Integration of ethics and aesthetics

Abstract

This article proposes that although most architects agree about the urgent need to integrate environmental sustainability criteria in the architectural project, we still find that the kind of architecture that captures media attention is dominated by image, while examples of sustainable architecture are considered aesthetically poor. However, sustainable architecture does not necessarily imply superimposing an aesthetic appearance to a physical performance that obeys the objectives of sustainability, but rather to create an integral relationship between aesthetical values and scientific knowledge. In the search to integrate ethics and aesthetics along the multiple and diverse paths that lead towards sustainability, we should be sceptical of those trends based on a hypothetical consensus regarding what sustainable architecture should be and of the belief that a work of architecture can be objectively evaluated by breaking it up into a list of parameters. In architecture, the whole is always more than the sum of the parts.