LINKS
Ethics and Professional Responsibility: Information concerning the AIA Code of Ethics and its enforcement
AIA Code of Ethics
Washington State Board of Registration for Architects
Chapter 18.08 RCW
Chapter 308-12 WAC

DEAR LIBRA MAY 2008

The AIA Seattle Practice/Ethics Committee Co-Chair Jerome J. Diepenbrock AIA provided material for this Dear Libra column. The Committee welcomes your questions or comments on its contents.

Dear Libra,

I recently attended a seminar at the regeneration 2008 sustainability forum which asked the question, is there a greener gender? It was hosted by a panel of women (Lucia Athens, Anne Schopf, Judith Heerwagen & Amanda Sturgeon) who are leaders in the environmental movement and moderated by Kira Gould who co-authored the book Women in Green. It implied that women may be greener than men because they are leading the way to the next revolution in green design, a qualitative rather than the current quantitative advance.

The panelists’ opinion was that there wasn’t really a greener gender, however using techniques and values that were more feminine than masculine would help us reach this next level of sustainable design. These feminine techniques and values such as using a collaborative and intuitive process, and designing buildings experientially and as a connection to their context and the people who use them rather than the more masculine ones of using a hierarchical process and designing buildings as individual expressions and sculptural objects were more conducive to sustainable design.

They also mentioned that there appeared to be a large drop out rate among their female colleagues since college perhaps because they had a difficult time expressing their feminine values in the typical architectural office.

This sounded like stereotyping, kind of like a self help session and way too soft to me and even if it was true I couldn’t see how it would help me when I got back to work the next day. Some guy at the seminar said he thought it meant bringing all of himself into the office, I didn’t really understand what he meant but I am interested to find out. Libra, what do you think about all this masculine/feminine stuff?

-Definitely Male in Monroe

Dear Definitely,

I am all about balance, and I do think that the male way of doing things which has dominated your world since the goddess was replaced with the hero-god-kings almost 5,000 years ago is not working anymore.

I agree that creating anything, including buildings, needs an equal amount of masculine and feminine involvement, I also think that the ultimate goal of sustainability should be co-creating with your mother earth. Who better to lead the way than women who perhaps have a slight advantage understanding her ways of creating and nurturing life.

A practical approach to the problem of sustainability might be adopting a design process that is more like mother earth’s to ensure that your creations are more compatible with her. The “evolutionary” approach encourages all to participate, nurtures what works, learns from what fails, and plots its course not knowing in advance which direction comes next. This is the way mother earth has created life for billions of years. Indigenous peoples have all operated this way as a means of survival; respecting and honoring animals, plants and rocks as their relations in order to learn from them and live in harmony and balance with them.

The internal creative process is a continuous cycle made up of both masculine and feminine behavior. The feminine gestates and nurtures a creation until it is ready to be brought out into the world, the masculine takes it into the world and expresses, tests and refines it and then takes it back to the feminine for her appreciation and encouragement, and then the cycle is repeated.

If either of these is underdeveloped or negative, the quality and viability of the creation is impacted. One way to ensure a positive, healthy creative process is to have both men and woman collaboratively involved in all creative decisions. Native Americans understood this very well and were horrified when they arrived at treaty negotiations with white men to discover they hadn’t brought their women to advise them.

One way to put this into practice is for men to honor these feminine values and allow their workplaces to be more accepting of them to encourage fuller participation of themselves and their female colleagues. I think that this is what your colleague meant when he said he was able to bring all of himself to work. Hopefully this explains what your women in green panelists were trying to say and allows you to be more aware of and therefore improve your ability to design in harmony with your mother earth.

Libra