This is the third entry in Architects Talking Ethics, an advice column that intends to host a discussion of the values that architects embody or should embody. It aims to answer real-world ethical questions posed by architects, designers, students, and professors.

We, as the three initial authors of this column, think the profession is way behind in how it addresses ethics. We think architects should explore our own ethics with the breadth and depth that other fields have done for a long time.  

In our teaching, we’ve sensed an eagerness among students to talk about ethics. The “ethical turn” in our profession that has a lot to do with equity and environmental responsibility, yet the typical curriculum has, maybe, one lecture on ethics in the pro-practice course. The amount of time and attention we give to ethics in school as well as in the profession does not align with its importance. Maybe, with this column, we can encourage more interest.

What are the ethics of architects? What questions about ethics and architecture do you have? What ethical dilemmas do you face or have faced or anticipate facing?

Our third column addresses the shortcomings of the AIA Code of Ethics and makes the argument the current code does little to consider welfare.

Send your questions to ethics@archpaper.com for consideration in future columns.

Architectural practitioners sometimes confuse ordinary ethics or business ethics with professional ethics. Ordinary ethics considers how we all should treat one another, while business ethics deals with the conflicts that can arise when balancing your company’s interests and those of your employees against those of clients. Both of these are incredibly important. However, in the world of professional ethics, where “professional” indicates those licensed to perform defined activities by the state, the first consideration is one’s duty to the public. Architects, in other words, have fiduciary responsibilities to clients and employees, professional obligations to colleagues and the discipline, and, like all professions, an overriding responsibility to the public.

Our profession’s codes of ethics as outlined by the American Institute of Architects (AIA, which again regulates only those architects volunteering to be members of its organization), however, are less than clear about the order of those obligations. Recently updated in April 2024, this document addresses architects’ responsibilities to the public, but it spends more time on our business-related responsibilities; at the same time, it also includes issues such as upholding the law or not committing fraud—legal matters that fall beneath even basic ordinary ethics—thus further blurring the distinction between what is or is not professional ethics.

When we do stay within the boundaries of professional ethics, our responsibilities to the public’s health, safety and welfare still remain ambiguous. Most of our ethics—and our professional development—have traditionally focused on the more engineering-related areas of safety (structural integrity, fire or shock prevention) and health (air flow and temperature, clean water and sewage disposal), with relatively little attention paid to welfare. Maybe the term “welfare” has become such a politicized term that we tend to avoid it, which is all the more reason why we should talk about it.

In talking about welfare, architects may actually find a clearer argument for the value of what we do. When we look back at the Vitruvian triad, commodity and firmness are not hard to reconcile with the health and safety of people in a building. But the third part of the Vitruvian triad—venustas, or delight—is what we, as architects, are almost uniquely responsible for. Delight also has implications far beyond the building itself or mere aesthetic pleasure. It includes the public realm and natural environment, and with that, human welfare and wellbeing. Welfare, in other words, creates an ethical foundation for the vast part of our work that is unique to us.

But this raises another question: Whose welfare are we addressing? Like the health and safety of the occupants of a building, our profession has often falsely assumed that the occupants of a building are the sole client, an assumption that can have grave classist implications. Shouldn’t our sense of welfare extend beyond those who occupy or own our buildings to, say, the working conditions of the people who make the materials we specify, wherever they might be? And what about those indirectly affected by our buildings, like people generations ahead or those among us whose true need for shelter is continually de-prioritized?

That such questions do not appear in the AIA’s Codes of Ethics shows how much our profession’s ethical thinking is underdeveloped, especially when compared to the robust and specific moral action promoted in other fields, such as medicine and law. If you are a doctor, for example, you not only have a responsibility to advocate for universal healthcare but also an obligation to help someone on the street who is having a medical emergency. The same with law: The justice system ensures that everyone has legal representation in a court of law, with the expectation that all lawyers will do some amount of pro bono or public defense work.

If everyone has a right to emergency room doctors or public defenders, why doesn’t everyone also have a right to an architect? That may sound like a silly question, given our dependence upon fee-paying clients. However, if our work affects people’s health, safety, and welfare as much as we claim it does, then why don’t we have a public health or public defender version of our profession? As Ann Lui writes in Log 48 in a piece titled, “Toward an Office of a Public Architect,” “The [Office of the Public Architect] would provide access to a small but legally mandated service at the moment when the constant and divergent pressures of market value, building maintenance, access to design services, and the unequal deployment of law converge.”

If we are a profession with ethical obligations to the public, don’t we need a new model of practice that would give the public as much access to an architect as people have to a doctor or lawyer? Or, if we don’t care to make our services so widely available and instead remain content with mainly serving those with the capacity to pay our fees, then how can we call ourselves a profession?

A related issue is locating where personal conviction sits within professional ethics. On the one hand, professions have an obligation to help others regardless of their ability to pay and despite the circumstances that led to their needing help. When a gang member arrives in a clinic with a gunshot wound, the doctor has a responsibility to attend to that patient, however much he or she might find gang violence objectionable. On the other hand, as we have seen with the Supreme Court allowing a wedding cake business not to serve a gay couple, businesses have some agency in who they take on as customers, based on their personal convictions. So the question is: Do we see architecture more like a clinic or more like a bakery? In other words, are we more like a profession or a trade?

The other major professions became licensed for clear, public reasons: doctors to promote health, lawyers to promote justice, and engineers to promote safety. If we, as architects, want to have legitimacy as a profession, then we must have an equally clear, social purpose. Architects provide services deemed essential not only by our clients, but also by the broader public, like the welfare of people and the well-being of the planet. Otherwise, why are we even licensed? With all of these vital issues yet to be fully explored and spelled out by the AIA, it’s clear that the current Code of Ethics deserves another update.

Victoria Beach was a faculty fellow at Harvard’s Center for Ethics and wrote the textbook for the first ethics class at the GSD. She has had her own architectural practice for nearly 30 years and has recently held elected office in California.

Peggy Deamer is professor emerita, Yale School of Architecture and a founding member of the Architecture Lobby. She has practiced architecture for 45 years and is the author Architecture and Labor.

Tom Fisher is a professor in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota and the director of the Minnesota Design Center. A former dean of the college, he was also an editor at Progressive Architecture magazine for 14 years.

The views of our writers do not necessarily reflect those of the staff or advisers of The Architect’s Newspaper.