Design Beyond Ethics PDF

1.3 PA R T 1 : T H E P R O F E S S I O N F or Mor e I nf o r m ati o n AIA Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct: www.aia.org/about/ethicsandbylaws. Ethics for Architects: Fifty Dilemmas of Professional Practice (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010) by Thomas Fisher. Architecture Design and Ethi...

1.3 PA R T 1 : T H E P R O F E S S I O N F or Mor e I nf o r m ati o n AIA Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct: www.aia.org/about/ethicsandbylaws. Ethics for Architects: Fifty Dilemmas of Professional Practice (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010) by Thomas Fisher. Architecture Design and Ethics: Tools for Survival (The Architectural Press, 2008) by Thomas Fisher. The Ethical Architect: The Dilemma of Contemporary Practice (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001) by Thomas Spector. Ethics and the Practice of Architecture (Wiley, 2000) by Barry Wasserman, Patrick Sullivan, and Gregory Palermo. Design Beyond Ethics Victoria Beach, AIA As with safe food, many actors contribute to the ethical project of safe shelter: inspectors, engineers, and more. Rather than compete with them, architects, like chefs, should seek their niche with aesthetics—not in the narrow sense of beauty but in the broad sense of understanding and shaping how humans interact with their surroundings. I NT ROD U C T I ON : TH E C H EF AR C H ITE C T We all experience architecture Expecting an architect to design a safe structure is like expecting a chef to cook a safe meal: It is at once a high ethical requirement and a very low expectation. Food and shelter, the raw materials that chefs and architects work with, are absolutely essential to human survival. Because of this, their quality (or lack thereof) rises to an ethical concern that society takes seriously, creating a great umbrella involving testing, codes, inspectors, and the like to protect the public from getting sick or injured. Obviously, anyone involved with things that can save or threaten lives is ethically mandated to uphold these protections. This mandate forms a foundation for professional ethics. American architects became subject to professional ethics fairly recently, when they formed a regulated profession in the twentieth century. A well-defined branch of applied moral philosophy, professional ethics pertains to all professionals, including doctors, lawyers, and engineers. But just as with chefs, the core, defining work of architects—the work that differentiates them from all the other contributors to the safety of the built environment— goes beyond ethics and into aesthetics. And just as there are many sources for a safe snack, many kinds of people (and even computers) can make a building firm, but it takes an architect to make one commodious and delightful. Currently the legal authority of architects rests with their licensure and their parallel commitment to professional ethics. But what if the raw, primal power of aesthetics could trump that of ethics? If so, aesthetics may be the key to unlocking the real authority of architects, and therefore of architecture, to shape society. before we have even heard the word. —Peter Zumthor, Architect Victoria Beach is the 2012 AIA National Ethics Council chair and was faculty fellow at the Center for Ethics at Harvard, where she taught design, history, theory, and ethics. An AIA Young Architect Award recipient, Beach is principal of her own practice and city council member for Carmel, California. 1.3 Design Beyond Ethics 19 AESTH E TIC S Aesthetics is the mother of ethics. PA R T 1 : T H E P R O F E S S I O N Joseph Brodsky, 1987 Nobel Laureate “Aesthetics” is not what it used to be: the term has undergone some renovations. Around the mid-nineteenth century, the word became most closely associated with ideas of beauty or taste. But this recent definition constitutes a detour away from its more enduring and ancient foundations in basic notions of perception—with etymological connotations of sensing as well as understanding: Greek: aesthethikos—pertaining to sense perception, from aistheta, perceptible things, from aisthenasthai / aesthesis, to perceive. Latin: percipere, to seize wholly, to see all the way through; per, thoroughly + capere, to seize. The philosopher Immanuel Kant saw the detour coming and railed against a corruption of this word that would rob our language of a useful conceptual tool: At the foundation of this term lies the disappointed hope…of subjecting the criticism of the beautiful to principles of reason, and so of elevating its rules into a science…. It is advisable to give up the use of the term as designating the critique of taste, and to apply it solely to that doctrine, which is true science—the science of the laws of sensibility— and thus come nearer to the language and the sense of the ancients. The trendy definition may have had its run, but the concept of “sensory knowledge” is too helpful to architecture’s current predicament to keep it buried. It’s time to reconnect the modern definition to the timeless one. Under its timeless definition, aesthetics is a most capacious term—encompassing the perception of all material things by all living senses: the earthy warmth of fresh milk and the repulsive acridness when it spoils. An aesthetic experience, then, is simply a perceptible one, just as a medical anesthetic renders us unable to perceive. To