Ethics in architecture: introducing concepts of power and

empowerment
Alexandra Staub
The Pennsylvania State University, United States

ABSTRACT: This article analyzes the results of a broad-scale process of teaching ethics in architecture to
both professional and research-based master’s students at a major U.S. university. Redefining ethics as a
question of both power and empowerment (or agency), classical frameworks such as Immanuel Kant’s cate-
gorical imperative or Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism are re-cast as a framework of power discrepancies that
can be addressed using negotiation strategies. Using examples taken from both professional practice and areas
of current architectural research, students are asked to identify stakeholders and their values and interests, and
then insert themselves into the framework as mediators in search of ethically responsive outcomes. This ap-
proach has allowed the perceived ethical neutrality of both design and research problem statements to be
called into question, as students explore an enhanced role as professionals and researchers in relating problem
statements to outcomes, and outcomes to broad stakeholder satisfaction.

1 ETHICS IN ARCHITECTURE
1.1 The legal view of morality
Little has been written specifically on architectural
ethics, and what is available has generally taken
one of three approaches. The first, and oldest, of
these presents ethics through the lens of profession-
al practice. From early times, architects and build-
ers have been seen as upholders of human welfare,
and social codes regulating their activities were an
expression of moral values canonized through laws.
The Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi, written in
1754 B.C., laid out punishments for professional
negligence or incompetence, stipulating for exam-
ple that the builder of a structure that collapsed and
killed its occupant would likewise be put to death
(cited in Ching and Winkel 2012, 2).
Current laws governing architects’ behavior are
less drastic, as licensure has sought to insure pro-
fessional competency, while building codes ensure
a structure’s safety. In the United States, profes-
sional ethics are now largely defined as normed be-
havior between individuals involved in or affected
by the building process. Both the leading national
professional association and the national licensure
board have developed edicts to this effect: the
American Institute of Architects (AIA) has pub-
lished a Code of Ethics and the National Council of
Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) a
Rules of Conduct. Both texts approach their subject
largely from the point of view of contractual law
and thus use a fairly limited scope in defining archi-
tectural ethics.
Going beyond these legal-based rules to examine
social and moral issues such as discriminatory prac-
tices and the right of the community to determine
what gets built in its midst, Thomas Fisher’s book,
Ethics for Architects (2010) presents a series of hy-
pothetical case studies taken from the point of view
of today’s architectural practice. Fisher’s book of-
fers illustrative examples that go beyond what is
covered by the AIA and NCARB documents, cov-
ering issues such as respect for community values
or avoiding discrimination based on gender or disa-
bility. Barry Wasserman, Patrick Sullivan and
Gregory Palermo’s tripartite book Ethics and the
Practice of Architecture offers a broader approach,
introducing ethical “awareness”, before moving to
“understanding” and then presenting “choices”. The
first section introduces the ethical nature of archi-
tecture and defines philosophical contexts and theo-
ries; the second section more selectively applies
these concepts to the architectural process, and the
third supplies textbook cases to be used in the class-
room. The goal is to help students develop their
“ethical stance and reasoning processes” in their
role as professional architects (Wasserman, Sulli-
van and Palermo 2000, 180).
Langdon Winner’s 1980 article, “Do artifacts
have politics,” provides a critical voice, exploring
ethics in terms of systems and decision-making
processes, or rather, how technical systems have a
political dimension. Examining how the creation of
artifacts has effects and repercussions that an ethi-
cal analysis must take into account, Winner lists
examples such as Robert Moses’s decision in the
1930s to build overpass bridges spanning the Long
Island Parkways, which connected the city of New
York with Long Island towns and recreational are-
as, with such a low clearance that busses could not
pass through (Figure 1). The bridges kept the work-
ing class, who did not own private automobiles and
thus relied on busses, from accessing Long Island’s
acclaimed public beaches. The bridges themselves
appeared as neutral objects of civil engineering, yet
their low clearance allowed them to become politi-
cal pawns. In another set of examples, Winner
points out that technologies used to maintain public
infrastructure – for example that of nuclear power
plants – requires a corresponding hierarchical polit-
ical system, in this case a set of industrial and sci-
entific elites trained to run them.
