The good, the bad and the juggled: the new ethics of building materials

In much environmental analysis, architecture is reduced to a fraction of itself: the architectural-artefact-as-physical-object. Its symbolic and self-referential capacities, its aesthetic and spatial concerns ww- that which conventionally characterises it as 'design'- are dismissed as irrelevant to the crisis at hand. What 'meaning' architecture is permitted thus tends to be discussed in quantifiable terms: energy ratings, insulation values, etc. This data, however, only has meaning because it is contained within a larger hermeneutic framework, an ethical one. That is, buildings meeting certain environmental performance criteria are deemed ethically acceptable because they are taking into consideration the well-being of a larger community, whether that community is exclusively human, or inclusive of all life. This is a new definition of the ethical in architecture, new because what is conventionally viewed as a qualitative judgement is being considered in quantitative terms, with all the problems of interpretation inherent in such a direction.