Intention and Responsibility. Ethical Consistency in Contemporary Architecture

While theories fade, architectural practices are more and more driven by personal poetics: architects need some kind of legitimization, and are ready to change everything in a motivation. However, while design choices have become an expression of pure preference, design actions continue to produce consequences to deal with, more unexpectedly than ever. Thus, quite unexpectedly, ethics has become the authentic, constitutive and epistemological nature of architecture. Usually ethics is merely reduced to the rules of professional deontology, or to an expression of careless do-goodery: but only through a responsible involvement and a consistent acting it is possible – as stated in this brave challenge – to reveal the widespread ethics of intentions, thus shrinking from controversy between theory and practice. Using as a starting point the phenomenological tradition and the philosophical-architectonic dialogue between Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Enzo Paci, and through a continuous confrontation with actual practice, this journey will eventually take you to an authentic, responsible theory of design.