Figure 1. Low overpass bridges on Long Island Parkways
prevented low-income residents relying on bus transporta-
tion from accessing Long Island’s recreational areas. Photo
courtesy NYC Municipal Archives.
1.2 Ethics and aesthetics
A second area of discussion regarding architectural
ethics approaches the topic from the point of view
of aesthetics. In this body of literature, the architect
is seen as an upholder of social welfare in the
broader sense, creating a built environment that is
to bring greater social happiness through expressing
deeper thinking regarding the condition of life it-
self. The tenets of material honesty and structural
and spatial transparency at the heart of modernism,
or the social commentary expressed by the postwar
Brutalist movement, are two cases in point. Texts
are often based in philosophy, such as Karsten Har-
ries’s 1997 book The Ethical Function of Architec-
ture, which discusses the uncertain path of contem-
porary architecture as a reflection on Siegfried
Gideon’s classic treatise that architecture should
express “a way of life valid for our period” (Gideon
1967, xxxiii). Discussions of ethics as related to
aesthetics remain the most intensely theoretical of
the three approaches to ethics and, as we shall see,
the most open to controversy over what is “right”
and proper for a given society made up of individu-
als with differing needs.
1.3 Ethics and ecology
A more current direction that has become part of
the debate on architectural ethics involves the ecol-
ogy of our planet, and the role of architecture in our
plant’s future. In the United States, buildings have
been shown to account for almost 40% of carbon
emissions as well as 70% of the nation’s electrical
consumption (Green Building Council 2016). Ar-
chitects are reminded of the essential role they can
play in reducing energy use both in the construction
process and post occupancy phases, a role that fo-
cuses on efforts to increase the common good.
Books such as Warwick Fox’s edited volume on
Ethics and the Built Environment (2012) have
pushed such considerations to the forefront as they
explore the ethical nature of sustainable design.
1.4 Ethics and the greater good
All three approaches – professional ethics, the eth-
ics of aesthetics, and ethics linked to environmental
stewardship – can be seen as derived from ethical
principles as defined by philosophers, principles
that have in common their ideals of justice as well
as action for the greater good. While many philoso-
phers have written on what we might call ethics, I
focused on two concepts that I felt were most useful
for the focus of the class: Immanuel Kant’s idea of
the categorical imperative, and Jeremy Bentham’s
universalism. Kant stipulates that one should, “act
only according to that maxim whereby you can, at
the same time, will that it should become a univer-
sal law,” (Kant 1785/1993). With this phrase, Kant
postulates that an action is only morally right for
one if it is morally right for all. Jeremy Bentham
frames the ideal of social justice a bit differently. In
his theory of universalism he instructs us to maxim-
ize pleasure and happiness and minimize pain and
unhappiness for the greatest number of people; the
profit of a few may not outweigh the good of the
many (Bentham 1789/1988). This theorem can be
amended to consider the degree of unhappiness a
minority group may suffer – if maximizing happi-
ness for most would create a situation in which a
minority is truly miserable, the rules of universal-
ism must be adjusted. Both the categorical impera-
tive and universalism can be seen in contrast to so-
cial contract theory (Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
others), in which individuals forfeit some of their
liberties to the state, or Aristotle’s virtue ethics,
which stresses the moral character of the decision
maker. Here, universal principles governing deci-
sion-making are less important than a pedagogical
approach leading to self-regulation: the training and
instilling of a proper, or virtuous, set of values (Ar-
istotle and Barnes 2004). Aristotle’s concept of an
internalized virtuousness is not unique of course;
non-Western philosophies, such as Confucianism,
follow similar ideals.
What philosophical ethics deals with in the ab-
stract, and professional ethics largely ignores, is a
broad set of ethical questions that architects and ar-
chitectural researchers have become deeply en-
meshed in but rarely discuss: the role of the practic-
ing architect and the researcher in shaping
architectural, and with it social, discourse.
In professional practice, building designs, build-
ing placement, landscape and infrastructure, build-
ing materials, office organization and the construc-
tion process itself all involve both process and
product decisions that involve the architect. In most
cases, the ethical dimensions of such decisions re-
main unexamined.