study or to master such a fundamentally human kind of knowledge is to connect to the essence of life in a way that ethics never can. Nobel Laureate in Literature Joseph Brodsky remarks, “The tender babe who cries and rejects the stranger…does so instinctively, making an aesthetic choice, not a moral one.” In other words, aesthetic knowledge comes first, long before moral knowledge. An aesthetic instinct develops in man rather rapidly, for, even without fully realizing who he is and what he actually requires, a person instinctively knows what he doesn’t like and what doesn’t suit him. In an anthropological respect, let me reiterate, a human being is an aesthetic creature before he is an ethical one. Aesthetics describes the first contact with reality, whether at the beginning of each day or at the beginning of life itself. Morality, in contrast, evolves as part of the culture utilizing it. ETH IC S AN D MO R A LI TY Under their largely uncontested definitions, ethics and morality are fairly circumscribed terms—dealing with the shared values and duties developed by and describing a particular group of people, and etymologically connoting customs, manners, or habits: Latin: ethicus, Greek: ethikos—ethos, character; (pl.) manners. Latin: moralis, concerned with ethics, moral; mor-, mos, custom; (pl.) mores, habits, morals. Classical Latin moralis was formed by Cicero (De Fato ii. i) as a rendering of ancient Greek ethikos (mores being the accepted Latin equivalent of ethe). Whether a person’s action is right or wrong, therefore, highly depends on what the ethos of that person’s group requires. For example, it would be quite wrong for members of a local street gang to try to cut a person open with sharp knives, unless, of course, those same folks were the nurses and doctors on a surgical team. The societal group called doctors is defined by its devotion to medical ethics and the ethical goal of health; the street gang has other goals. 20 Ethics and Professional Practice PA R T 1 : T H E P R O F E S S I O N Doctors, as we know, form a self-selected subset of a larger group called professionals. People who devote themselves to professional ethical duties (shorthand: “pro” ethics) are, by definition, professionals. But professionals are also a self-selected subcategory of a larger social group of ordinary citizens with their own set of ordinary ethics (shorthand: “joe” ethics), things like being honest, kind, or fair. Even membership in this subgroup is elective, though. Folks who eschew these neighborly values, sticking to the bare legal minimums for behavior (shorthand: “schmoe” ethics) belong to an even larger group best defined, perhaps, as the unimprisoned. With all this talk of ethical options, it is interesting to note that deciding between being a pro, joe, or schmoe, or a member of any other identifying group actually requires an aesthetic choice. People choose to pursue the kind of life that appeals to them, the one that follows their aesthetic vision for themselves; nobody must grow up to be a doctor, after all. Only once that meta-choice is made must future ethical choices follow the value system of the group in order to ensure that the life pursued will actually be led. “Aesthetics is the mother of ethics,” according to Brodsky, which of course makes ethics the offspring of aesthetics. Aesthetics deals with physical truths while ethics deals with social constructs dependent upon them. Sense follows sensibility. As architect Peter Zumthor states, “We all experience architecture before we have even heard the word.” If so, then aesthetics provides the foundation to ethics, not the reverse. P ROFE S SI ON AL ETH IC S Though professional ethics may not fully describe the ultimate aesthetic obligations of architects, it’s worth sorting through the complex web of obligations it does describe. All licensed professions share at least four common characteristics. They apply (i) technical knowledge, nurtured by (ii) collegial organizations, to advance (iii) ethical public values, through (iv) client service. Each one of these four brings with it its own universe of moral duties to perform or moral virtues to cultivate. An ethical public value (iii) provides the primary defining justification for establishing a regulated profession. This goal, such as safety for engineers, health for doctors, or justice for lawyers must be so crucial to humanity’s survival that it rises to the high level of an ethical value. And it follows that the highest ethical priority professionals have is to serve the public, above serving their discipline, colleagues, or even clients. The sociologist Talcott Parsons put it well in discussing lawyers: [Their] function in relation to clients is by no means only to “give them what they want” but often to resist their pressures and get them to realize…what the law will permit them to do. In this sense, then, the lawyer stands as a kind of buffer between the illegitimate desires of clients and the social interest. Here he “represents” the law rather than the client. And the public is not limited to the paying public. Medicine and law, in fact, require pro bono services to those who cannot pay, because to deny someone access to a hospital or a fair trial would be to deny someone a fundamental human right. Obviously, it requires the exercise of certain human virtues to maintain this principled stance: philanthropism, humanitas, Samaritanism, and