Ethics and the Practice of Architecture

by Barry Wasserman, Patrick Sullivan, Gregory Palermo

From theory to practice a unique, well-rounded guide to ethics fortoday s architect

How does an architect assist a community in evaluating alternativedesigns? Resolve a dispute with a contractor? Take into account aproject s impact on the natural environment?

When it comes to questions like these, making decisions about whatought to be done or what is the "best" or "right" solution requiresmore than sound technical knowledge and strong design talent. Itdemands a solid understanding of the ethical issues that lie at theheart of architectural practice.

Ethics and the Practice of Architecture offers a complete,broad-based introduction to this crucial subject. First, itexamines basic ethical theories and their application toarchitecture, and discusses different ways of identifying ethicalcontent in architecture. Bridging the gap between theory andpractice, the second part of the book surveys differentprofessional settings and building project processes thatfrequently hold ethical concerns, and charts the ethical mandatesthat arise from them.

In the final section of the book, thirty case studies explore awide range of ethical dilemmas encountered in architecturalpractice, with useful guidance on how to work through themeffectively. Arranged by topics that span the key phases of aproject from pre-design through post-occupancy evaluation, thesecase studies allow a detailed look at ethical concerns in real-lifesituations where multiple issues are often at stake.

Providing a practical framework for the exploration of ethicalissues in architecture today, Ethics and the Practice ofArchitecture is an excellent resource for present and futurearchitects in all areas of the field.

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2000

Reviews

[Erin Reilly-Sanders]

I had to read this one for class and while the subject should be interesting, this book was not. The content seemed to repeat itself a lot, trying to prove that architecture is intrinsically ethical, but I could have just been bored. Architecture, in the building sense is certainly based on ethics, and that's even the reason for my interest in the field- to better people's lives. Whether it's ethical in the critical sense is still somewhat debatable. The lists of questions would be interesting for discussion, but as reading material it was practically useless, the problem being that it asked the questions and described a vague framework of how to examine questions but didn't present good examples of actually applying the framework. With these questions there aren't supposed to be right answers so it would have been really valuable to see two "solutions" to an ethics issue that used the same method to come up with two different answers.