For the architectural researcher, discussions of
ethical considerations remain equally limited. Ethi-
cal questions are often covered through institutional
review boards, which oversee research designs and
guarantee that human or animal subjects suffer no
physical or psychological harm. Research questions
themselves are thus largely seen as ethically neu-
tral. Unearthing new knowledge and developing
new concepts has become the measure of success,
with little regard to choosing one’s questions based
on some sort of ethical construct. A longer-range
historical view shows the fallacy of such valuation,
however, since what is not asked is often as telling
as what is pursued, or put another way, questions,
like artifacts, “have politics”. This recognition has
led to changes in the research landscape; for exam-
ple, research of the past two decades has questioned
earlier interpretations of architecture and urban
planning and analysis as written from the point of
view of white, middle-class males, and has coun-
tered existing theories with new ways to frame
questions and offer theories of space (see for exam-
ple Colomina 1992, Massey 1994, Sandercock
1998).
2 REFRAMING THE ETHICAL PARADIGM
In the course “Architectural Ethics” offered as part
of Penn State University’s graduate program in ar-
chitecture, I propose a new framework for architec-
tural ethics, approaching the topic as a question of
both power and empowerment. Put another way, I
propose that it is power imbalances that create ethi-
cal dilemmas, and as architects and researchers
concerned with ethics, we must become aware of
who holds the power to act in any given situation,
and why others might not share this power.
Students were asked to think of decisions con-
cerning the built environment in terms of stake-
holders. Stakeholders have interests in the outcome
of decisions, but do not always have the power to
act to their own benefit. It is when stakeholder
groups become disempowered that ethical dilem-
mas often occur – when the categorical imperative
is cast aside or when definitions of the “greatest
good” become skewed. Fueling this tendency is a
commonly held view that decisions must involve a
zero-sum outcome: that allowing one group to gain
must mean a loss for another. Breaking through this
pattern of thinking became one of the main course
objectives.
2.1 The course methodology
In order to gain practice in framing ethical dimen-
sions in terms of power discrepancies and to find
solutions for identified problems, I presented stu-
dents with a series of readings and case studies and
asked them to determine the set of stakeholders in
any given situation. I then asked students to list
what interests those stakeholders might have, as
opposed to the positions they were expressing, in
order to uncover common ground between stake-
holders. Using this analysis of stakeholder interests,
students then worked to develop options for mutual
gain for all stakeholders, keeping Kant’s categorical
imperative and Bentham’s concept of utilitarianism
as reference points.
Students in the course are assigned just one text-
book: Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Pat-
ton’s book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement
Without Giving In (2011), a how-to guide written
by three members of the Harvard Negotiation Pro-
ject. The book allowed students to perform ethics
analyses based on a simple concept for negotiation
strategy: 1) Separate the people from the problem,
in this case by identifying the stakeholders in-
volved, 2) Identify each stakeholder’s interests in-
stead of simply accepting their stated positions on
an issue 3) Develop a set of options for mutual
gain, and 4) Identify objective criteria by which
such options could be assessed. Student used these
principles to work through the readings and case
studies assigned.
The course is arranged topically, and covers di-
verse areas such as contested terrains based on race,
ethnicity, religion, social class or gender, expres-
sions of power through the built environment, spe-
cifically through spatial arrangements and the use
of monumentality; ethics and aesthetics, the role of
ethics in green architecture, the role of ethics in
technical advances, specifically in computational
design, and case studies taken from professional
practice. In each situation analyzed, I asked stu-
dents to consider ethical dilemmas as power dis-
crepancies that could be addressed through negotia-
tion strategy as outlined above.
The first case they were presented with was a
1975 dispute carried out in the New York Times
between sociologist Herbert Gans and architecture
critic Ada Louise Huxtable on how the Landmarks
Preservation Commission of New York City should
choose which buildings to preserve. The case, de-
scribed in Dolores Hayden’s book The Power of
Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (1997),
saw Huxtable arguing that the Commission should
focus on preserving major architectural monu-
ments, while Gans countered that this preserved the
architecture of the rich and the elite, while the built
history of the common people was allowed to dis-
appear. Countering Huxtable’s point that “great
buildings” designed by “great architects” exempli-
fied public culture, Gans pointed out that the Com-
mission was funded through taxpayer money and
warned that while, “[p]rivate citizens are of course
entitled to save their own past, […] when preserva-
tion becomes a public act, supported with public
funds, it must attend to everyone’s past,” (cited in
Hayden 1997, 3). To underscore his point that the
Commission was not acting according to these val-
ues, Gans presented a quantitative analysis of the
buildings the Commission had acted to preserve,
most of which were, in fact, created for the affluent.