transcendency, to name a few. Client service (iv) is one of the four cornerstones of a profession because professionals achieve their general moral goals iteratively and incrementally, through many specific client cases. Theirs is an applied science: neither basic laboratory research nor overarching political policy. This endows the relationship between professionals and clients with the utmost societal importance and with crucial ethical dimensions. Furthermore, due to the imbalance of technical knowledge in the relationship, the situation is ripe for exploitation and must be counterbalanced. Professionals, therefore, must cherish this special relationship and must always prefer their clients’ interests above their own. In doing so, they may call on such moral virtues as selflessness, trustworthiness, fidelity, and discretion. 1.3 Design Beyond Ethics 21 PA R T 1 : T H E P R O F E S S I O N It may seem strange to have ethical obligations toward a nonhuman abstraction. But professionals must respect technical knowledge (i) just as they might look after an important tool, like a sharp knife. If the tools do not perform, neither can the professionals using them perform their obligatory societal role. In fact, states cede power to professions to self-govern because neither the state nor any other entity is more expert than the professionals themselves to evaluate their own standards. So, a profession that does not maintain high technical standards can simply decline until it disappears or until it becomes regulated by outsiders, as occurred with accountants in the wake of the Enron scandals. In a rapidly evolving global culture, everyone must continually expand the boundaries of their knowledge even to stay current—a minimum standard for professionals. Just to stay ahead of lay knowledge can, therefore, be a Herculean task, requiring access to virtues such as inquisitiveness, disinterestedness, rigor, and diligence. Stranger still, perhaps, are ethical obligations toward the self, which may initially appear selfish, a decidedly unvirtuous quality. But if the ethical goals of a profession are to thrive, so must the profession itself. A profession is therefore ethically obliged to ensure its own survival. In a strong collegial organization (ii), each member contributes to the unified voice of the profession’s ethos and must be respected and nurtured. This is especially true for those who are most vulnerable: the aspiring professionals who quite literally represent the future of any profession. This self-referential focus performs another important function in upholding professional ethics. For example, the unanimity with which doctors in California adhered to their own ethical code led to the indefinite postponement, in 2006, of the practice of lethal injection. If a single doctor had broken this collegial bond, the profession would have remained ineffectual on this matter. To come together, sometimes against corrosive exterior forces, may involve ethical virtues such as empathy, nurturing, kinship, and protectiveness. ETH IC S OF A E S TH E TI C S Though complicated and with competing duties that often seem impossible to balance, professional ethics is not particularly controversial; there is widespread agreement on the specifics of its four cornerstones and on the general notion that professions entail ethics in the first place. In contrast, there is very little agreement on the general question of whether aesthetics entails ethics or on the specifics of how that might work. And since architecture derives its identity through the artistic treatment of the medium of shelter, it is worth exploring whether this component of the work involves ethics. Over the millennia, many philosophers have investigated the moral purpose of art in search of an ethical justification for all the aesthetic activities (visual, musical, culinary) that humans just cannot seem to resist. Here is a brief sampling of the mixed results. Human beings require an expressive outlet, goes one argument. As sports provide physical release for our animal energies, without the emotive outlet of the arts, our species descends into instability. This theory seeks moral authority for the arts based on its role in maintaining a civilized society, but many, including Plato himself, take issue with whether self-indulgent expression rechannels or actually cultivates depravity. Many argue that art’s moral purpose is to edify. Art improves us, they claim, makes us more morally virtuous—often through the empathy we feel with artists or their subjects. But counterclaims point out that interpretations of artistic works vary uncontrollably from person to person. In fact, lessons that are intentionally planned and obvious to anyone verge on the pedantic or the doctrinaire—hardly the province of art. The Mithraditic approach to art’s moral purpose may be among the most creative. King Mithradates VI ruled Pontus (modern-day Turkey) in the first century bc and took small doses of poison starting in childhood so that he could not be secretly poisoned by his enemies. Art, by analogy, provides life experience by proxy—protecting us, in small, harmless doses, from the otherwise overwhelming dimensions of life. This might provide a moral justification for art, though it does not take into account life’s unusual twists and turns. In fact, the king’s plan hit a major snag when, under threat of 22 Ethics and Professional Practice