ABSTRACT

This chapter seeks to reflect on architecture as not only a confirmation and reinforcement of established moral rules and as a scenographic glorification of the status quo, but also as a field of emergence of new possibilities. Those possibilities contains critique of the unjust institutions, laws, systems of values or moral principles that dominate current social relations, power structures and their architectural production. Hendrix argues that architecture, as an abstract intellectual act, should transcend functional and utilitarian demands. In the chapter, Harries reinscribes the demand for an ethical function of space within a more developed understanding of the human existential condition in modernity. Nicholas Temple, in, Architecture as the receptacle of Mitsein, examines the moral repercussions of urban life and meaning of dwelling in the city. Starting from Sennett's book Together, Temple argues for the need to find new forms of civic, ritual participation in contemporary urban life that would regain the public sphere contrary to corporatisation and individualist behaviour.