The students rightly saw this exchange as a
failed attempt at negotiation, with each side digging
into positional thinking. Huxtable and Gans were
using terms such as “architecture”, “vernacular”,
and “neighborhood” very differently, a point they
both failed to recognize. Their positions were based
on different valuations of these concepts: Huxtable
saw vernacular architecture as buildings created by
anonymous builders, which meant the building be-
came defined by its general historic style, while
Gans saw vernacular architecture as buildings with
a wide social use or public accessibility. While to
Huxtable the term “vernacular” lessened the histor-
ical value of the building, for Gans the term height-
ened value.
The students saw several stakeholders in this ex-
change. Gans and Huxtable were identified as two
stakeholders whose verbal sparring, evolving from
two incompatible positional arguments, was de-
signed to influence the future of the Landmark
Commission’s activities. Students saw a power im-
balance between Huxtable and Gans, noting that,
“Huxtable [has] more power because […] Gans is
the one who is trying to make a change from the
[status quo],” (McKenna 2015), while also noting
that when Gans seemed to be winning the argument
through pointing out the ethics of using taxpayer
money, Huxtable’s employer – the New York
Times – censored his rebuttal by shortening it and
relegating it to an obscure section of the paper.
Despite the strong positions Huxtable and Gans
adopted, students found common interests between
the two, chief among them the desire to preserve
the history of both the city and its built artifacts.
Students also recognized that both wished to spend
the Commission’s money wisely, while satisfying
the public, another identified stakeholder. Students
suggested options for mutual gain (some already
mentioned by Hayden), such as highlighting the
role of workers in the construction and upkeep of
buildings for the wealthy, or of presenting architec-
tural monuments within the context of adjoining
working-class neighborhoods. Such measures, they
argued, would give a fuller picture of both the ar-
chitectural significance and ensuing symbolism of
the stately architecture as well as the “back story”
context of how earlier societies created and used
the built environment. Students pointed out that in
this way monumental architecture could be pre-
served without stripping it of its social context, cre-
ating opportunities for more fully recognizing an
earlier society’s achievements and way of life.
2.2 The topics of ethical practice and research
Further cases the students analyzed were socially
more complex. Joe Feagin’s Racist America (2014)
traced how the consequences of American slavery
of the 18th and 19th centuries resonate to the pre-
sent day, as the unpaid labor of slaves and the une-
qual opportunities under the physical segregation
that followed its abolition caused inequalities of
economic and social capital that have been com-
pounded over the course of twenty generations.
Chad Friedrich’s film The Pruitt Igoe Myth (2011)
provided a poignant example of this inequality. Ex-
amining the background to one of the most notori-
ous failed housing projects in the United States,
Friedrichs pointed out how – contrary to the com-
mon narrative that the architecture was somehow to
blame – the de-facto segregation of low-income Af-
rican Americans into the complex, the ensuing lack
of investment in the project’s infrastructure, social
agencies’ paternalistic rules for project residents,
and poorly conceived financial plans for maintain-
ing the project, led to its assured demise. The Pruitt
Igoe Myth introduced two ethical dilemmas: treat-
ment of a group of stakeholders on the one hand,
and correct representation of historical events on
the other. Madhuri Desai’s article “Mosques, Tem-
ples, and Orientalists: Hegemonic Imaginations in
Banaras” (2003) illuminated another example of
misrepresented history, as a dominant Hindu socie-
ty in India claimed the city of Banaras as a “Hindu
pilgrimage city”, in the process erasing any refer-
ences to the substantial Moslem population that has
resided there for centuries. Barbara Hooper’s
“‘Split at the Roots’: A Critique of the Philosophi-
cal and Political Sources of Modern Planning Doc-
trine” (1992) presented the mechanisms of wom-
en’s exclusion from modern planning doctrine from
the late nineteenth century onwards, while Beatriz
Colomina’s article “The Split Wall” (1992) pointed
out how women, as a group, were presented as ex-
otic “others” in the spatial arrangements of iconic
modernist architecture. In all of these scenarios,
students analyzed not only the cases themselves and
how a dominant group exerted power over space
and other resources, but also how such cases had
been researched and presented in the form of a nar-
rative controlled by the dominant group.
