Ethics and Decision Making in Architecture

This seminar confronts the ethical imperatives of architectural practice amid intersecting crises, climate collapse, technological acceleration, and structural injustice. Anchored in Carnegie Mellon’s ethos of critical praxis, we recast design not as neutral problem-solving but as a philosophical and political act: a making-with the world that entangles the architect in struggles over power, subjectivity, and the conditions of collective life.

We begin by pausing the rush to make, suspending technique to ask ontological questions: Why build at all? Beyond shelter, what do we seek through this fundamental human act? Our aspirations, justice, democracy, and the ever-shifting ideals of communal life must find legible form. At the same time, we read how bias, authoritarian narratives, and uneven distributions of power have etched themselves into the city’s fabric. We cultivate a critical, inquiry-driven lens to trace these material and psychological forces across urban space, and we claim the architect’s agency to conjure ethical scaffolding, pushing the boundaries of practice and prototyping methods that bring more just futures into view.