The Good, the Bad and the Juggled: The New Ethics of Building Materials
Author(s)
Hagan, S.
Abstract
In much environmental analysis, architecture is reduced to a fraction of itself: the architectural-artifact-as-physical-object. Its symbolic and self-referential capacities, its aesthetic and spatial concerns – that which conventionally characterizes it as ‘design’- are dismissed as irrelevant to the crisis at hand. What ‘meaning’ architecture is permitted thus tends to be discussed in quantifiable terms: energy ratings, insulation values, etc. This data, however, only has meaning because it is contained within a larger hermeneutic framework, an ethical one. That is, buildings meeting certain environmental performance criteria are deemed ethically acceptable because they are taking into consideration the well-being of a larger community, whether that community is exclusively human, or inclusive of all life. This is a new definition of the ethical in architecture, new because what is conventionally viewed as a qualitative judgment is being considered in quantitative terms, with all the problems of interpretation inherent in such a direction.