The emphasis on examining both an architectur-
al or urban problem and its portrayal in the litera-
ture became a useful tool for understanding how
narratives – including those the researcher contrib-
utes to or controls– affect a power matrix. Analyz-
ing the underlying questions of power and agency
showed that neither the artifacts created through the
architect’s labor, nor the questions and narrative of
the researcher’s work are neutral.
The course examined a range of topics related to
the built environment. Simon Guy and Graham
Farmer’s exploration of “Contested Constructions:
The competing logics of green buildings and eth-
ics” (2012) opened an avenue towards understand-
ing the debate around how the concept of “sustain-
ability” is interpreted by different groups of
stakeholders. Daniel Cardoso’s article "Inertia of an
Automated Utopia: Design Commodities and Au-
thorial Agency 40 Years After the Architecture
Machine" (2011) shed light on the early hopes for
how design computing would make the built envi-
ronment more humane by allowing users direct in-
put over the product, and Lilli Irani’s article on
Amazon’s mechanical Turk (2015) led to a lively
debate about the role of humans and machines in
rote tasks, and the ethics of allowing humans to
perform repetitive and machine-like functions as
part of a profit-making system.
2.3 Ethics have politics
As one of the students pointed out, the political
angle of the course readings was largely liberal.
This resulted quite simply from the way the as-
signments were constructed: in placing an emphasis
on identifying stakeholders’ interests – no matter
their conventionally perceived level of social im-
portance – and attempting to find areas of mutual
gain, I was following a narrative based largely on
the value of social egalitarianism, rather than one
based on more conservative values, such as merit or
in-group loyalty. I had also not introduced social
contract theory as a working philosophical frame-
work because, based on my experience with femi-
nist, race- and class-based theory, I did not believe
that a process by which persons negotiate among
themselves to shape society would necessarily yield
morally valid results. To introduce students to an
example of conservative thinking on ethics, I as-
signed an article by the economist Milton Friedman
from 1970: “The Social Responsibility of Business
is to Increase Its Profits,” in which Friedman argues
that a corporate CEO may not take social actions
that could lessen the corporation’s profits, since do-
ing so would represent a from of shareholder “taxa-
tion” to which the CEO is not entitled. In develop-
ing his argument, Friedman pointed to the
government’s role as initiator of social action
through democratically voted demand (a form of
utilitarianism), and pointed out that a CEO would
be usurping the government’s role if he initiated –
and had his shareholders pay for – social programs.
The discussion that this article provoked in class
showed the importance of considering value sys-
tems when analyzing ethical questions. Friedman
assumed that a free market system incorporates the
checks and balances needed for ethical behavior to
remain the norm (a form of social contract). This
belief was the basis for his call to consider the
needs of those stakeholders best capable of per-
forming under the “open and free competition” of
Friedman’s lauded meritocracy. With other words,
Friedman argued that a market system created ine-
qualities, and that these inequalities were justified.
Having by now performed a series of analyses to
present stakeholder interests and win-win options
as part of a non zero-sum game, the students quick-
ly realized a pattern that allowed the wants and
needs of the have-nots to simply be canceled out of
Friedman’s social equation.
3 APPLYING ETHICAL THINKING
The final assignment for the course required the
students to develop a case study based on their the-
sis topic. Students in both the professional and the
research-based programs choose their own thesis
topics, which range from highly technical projects
to exploration of social issues. In the related ethics
assignment, students identified stakeholders, ana-
lyzed stakeholder interests, and developed options
for mutual gain, based on their analysis of the
background issues associated with their thesis topic.
