Ethics in architectural practice

Elżbieta Trocka-Leszczyńska, Grażyna Hryncewicz-Lamber

Abstract

The emergence of the consumerist society has changed the role of culture and architecture. Zygmunt Bauman wrote: Since culture had lost its status as a necessary tool in the design, construction, and maintenance of the social order, cultural artifacts were withdrawn from the storefront, and, following improvement, made available for sale at the Shopping Centre. Can we manage as a profession to survive, in view of the dissolution of criteria for beauty and usefulness, in a world of fluid values and aesthetics? Are the new, ethics-oriented architectural movements now gaining authority, such as slow architecture and sustainable design, a hope for the renewal of architecture? This monographic issue of ARCHITECTUS, conceived as an interdisciplinary review of professional ethics merges the voices of architects, planners, philosophers and lawyers in a collection of texts structured within the three main topics: Education in ethics for students of architecture, understood as an awakening of ethical consciousness. Faculties of Architecture at Polish universities often entrust the teaching of professional ethics to specialists from ‘outside’. Not wishing to diminish the status of the teaching of ethics as a philosophical science by individuals concerned with philosophy and meta-ethics, it seems necessary to give thought to the overall curriculum of professional ethics in architectural education. Should the teaching of ethics be based on broad reflection on universal concerns linked with responsible design, or is it sufficient to make students of architecture aware of the existence of limits to professional behaviour, leaving to them the subtleties of distinctions between right and wrong?

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