Five Critical Essays on Architectural Ethics
First Published by TRG Publishing, May 2024
These days it seems that ethical behaviour has become a given
The latest issue in the series from the Future Cities Project (FCP), Five Critical Essays on Architectural Ethics, is a collection that speaks to the question of the ‘self-determination’ of the designer. The five essays are by academics and professional practitioners: Dennis Hayes, Eleanor Jolliffe, Jide Ehizele, Alan Dunlop and James Woudhuysen. These and are ‘topped-and-tailed’ by the FCP director, Austin Williams, and the principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, Patrik Schumacher.
In his foreword to the latest edition, Williams highlights the crux of the ‘ethical’ problem in design and architecture: ‘Ethics has stopped being a difficult philosophical tussle about how things should be. The intellectual battle about the various interpretations of the meaning of life have been ceded to compliance spreadsheets reliant on scientific, empirical or mechanistic evidence.’
Contents
7 Foreword by Austin Williams
13 Taking Ethics Seriously by Dennis Hayes
19 Codifying moral behaviour by Eleanor Jolliffe
25 Uneven Development by Jide Ehizele
33 Common Sense by Alan Dunlop
39 Moral Grandstanding by James Woudhuysen
47 Afterword by Patrik Schumacher
Innovators I like
Robert Furchgott – discovered that nitric oxide transmits signals within the human body
Barry Marshall – showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most peptic ulcers, reversing decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid
N Joseph Woodland – co-inventor of the barcode
Jocelyn Bell Burnell – she discovered the first radio pulsars
John Tyndall – the man who worked out why the sky was blue
Rosalind Franklin co-discovered the structure of DNA, with Crick and Watson
Rosalyn Sussman Yallow – development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a method of quantifying minute amounts of biological substances in the body
Jonas Salk – discovery and development of the first successful polio vaccine
John Waterlow – discovered that lack of body potassium causes altitude sickness. First experiment: on himself
Werner Forssmann – the first man to insert a catheter into a human heart: his own
Bruce Bayer – scientist with Kodak whose invention of a colour filter array enabled digital imaging sensors to capture colour
Yuri Gagarin – first man in space. My piece of fandom: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/10421
Sir Godfrey Hounsfield – inventor, with Robert Ledley, of the CAT scanner
Martin Cooper – inventor of the mobile phone
George Devol – 'father of robotics’ who helped to revolutionise carmaking
Thomas Tuohy – Windscale manager who doused the flames of the 1957 fire
Eugene Polley – TV remote controls
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