In the traditional view architects are taken to be the authors of the products they design. Even when architects, as they must, meet the goals and requirements set by those who commission them, there is ample interpretive flexibility within the design problem for them to create unique spatial and material compositions. Clients generally expect such an expansive interpretation of the stated design problem. Under certain circumstances buildings and landscapes are commissioned to reflect the architect’s personal style and vision as evidenced in prior work. In this context architecture is perceived to be similar to the fine arts. Building owners may seek to enhance their own social position through association with the artistic authority of the architect. Such an understanding of the social context of architectural production is aided by a traditional philosophy of art whereby paintings, sculptures, or other products are designated by a single author. To the philosopher of technology, however, a single author of an architectural product may seem naive. The client, let alone the many draftsmen, engineers, suppliers, and contractors who contribute skill and knowledge to a project’s realization, also contribute to the design process. But whether one prefers the lens of single or multiple authors, the traditional view tempts us toward a vision of the architect as author, either producing a unique vision alone or directing a panoply of other actors assisting in the production of that vision. Such a view may also beg the question of whether architects are responsible for the consequences of their designs in a more substantive way, but this is an issue we will take up later.
Engineers are traditionally viewed as operating in a less publicly recognizable manner. The products they design are characterized by the technological possibilities of their era, and may include decorations peculiar to their period, but nonetheless engineers are typically more anonymous as authors of their work. They may advise those that commission their work about adjusting their expectations, or bring to a project a specific method of designing. But their products are generally oriented by a reductive, rather than expansive, interpretation of the design problem at hand. This is to say that the specific goals and requirements agreed upon at the beginning of the design process tend to limit engineers to coming up with efficient technical solutions to problems. Some pioneering engineers may be known more publicly for their inventions, and countries may even have a few heroic engineers known for public works of national grandeur. But the average technical product will not be recognizable as designed by a particular engineer. A full explanation of the roots of this traditional difference between authorship in engineering and architecture is complex, but we can say here that, on the whole, engineers tend to interpret design problems reductively using quantitative criteria, and architects tend to interpret design problems expansively and to employ qualitative criteria.
A related phenomenon is that the cultures of engineering and architecture have produced different organizational structures that reflect differing values. Architects typically work within firms that are recognizable as architectural firms. This also holds for some engineers, but engineering has also been integrated into larger commercial enterprises that subsume the identity of engineers into the company’s identity. Under such conditions large companies have taken over the role of authors of the products designed, such is the case with consumer goods like cars, cellular phones, and sports wear. The relative anonymity of the engineer is related both to the issue of authorship and organizational structure. If one accepts the notion that engineering is an objective science applied to specific problems, then authorship is concealed. The contribution of the individual designer is suppressed. In this context engineering has been defined as a profession that designs products that meet the goals and requirements agreed upon by those who commission them and nothing more.
Unlike architects, who tend to expand the scope of their design problems to go beyond the everyday, engineers tend to reduce the scope of their design problems to the narrowest possible empirical criteria. This is to say that engineers and architects have intentionally or unintentionally produced distinct “epistemic communities,” or attitudes toward what can be known or designed.4 An example of this phenomenon would be the traffic engineer who expertly designs a street intersection to meet the required flows of automobiles but does not consider the consequences of the design for pedestrians, the natural environment, or urban development patterns because these variables were not specified in the design brief. Engineers are encouraged to become designers that loyally and efficiently carry out the tasks they are set by clients, transferring not only the authorship to the client but also, in the eyes of the engineers themselves, the moral responsibility for the existence and use of what is produced for their employers.3 In contrast, architects would be far more comfortable with expanding the stated design problem to include these other normative variables because they would be rewarded by their professional culture, if not the client, for doing so.
In part because engineers appear to be more in the position of taking orders rather than assuming authorship, philosophers who work on the ethics of engineering have developed a specific literature justifying “whistle blowing” by engineers. In part this literature attempts to justify standards of professional practice by engineers that can supersede obligations to their employers. Philosophers point to examples such as the explosion of the U.S. space shuttle Challenger as a relevant case. There it is argued that NASA engineers overlooked or ignored claims about design flaws in the “O rings,” which sealed the joints between sections of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters, which caused the shuttle to explode on liftoff. Some argue that these engineers should have exercised a larger professional responsibility to protect human safety over the demands to fulfill a mission goal. Regardless of the merits of this claim, our point is that such arguments are thought to require special justification in part because of the limited understanding of the responsibilities of engineers prior to the development of this literature. This limited sense of professional responsibility in turn may extend from the constrained understanding of authorship in engineering as a whole.
In comparison, finding the political content and assessing responsibility for built space is relatively prosaic. For example, the architects of the early 20th century deliberately designed houses for the working class with small kitchens - e.g., Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurter KUche and Piet Zwart’s Bruynzeel
Kitchen - for separating cooking from living and for redefining it as a rationalized and technological activity of ‘modern housewives.’ Using a similar logic, many historians have argued that Georges Eugene baron Haussmann’s boulevards for the new Paris of Louis Napoleon were designed to prevent its inhabitants from easily blocking off parts of their city during a riot. The same argument is made in reference to the design of new university campuses in the U.S. following the student unrest of the 1960s. As such, philosophers have not felt quite as compelled to articulate a unique claim about how architects should exercise some form of professional, moral, or social responsibility, but have simply pointed out the moral and social consequences of the products of architects.