PA R T 1 : T H E P R O F E S S I O N capture by Rome, he could not commit suicide by the usual, more gentle means of poison and had to command his servant to stab him to death. Problems seem inherent to every known attempt to justify art in moral terms. Some maintain, therefore, that it is the very resistance to, or transcendence of, morality that defines the artistic endeavor. In other words, they see art as a meta-ethical thing: beyond or outside ethical consideration, ethically inert like a potato or a pebble. This would imply that art can be neither moral nor immoral. It can neither uphold nor subvert any particular morality. Under this theory art is amoral: simply nonmoral. This is the theory that Henry Cobb, the world-renowned architect and regrettably less-renowned ethicist, espoused in a 1995 essay: How do principles of human duty relate or apply to works of art? We can go a long way toward answering this question by referring to an aphorism of the poet-philosopher Paul Valéry, who wrote: “We recognize a work of art by the fact that no idea it inspires in us, no mode of behavior it suggests we adopt, could exhaust or dispose of it.” This statement seems to me precisely correct. And though its eloquence be sacrificed, I think its meaning is not lost when we rephrase it as follows: a work of art always transcends those principles of human duty which it may embody or to which it refer. Thus the work of art is alone among human productions in being privileged, indeed obligated, to escape the rule of human duty. Hence we can say that the only absolute duty imposed on a work of art is that of being undutiful. The duty to have no duty, though a contradiction of logic, is an evocative description of the amorality of art and could certainly apply to the aesthetic aspect of what architects do. E T HI CS OF ARC H ITEC TURAL AE S TH E TI C S Though most moral philosophers investigate aesthetics through the general category of the fine arts, occasionally someone tackles the particular aesthetic case of architecture head-on. In a 2000 essay, philosopher and planner Nigel Taylor explores a few possibilities for understanding the aesthetic content of buildings through ethical means. He takes on three familiar historical arguments that ascribed moral imperatives to design choices: arguments for “honesty,” for a certain superior style, and for following the “spirit of the age.” He finds each one lacking ethical force. Modernists and Gothicists alike argued for aesthetic honesty, for revealing structure, for being true to materials, and so on. But Taylor finds that this theory’s own proponents espoused so many exceptions to their ethos that it falls apart into incoherence. Moreover, he points out, sometimes we prefer the aesthetic deceit, the elaborate ceiling shape that accommodates the old ductwork, such that ethical honesty would actually be the lesser choice. Proponents of architectural styles often assert their moral superiority. For the Gothicists, the argument was both religious and moral, an ethical responsibility to mimic the glory of Nature. The evocation of Mother Nature was meant to add finality to the discussion. Taylor sees, however, that even the original choice to elevate nature is actually not a moral one as claimed but an aesthetic one, a fact that he says becomes clear as soon as anyone forms a similar attraction to a straight line or right angle. The spirit of the age or Zeitgeist argument, favored by Modernists, disintegrates as well, according to Taylor. He questions the premise that we can ever successfully identify a distinctive technology or culture that characterizes a particular historical period. Then he questions the conclusion that we should necessarily design to express that distinctive technology or culture should we find it. If, for example, in our rapidly changing multicultural world, Nazi culture were somehow to become completely pervasive, it should obviously be resisted, he explains. Taylor thus obliterates many of the best architects’ attempts to bring ethics into their aesthetic choices. He also points out that buildings themselves are ultimately amoral, ethically inert artifacts, and that only people can be said to be moral or immoral. 1.3 Design Beyond Ethics 23 PA R T 1 : T H E P R O F E S S I O N We may find, for example, that an ancient Greek temple seems morally depraved if we discover that it hosted human sacrifice, but that would be misdirecting the blame from the people to the place, and probably would not prevent us from finding it aesthetically excellent anyway. AESTH E TIC ATTE N TI V E N E S S Though buildings may not embody the ethical principles of their creators or occupants, Taylor concludes that we can still detect something significant in these built artifacts: thoughtful design work, or what he calls “aesthetic attentiveness.” He asks us to Imagine a building, which we find aesthetically displeasing, and where this displeasure arises in large part because all kinds of features and details in the building appear to have been thrown together carelessly, without any thought or sensitivity. Imagine, too, that part of our displeasure arises because the building as a whole appears as if it has just been “plonked” down on its site without any apparent consideration of how it fits on the site or relates to its surroundings. Such a building might literally offend us aesthetically, but, more than that, part of our offence