ABSTRACT
Practitioners know, even if others seem largely unaware of it, that the building process is extremely fragmented, with a multitude of different players from drawing board to completion – developers, planners, contractors and subcontractors, delivery architects, other designers and more – routinely reducing the nominal architect’s influence on the final product, assuming they are even allowed to stay on board. Such disjointedness raises fundamental questions of accountability and responsibility (ethical matters of the highest order), beyond matters of mere liability (who can sue whom), and yet they do not seem to feature in contemporary debates all that much. According to Karsten Harries, architecture’s highest function is to manifest in built form the shared ‘character’ that transforms individuals to community. Behind ‘professional ethics’ (understood as codes of conduct and standards of behaviour, important as these are) lies this great responsibility of architects, which requires much care and commitment and cannot be passed onto others.
