E212 - Ole Bouman: Bicycles, buildings and an ethic of care.

Architecture’s conscience – as building, buildings, materials and practices – is a bolt-on at best, but more often a semantic, sophistic trick. Architecture as a profession talks ethically but it’s very difficult to see where this manifests in real life. This is an agency problem but also a discipline problem – at a profession-level individualism resists collective action to solve broad social problems. At a policy level, any attempt by anybody to suggest architects have some social obligation that impinges on “design” gets shot down. 

In a May 2026 op-ed for the Journal of Architecture entitled Architecture et Révolution: The En...