Professional Ethics in Architecture

7-8 & 12 Juli 2014 // Delft, Netherlands

The 2014 ISPA Summer School will bring architecture researchers together from the USA, Canada, and the European Union to jointly seek means to redress the geographic and institutional imbalance in addressing professional ethics in architecture.

We have invited researchers with a proven track record of research and teaching in the professional ethics of architecture. Our goal is to confront these researchers with masters students and colleagues from (primarily) EU institutes, so they can hear their questions and concerns. The very workshop-like nature of a summer school seems ideally suited to materialize this aim, of creating an atmosphere of competent discussion and fruitful exchange.

Confirmed speakers and discussants for our summer school include Prof. Vasilis Ganiatsas, head of Architectural Design at the National Technical University of Athens (Greece), Prof. Tom Spector, University of Oklahoma (USA), Dr. Martin Düchs, Munich (Germany), and Prof. Graham Owen, University of Toronto (Canada). Course coordinators from our IDEALeague partner institutes include Prof. Axel Sowa, Theory Chair in Architecture at RWTH Aachen, and Dr. Christoph Baumberger, Environmental Ethics Unit at ETH Zürich.

Application

If you are an MA-student (or even PhD!) in architecture and neighbouring fields, please send us your name, institution or professional affiliation to isparchitecture@gmail.com for further registration details.

If you attend an IDEALeague partner institute – RWTH Aachen, ETH Zürich, TU Delft – we may be in a position to offer sponsored attendance, covering travel, accommodation, and course costs.

Background

As stipulated in the UIA-UNESCO Validation System for Architectural Education, drafted in 1996-2000 and upheld at a congress held in Berlin in 2002, professional ethics was to become a prerequisite in the formal training of architects at universities. This was in recognition of the undoubted societal and environmental challenges that architectural practitioners face in their work every day – and of the need to better prepare them to face such challenges intelligently and responsibly.

In the decade since the Berlin congress, impressive efforts and progress have been made in Northern America, where course curricula have been updated, and a rich number of publications in article and book format have contributed to an ongoing awareness to address the UIA/UNESCO charter in concrete terms – by bringing it to bear on the localized conditions of the profession in the USA and Canada. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Europe, where research and curricular restructuring has been slow to adopt the outcome of the Berlin congress, and efforts to contextualize the charter have not been forthcoming.

It is thus our aim with the 2014 ISPA Summer School to bring architecture researchers together from the USA, Canada, and the European Union to jointly seek means to redress the geographic and institutional imbalance, and find out what can and need be learned to adapt recognized results from abroad to a Central European context.