Musings

One small voice.

Posts tagged morality
Morally? Ethically? or Sense & Sensibility?

“Common sense, common care, and common prudence, were all sunk into Mrs. Dashwood’s romantic delicacy.”

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen

Where does morality begin? Where does architectural duty end? For me, these questions begin with the history of architecture and the preservation of the urban fabric, something which served as the original inspiration to study architecture. Whilst I may not possess the same ‘romantic delicacies’ as Mrs. Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, I am fully aware that architects, as builders of the social sphere, cannot afford to drop the moral high standard which is expected of us. Indeed it is essential for architects, as negotiators and as the generalist coordinator as we have previously identified to uphold the standards of society - and where fault is found, whilst it is not necessarily our legal duty, it is certainly our moral duty to enforce change for the greater good.

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The Moral Dimension

I have noticed that almost all of my posts so far concerning the issue of sustainability have had a focus on green architecture and urbanism. Today therefore, I want to take a step in a new direction and examine the statement of arguably one of the greatest figures of architecture today, Dame Zaha Hadid. In a recent interview where she was asked about the over 800 migrant worker deaths that have occurred in constructing her 2022 FIFA World Cup Qatar Stadium, she boldly declared that it was the duty of governments to protect workers and that “It’s not my duty as an architect to look at it” (Dezeen Magazine, 2014). This statement was in a way furthered a month later by her company’s director, Michael Schumacher, who took to Facebook to declare that we must “STOP political correctness in architecture.” (Schumacher, 2014). While I am of course unable to go into depth about these issues, I do want to point out that this of course raises the interesting question of who should be in charge of managing the morality of our social fabric. 

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