In the wake of a new era of design brought upon by 9/11, FT.com's architecture writer reflects on the origins and the future of morality in architecture.
"Contemporary architects are not accustomed to presenting their plans in terms of morality, but the replacement for the Twin Towers, destroyed in moral outrage, is being judged in moral terms....Morality had been central to modernism, a functional architecture stripped bare of decoration and the accrued layers of history to reveal its soul. That soul, now visible, had to be accountable - which required an architecture of clarity, purity, whiteness and a machine-made rigour which seemed to deny human involvement....Today, talk of morality and ethics in architecture in New York causes people to roll their eyes....[Libeskind] will now have to ponder whether, smashed against the demands of developers, local government and bureaucracy, his architecture has perhaps become the sacrificial vessel buried with the thousands of dead of September 11, dragging the dream of a moral architecture into the grave."
Thanks to Connie Chung
FULL STORY: Feature: The moral angle
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