Of the eight students in the class who were pur-
suing a professional degree, six centered their anal-
ysis on the urban contexts of their proposed build-
ing designs. One used David Harvey’s matrix
presented in Social Justice and the City (1973) as a
basis for developing scenarios for disused London
underground stations in a way that would benefit as
many diverse stakeholder groups as possible (Fig-
ure 2). One created an analogy between the urban
gentrification process and natural ecosystems, ana-
lyzing that changes at too large a scale in the urban
fabric can have results, good or bad, similar to natu-
ral disasters in the wild such as a forest fire or
flood, and arguing that as a rule, change should be
more controlled. Another student questioned the
“modernization” plans for a thriving community in
Mumbai, concluding that stakeholder interests
could be satisfied with far less radical interventions
than were being planned. One student took a differ-
ent path, looking at the stakeholders involved in
end-of-life scenarios, and concluding that new
types of spaces that cater to the dying and their
families would serve those stakeholder groups bet-
ter, while saving patients, hospitals and the health
care system millions of dollars annually.
Figure 2. A proposal for a disused London underground sta-
tion reconfigured as a public bicycle path. Photo © Gensler.
The five students pursuing a research-based de-
gree largely focused on the interplay between archi-
tecture or urban spaces and policy decisions, many
examining who controls urban space and how such
control is presented to the population. One student
examined how political parties in a major city in
India make use of a waterfront park to erect monu-
ments that, while presented as public recreational
spaces, in reality use public funds to showcase the
parties’ own political agenda. Another student
traced how a major park in Bogota, Colombia failed
because the municipality and the architects neglect-
ed to acknowledge the presence of a large homeless
and drug-using community that quickly took over
the park’s spaces, making them unattractive for the
intended users (Figure 3). A further project ana-
lyzed the commercialization of public space in
global cities through the presence of lit billboards
occluding the buildings they cover, and questioned
the architect’s role in this arrangement. In all cases,
students learned to understand the process of creat-
ing spaces as something that involves a variety of
stakeholders. They also came to understand how
analyzing the power structures between stakehold-
ers, as well as stakeholder’s interests, can lead to a
better understanding of what is needed for a suc-
cessful, and ethical, design.
Figure 3. Tercer Milenio Park in Bogotá, Colombia. The
park remains underused, due to social problems unrecog-
nized by the planners. Photo by Pedro Felipe.
3.1 Negotiating power structures
In framing ethical problems as an issue of power
discrepancies and questions of agency, students be-
gan understanding design problems as more than
just a question of function, structure, cost or aes-
thetics – considerations they are commonly taught
as part of an architectural education. Instead, stu-
dents began to systematically consider the broader
implication of design and planning decisions and
how such decisions affect the built environment and
the people it serves. Identifying stakeholders affect-
ed by design and planning decisions became a first
step in assessing stakeholders’ relative degrees of
empowerment and stakeholders’ ethical treatment.
Analyzing stakeholders’ interests moved the design
problem beyond the creation of space and form, al-
lowing students to consider how their own actions
ripple beyond the architect’s immediate set of tasks
to encompass ethical questions they can address.
Most importantly, teaching students negotiation
strategies to achieve win-win options, and helping
them to identify values and criteria by which such
options could be evaluated, helped students to ad-
dress conflicting interests between stakeholder
groups as a quest for ethical solutions to architec-
tural and urban design problems.
For students engaged in architectural research,
expanding the search for stakeholders beyond those
immediately touched on by the research problem al-
lowed students to consider how stakeholder groups
sometimes remain invisible, how such groups, once
identified, can be empowered through providing in-
formation or through reframing the research ques-
tion, and how exploring research problems as a
quest for mutual gain allows far more wide-
reaching research results than if results were geared
towards a more limited or immediately accessible
set of stakeholders. In both cases, identifying power
imbalances, naming stakeholders and their interests,
developing options for mutual gain, and evaluating
those options based on a set of agreed-upon values
and criteria led to an understanding of architectural
ethics as central to architectural decision-making.
REFERENCES
I would like to thank Dr. Xiaofeng Denver Tang of the Rock
Ethics Institute at Penn State University for his generous sup-
port while preparing this class. I would especially like to
thank the students in the initial semester of this class – Lind-
say Connelly, Katrin Freude, Emily Liuzza, Mahsa Masoudi,
Marie McKenna, Nasim Motalebi, Quinn Pullen, Rohini
Raghavan, Janahvi Ramakrishnan, Angelica Rodriguez,
Anahita Shadkam, Katelyn Troutman, and Anthony Vischan-
sky– for their many contributions to the discussions we held.
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