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 Engineered Consent of a Discipline, Ole Bouman, writer, curator, publisher and Professor in the College of Architecture & Urbanism, Tongji University, Shanghai, makes a strong claim: architecture is aligned with delivering the status quo, just as Le Corbusier suggested in it should. Contrary to the general belief that we ask too much of architecture, Bouman suggests perhaps in fact we ask too little.

Ole suggests that the polycrisis upon us requires action at the collective level. To illustrate this, he uses the bicycle: no single bicycle fights climate change but "a culture of cycling can,". No project changes anything but the knowledge of the discipline could.

Ole’s website is linked here. The essay is linked above.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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

A is for Architecture Podcast

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