The Moment of Environmental Ethics the Moment of Drift?

The question of whether architectural creativity is more of an artistic or engineering nature is one with a long history but also one with no conclusive answer. The art camp would argue that technology should be treated as a means towards and end, and that technology alone cannot give meaning to our lives. The engineering camp on the other hand would argue that good problem-solving results in better ways of living our everyday lives, and that this in turn brings about a beauty of its own which is beyond that offered by conventional aesthetics of beautiful objects. This dichotomy, among other things, epitomises the inconsistent relationship between architectural design value systems and those of other arts for although they share certain concepts about beauty and the role of each discipline’s creative products in enhancing their audiences’ and users’ lives, the influence of other ‘outside’ disciplines on architecture and other more applied arts can have an effect on diverting their value systems. Put differently, architectural value systems do not consistently parallel those of other arts. This paper looks at some key moments in modern architectural history to show the degree to which architectural value systems share—or otherwise—the values of the other arts and then extend the survey to the present-day emergence of environmental ethics in architecture. It argues that the factual, non-ideological sound of environmental ethics may be promising, but it also signals the arrival of another period of drifting architectural and artistic value systems: one in which, perhaps not for the first time, the ethical is not invested in any kind of semantics and aesthetics of the product itself, but in the processes of its formation and, importantly, in the lifeenhancing possibilities of the work.