ABSTRACT
In Chapter one, I discussed how the motivations of architectural firms cannot be defined by market-driven rationality alone. To recap, the private nature of many firms (where share ownership is held tightly by a self-selected group of partners) means that to fulfil the imperative of firm growth or diversification, architects are compelled to consider a wide range of proposals by a wide range of clients. However, there is another layer of complexity. While many ethical issues are discussed at the level of individual conscience, architects operating within firms are immediately bundled into an ethical framework of shared responsibility (where legal recourse falls on to a firm’s directors, for example). This is complicated for architects, who operate within two different ethical frameworks. As Kris Olds has argued, globally operative architects:
inhabit the ‘neo-worlds’ of late capitalism. They easily negotiate the stretched out social spaces tied to both the business networks of architecture (the moneyed white collar property developers and senior state officials) and the professional networks of architecture (the intelligentsia-managed institutions that help define the discourse of Architecture).
