fiona l. kenney

Over the last half-century, ethical questions have come to the forefront in many disciplines, with medical ethics being the most dramatic example. Research centres, projects, and graduate degrees in medical ethics have cropped up by the hundreds in the last several decades. In light of this focus in medicine, as in other professions, we would not be wrong to expect parallel development in architecture: a new “archit-ethics devoted to the analysis and discussion of ethical problems raised by architecture.” This thesis seeks to identify, articulate the shortcomings of, and propose an alternative to the ethical foundation of contemporary architectural practice. It began with the question: how is ethics being talked about in architecture, and what ethical assumptions underlie architectural practice? Upon identifying a lack of normative ethics deliberation in architecture, this then grew to include: how might examining practice through a normative lens and applying alternative moral frameworks change how we understand architectural obligation? Further, how might this new way of understanding the ethics of architecture become grounded in applied, practicable ways?

While professional ethics in architecture have been slowly given more attention in the last three decades, little scholarship has focused on the underlying assumptions that enable, hinder, or lend importance to these existing frameworks. In this thesis, I look at the way ethical concerns are being discursively represented, and I identify the moral frameworks that underlie architecture’s current model of practice. In doing so, I aim to propose a more active ethical role for architecture, specifically analyzing how architecture might draw from the ethics of care. With its attention to interpersonal relationships, professional obligation, and feeling, care ethics was formalized into the moral philosophical register as a framework to be taken seriously near the end of the twentieth century. The definition of care, something we may feel we know intuitively but have trouble articulating in practice, proves elusive throughout care ethics work, too: roughly, care here refers to a desire or inclination towards another person’s needs, often in the affective form of empathy, that necessarily involves action as a result of such empathic inclination—chapter two further defines both care and empathy as they will here be used.

Applying the principles of care ethics to architectural concerns, I seek to propose new ways of thinking about and fostering empathy through design. Instead of advocating for architecture that simply facilitates care by way of the activities that play out within it, I am interested in a potential mode of understanding architecture that works to embody care: architecture as an active participant in the process of empathy rather than as simply a setting. Specifically, this research follows the work of late twentieth century philosophers Nel Noddings, Carol Gilligan, and Michael Slote, who, building from the moral sentimentalist tradition, developed the framework of care ethics. This is not a argument against the work of contemporary architect-ethicists tackling questions of design ethics or professional ethics in architecture—rather, it is an effort to suggest new questions to be asked of architecture, by architects. With the relatively recent introduction of ethics work (outside of architecture) that seeks to question the structures and assumptions which have historically grounded moral knowledge, architecture’s internal ethics are due to be renegotiated as well—and the discipline is well-positioned to do so. Reconceiving of and recontextualizing ethics for architecture, in light of these new models, allows for inquiry into the ethical assumptions that have formed the basis of practice.

references
 

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