ABSTRACT
Professional architects – those on the ARB register and members of the RIBA anyway – are duty bound by codes of conduct and practice to exercise a degree of personal cultivation and continuing professional development. This is a philosophical duty of sorts, arguably the modern version of the sort of secular-spiritual exercises that have defined the vocational character of all professions throughout history. The practical lives of architects don’t leave much time for critical reflection though, never mind philosophical contemplation, and architects tend, in the UK at least, to bumble along with the comforting belief that somehow architecture is both an art and a science, and consequently that architects are somewhat like artists and scientists. Civic does not refer to a use class as such, i.e. a town hall, but to something which orients architecture towards the shared conditions of urbanity.