might be ethical. Thus we might reasonably be angered or outraged, not just by the look of the thing, but also by the visible evidence that the person who designed it didn’t show sufficient care about the aesthetic impact of his building. And this moral objection would be supported by the fact that buildings, unlike (say) paintings or books, are things we are compelled to look at, for architecture (unlike painting and literature) is necessarily a public art. Consequently, any lack of care given to the design of a building is also, in effect, a lack of care shown to the public. Architecture serves, then, as a fossil of sorts, preserving in stone, wood, and steel, if not ethics generally, at least a work ethic. The designer’s work ethic, Taylor implies, must take into account how the dimensions of architecture cut across so many scales of aesthetic human experience: affecting our individual senses at the personal scale of the detail as well as our social senses at the public scale of the city. John Ruskin also seems to have wished that design at least demonstrate some effort: [T]here is not a building that I know of, lately raised, wherein it is not sufficiently evident that neither the architect nor builder has done his best.… Ours has constantly the look of money’s worth, of a stopping short wherever and whenever we can, of a lazy compliance with low conditions…. And so does Peter Zumthor offer a similar complaint about how little is required of his design efforts and a belief that he must transcend those low demands: Our clients are of the opinion that the careful way in which we treat our materials, the way we develop the joints and transitions from one element of the building to the other, and the precision of detail to which we aspire are all too elaborate. They want us to use more common components and constructions, they do not want us to make such high demands on the craftsmen and technicians who are collaborating with us: they want us to build more cheaply…. When I think of the air of quality that the building could eventually emanate on its appointed site in five years or five decades, when I consider that to the people who will encounter it, the only thing that will count is what they see, that which was finally constructed, I do not find it so hard to put up a resistance to our clients’ wishes. Moreover, according to Leon Batista Alberti, when architects put aesthetics first, it ensures the longevity and influence of their structures long after the designing is done: Thus I might be so bold as to state: No other means is as effective in protecting a work from damage and human injury as is dignity and grace of form. All care, all diligence, all financial consideration must be directed to ensuring that what is built is useful, commodious, yes—but also embellished and wholly graceful, so that anyone seeing it would not feel that the expense might have been invested better elsewhere. 24 Ethics and Professional Practice Yet all these pleas for aesthetic excellence in the art of architecture in no way diminish ethical responsibilities to the underlying science of safe shelter. Confusing the two, however, has presented obstacles to the practice of architecture. PA R T 1 : T H E P R O F E S S I O N A RT V S . SC I EN C E IN ARC H ITEC TU RE Good building involves engineering and therefore relies on the science of physics, just as law relies on logic and medicine relies on biology. But the art of building, like the art of cuisine, brings so much more to the table than science that it is not quite parallel to those engineering, legal, and medical counterparts. Since modern professions are scientifically based, the professionalization of architecture does not fully encompass or describe the practice of architecture. Not so long ago, many of the finest minds in architecture made this argument in an attempt to actually prevent architecture from becoming a regulated profession. During the late nineteenth century, a group of prominent British architects led by Richard Norman Shaw fought desperately against professional regulation, predicting that it would “kill” architecture. They observed that because the science of shelter is different from the art of architecture, the former can therefore be regulated and the latter cannot. The Brits never disputed that the scientific aspects of building (sanitation, safety, durability) could be professionalized, because those things can be taught, tested, and objectively evaluated. They believed that building inspectors, engineers, and codes (increasingly, we can include software) do and should take charge of these technical issues. But regulation of architecture as a whole, they claimed, would imply that its subjective, artistic aspects are as objective as its scientific aspects. Licensure would confuse and deceive an unwitting public, a lay public, into equating licensed “architects” with legitimate architects. The result, they predicted, would be an inadvertent degradation of the built environment. In the hundred years that followed, of course, the opposite view seems to have prevailed. At its founding in 1857, the American Institute of Architects, just like their British colleagues, did recognize and promote a distinct field they called “architectural science.” Moreover, the language of state regulations falls (as it must) squarely in the sciences, relying on the “health, safety, and welfare” justification for protecting monopoly