ABSTRACT
In many regards, architecture is less affecting and less effective than theater or film. Film is the quintessential information age media and the best films have no equals in buildings. Media's complicity in isolating humans into solipsistic or self-aggrandizing worldviews does not suggest that the antidote lies in downgrading the importance or roles of language or even media itself. Academics are concerned with ethical responsibility and social justice, while critics and theorists celebrate novelty, self-expression, or architecture as art. In the early twenty-first century, these trends have emerged as the most likely candidates for giving meaning to the notion of architectural information. The practice of architecture can be charitable. An architect or office may donate his or her time or subsidize work. Architecture as an artifact, however, is not charitable in any meaningful sense. Ethical responsibilities are chimera incapable of being encoded in or through the act of building.
