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Ethics and Architecture
Interdisciplinary Conference

 For several years now, questions of ecology as well as the fair distribution and sustainable exploitation of resources have once again triggered debates on ethics in architecture. The current Bauhaus anniversary is likewise accompanied by demands for a new theoretical foundation, a reflection on the essential and a desire for bold concessions to architecture's utopian potential. Architecture is built environment. It creates and designs individual and collective, private and public spaces for life, experience and action. Like no other discipline, it is bound to functionality; like no other it is shaped by existing material, structural, economic, socio-cultural and political conditions. Within this somewhat contradictory field, a central theme of architecture and its history is touched upon: the (difficult) relationship between ethics and aesthetics, which in turn is intimately linked with such concepts as order, beauty and truth, but also normativity and action.

The interdisciplinary conference being offered at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence -Max-Planck-Institute will take the abovementioned aspects as a point of departure for exploring the correlation between "ethics and architecture" within the broadly staked out period of the Middle Ages to the present. By focussing on examples of representative value for the overall theme, the aim is to allow different scholarly historical approaches which also welcome concentration on individual positions (e.g. Alberti, Palladio, Ledoux, Schinkel, Mies van der Rohe, Nouvel). The conference will investigate both cross-temporal and temporally specific categories as well as (architectural) value definitions which contribute to shaping the complex issue of architecture and ethics in theory and practise.

The goal of the conference is to unite contributions addressing aspects of architectural theory and analysis by art historians, philosophers and representatives of neighbouring disciplines.


  

Date
July 1st, 2010 to July 3rd, 2010

Location
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut
Palazzo Grifoni - Seminarraum
Via dei Servi 51
50122 Firenze
Contact
Hana Gründler M.A.
E-mail: gruendler@khi.fi.it

Dr. Brigitte Sölch
E-mail: soelch@khi.fi.it
Program
http://www.khi.fi.it/ pdf/c20100701.pdf
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