Building in Our Value(s)
By Robert T. Pennock
How should designers take account of human life?
This Article From Issue
May-June 2026
Volume 114, Number 3
Page 156
The built environment is the result of a thousand choices. If you were in the market for a home, for instance, you might pick one story instead of two, wood rather than brick, Art Deco over Victorian, and so on. However, unless you were building a new house, you probably would not think about the choices made by the contractor, the electrician, the plumber, and the other trades that brought such a construction to completion. Even less likely would you think of the design decisions of the architects and engineers whose planning made such abodes possible, or the history of the designers and builders whose work is displayed in the housing market at a given time.
QUICK TAKE
- Design in all fields requires choices that are fundamentally a question of values;the urban environment itself is a function of a history of selections that express values.
- Choices that express preferences can indicate what we value as individuals,but they can also demonstrate the ways that society values human life versus the objects we build.
- Architecture and engineering provide examples of trade-offs between values for creating the best product and obligations to protect human safety.
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