Intention and Responsibility

Among volumes of theories that are becoming more and more vague, contemporary architecture is convulsively hunting for legitimization. Thus, ethics (among design ideas reduced to expressions of mere preferences and planning actions with uncertain, yet concrete, consequences) has unexpectedly become architecture's authentic constitutive and epistemological dimension. Certainly, this has not happened in deontological terms or in terms permeated with the excessive exhibition of good feelings that often limit this question. Rather, a responsible personal engagement and consistent actions--according to the bold challenge in this book--are the keystones to expose the reigning ethics of intention and to solve the apparent dispute between theory and practice. This book follows a path that, going back to the philosophical-architectonic dialogue between Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Enzo Paci, uses everyday experience and looks for a design theory that is finally honestly responsible.