Ethics first. Moral understanding as a (prison) design guide.

Abstract

After modernism’s failure and postmodernist critiques, mainstream architecture turned away from ethics. Over the last decades, ethical concerns and awareness resurfaced but, surprisingly, the ethical underpinnings of design and architects’ ethical responsibility has remained underrepresented in architectural theory, practice, and education. Instead of understanding architectural ethics in a pragmatic or applied ethical sense or to confront the manifold ethical demands with scepticism, we should acknowledge that the essence of the architectural design practice relies on deliberations about what objectively matters and how to correspondingly design, i.e. on moral deliberation and moral choice. This implies that architects bear the responsibility to question the ethical foundations of their designs and the design briefs they respond to. By way of illustrating how ethical reflection and moral understanding can inform design deliberations, this talk focuses on prison design. While the importance of prison design on well-being, rehabilitation and reintegration has been gaining acknowledgement over the past years, the ethical underpinnings of prison design remain underrepresented in architectural theory. This talk explains how we can make sense of the practice of punishment as a moral and symbolic practice while recognising concerns about its moral justification. The paper suggests that, in order to morally justify the practice of punishment and to hold on to its intelligibility, we need a concept of detention that is radically oriented at rehabilitation. To conclude on the level of design consequences, the Belgian case of the twenty-first-century detention houses serve as an illustration of a possible design response.