privileges to practice. However, when their campaign for professional regulation began, somehow that important semantic clarification got lost, and it is “architecture” generally, rather than “architectural science” specifically, that states now regulate. The first American state to regulate architecture was Illinois in 1897; the last states were quite recent—Vermont and Wyoming in 1951—well within the lifetimes of many current practitioners. This long-fought regulatory victory has coincided with some mixed trends. The science of building has advanced. Net zero-energy facilities, the Burj Dubai, and better protection than ever from natural disasters testify to remarkable innovations. Yet the art of building has retreated, in the sense that since architectural regulation the built environment has not seen a corresponding aesthetic improvement—quite the contrary, perhaps. The fact that clients are hiring “architects” and not always getting architecture out of them could indeed, as the Brits predicted, point to some confusion about what architects add to a project beyond safe construction. C ONCL USI ON : TH E C H EF ARCH ITE C T In contrast, there does not seem to be much confusion about the role of chefs in society. Nobody chooses a restaurant, or even just a recipe, based on whether the meal will be safe. Fortunately, in modern societies, science and ethics make food safety virtually a given. This allows chefs to move beyond the science, beyond the merely ethical and the merely edible, and on to the aesthetically engaging. 1.3 Design Beyond Ethics 25 PA R T 1 : T H E P R O F E S S I O N Similarly, no chef would try to attract diners by drawing attention to the safety of their meals. Even though the issue is crucial—life and death—to dwell on it is to highlight the danger and not the joy: to court business with fear rather than with aromas from the kitchen. Scaring customers about the hazards of cuisine also runs the risk of scaring off customers altogether, sending them scrambling for their own kitchens and backyard vegetable gardens. A fear-based approach also runs the risk of perpetuating a lie about what chefs do. If diners thought that all chefs do is help prevent food poisoning, why would customers value or pay for their other talents? While government regulators have an ethical obligation to make sure that chefs produce cuisine as safe as a Twinkie, if chefs had to deliver cuisine for the same price as a Twinkie, they just might start to feel overworked and undervalued. And legally forcing the public into hiring a chef, when all they need is a factory-sealed pastry, is surely a recipe for dissatisfaction. However, with safety issues ethically handled back in the pantry, chefs are liberated to unleash their creativity out in the kitchen. They celebrate the aesthetic essence of what they do, the exploration of all the senses that are involved with eating. At their best, they study and understand what we humans can perceive with our taste buds, and they use that knowledge to help us experience an enhanced existence, so that when we sit down at the table, the food that we need to sustain our bodies does that plus much more: It helps us live our lives better than we knew we could. As with safe food, there are many actors that contribute to the ethical project of building safe shelter: building officials, licensing agencies, examiners, materials testers, engineers, contractors, lawyers, and the like. Rather than argue that architects have something unusually valuable to contribute in this arena, architects, like chefs, should seek their niche with aesthetics—in the timeless sense not merely of beauty but also of profoundly understanding how humans interact with their surroundings. Ironically it is in this completely ungovernable, amoral arena of pure design, where nobody else is legally kept out, that they should find almost no competition for what they do best. Aesthetics is the value architects add, better than anyone else, to safe shelter. If architects could just channel their inner chefs, they could better celebrate and promote the essence of their work: going beyond just the science of shelter to the art of inhabitation. Where ethics is transactional, aesthetics is sensory; and where ethics involves obligation, aesthetics involves instinct. Architecture, therefore, as the mother art, with a scale larger than most any other art, has the raw, instinctual power to move people, to direct culture and society more than any moral code ever could—to inspire rather than regulate us toward lives better lived. Architects need only honestly and unabashedly embrace design and devote their efforts to aesthetic attentiveness to assume their natural authority. Fo r M or e In for m a t i on On the Art of Building in Ten Books (MIT Press, 1988) by Leon Batista Alberti, trans. by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor. Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance lecture (December 8, 1987) by Joseph Brodsky. “Ethics and Architecture,” GSD News (Harvard University, Fall 1995) by Henry Cobb. Architecture: A Profession or an Art (John Murray Press, 1892), ed. by R. Norman Shaw and T. G. Jackson. “Ethical Arguments about the Aesthetics of Architecture” by Nigel Taylor, in Ethics and the Built Environment (Routledge, 2000), ed. by Warwick Fox. Thinking Architecture (Lars Müller Publishers, 1998) by Peter Zumthor. 26 Ethics and Professional Practice