Author Description

While not pretending to be exhaustive, this collection of essays, based on a conference held at Cambridge in 2004, nonetheless gives a clear sense of the enormous range of ethical issues architects face on an almost daily basis; from their often conflicting responsibilities to client and contractor, to their obligations to the greater public good, and in particular the natural environment. Whether most architects are conscious of the issues raised is open to question, which makes their discussion all the more valuable. It isn't possible in the limited scope of a review such as this to do justice to the individual contributions, which are consistently well-written and thought provoking. I was struck, however, by what appeared to be a clear convergence between several of the papers; namely, the relationship between the individual designer and society at large. Richard MacCormac, for example, makes a compelling case for valuing individual intuition in the service of the common good, which seems to be consistent with Jane Collier's account of John Dewey's notion of the 'Moral Imagination.' Historian Andrew Ballantyne suggests that the only real temporal continuity we have as societies is shared habit, and Sjoerd Soeters describes his personal experiences in practice of using variations on established architectural types to successfully balance the unique and the common.