) claims, “must be substantially remodelled” as architects must be able to explain their design choices on ethical grounds. As both Spector (2005, 21) and Kingwell (2021, 20) have mentioned, the vanguard or locus where societal problems are discussed is frequently the architectural playing field. In that regard, architectural education must much more than nowadays involve profound critical and ethical thinking and reflection so as to strengthen and mature future practitioners.