Guest Viewpoint: Ujjval Vyas

Ujjval Vyas, Ph.D., J.D.

Ujjval K. Vyas, Ph.D., J.D. is the principal of Alberti Group, a consultancy specializing in matters related to sustainability, risk management, and emerging technologies and new product development in the built environment. Prior to founding Alberti Group, he was an attorney representing contractors, design professionals, and other in the construction process (he remains a licensed attorney in the State of Ilinois). He has also taught architectural history, theory, design, and ethics at the graduate and undergraduate levels in the United States and Canada. He received his J.D. with honors from the Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s interdisciplinary Committee on the History of Culture.

I don’t know if I’ve ever encountered anyone before who has so thoroughly challenged my understanding of the proper role of the architect as a design professional, the necessity of critical thinking, and the objective analysis of facts. Even though Ujjval and I have yet to meet in person, we have frequently engaged in spirited debates via Twitter and email correspondence. His intellect, reasoning, and perspective are unassailable. He is quick to point out when I have failed to overcome biases and when those biases are potentially to the detriment of my professional duties, particularly when it comes to the concept of a client’s informed consent. First and foremost, he believes architects must confront difficult decisions with “as much objective, credible, and transparent information as possible.” In his mind to do otherwise is to fail to act ethically.

What Ujjval believes is necessary of architects is akin to the medical profession’s transition from a field of generalists to a disaggregated world where the general practitioner acts as a useful gatekeeper to more specialized and advanced professionals with relevant knowledge. In his analogy, the architectural profession must experience a similar shift to serve its clients in a manner more consistent with its responsibility to decrease risks. This shift contributes toward ensuring the formation of more robust design teams with the capacity, knowledge, objectivity, and judgment to allow clients to make informed decisions in their best interest.(1)

A licensed member of a learned profession must provide the benefit of his or her objective judgment in the service of the client’s wishes, but can never substitute the professional’s own judgment for that of the client in any material way. As Ujjval attempts to explain in the piece below (which dates to 2009), advocacy-driven activity in architecture is a deep problem, especially when it comes to the subject of sustainability. Our challenge is to avoid capitulating to confirmation biases bred into us by way of our training, those that prejudice us toward inadequately examined and unchallenged beliefs. How do we know what we think we know? If we cannot answer this question, have we merely adopted positions because they are easy, convenient, and self-inflating? Read on:

Hard Sustainability
The era of easy sustainability is over. Until now, easy sustainability has been the norm mostly because of our laziness, and because we have succumbed to the Siren song of simplifications. Green washing, green hype, green marketing machines, and green greed are all tempting us with their songs, but what is at stake is too important to leave to easy solutions. It is time to acknowledge that meaningful sustainability will require hard work, both in thinking and in action. But this is as it should be; ill-defined as it is, sustainability is the current watchword to call ourselves and others to create a more equitable and environmentally responsible future. It is first and foremost a proxy word for ethical action in the current state of the world.

Acting ethically is difficult. Just examining our own day-to-day existence tells us so if we are honest in our reflections. The difficulty of ethics arises not from the lack of recognition of the correct position or even from a lack of willpower. Rather, as the historian of ideas Sir Isaiah Berlin cogently pointed out, the difficulty with ethics is that by its very nature it arises out of a conflict of values, both within cultures and between cultures. When we strive to act ethically in the world, we can’t just follow some easy set of rules or oft-repeated slogans. Instead we must recognize that a choice has to be made under difficult circumstances. Equality may be a worthwhile ideal, but what happens when it meets the problem of merit? Equality before the law may lead to injustice. Freedom is a cherished ideal, but it has its limits as any parent knows. Deciding where to draw the line between equality and reward for the meritorious, or between freedom and necessary control over others puts us into the hard world of ethical choices. Sloganeering about freedom, equality, merit, and paternalism does not provide meaningful guidance when hard choices must be made between competing values.

Examples of values in conflict are easy to conjure. Are the recent wars in the Middle East the result of American addiction to fossil fuels and the resultant geopolitics, or are they the result of a moratorium on pursuing nuclear power that removed a viable option to help break that addiction? A similar argument could be made that nuclear power could significantly decrease CO2 emissions and reduce our need for coal-powered electrical generation plants. On the other hand, the drawbacks of nuclear power must be accounted for in these public policy debates. These are not easy choices and simplistic answers from either the pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear lobbying interests provide little help. When it comes to sustainability, we need open-minded, thoughtful, and intelligent arguments that engage in the difficult task of a risk adjusted cost-benefit analysis which accounts for both the import of human equity and environmental value.

As human beings, we are limited in our capacities. Therefore, when faced with making the difficult choices, it is useful to have before us as much objective, credible, and transparent information as possible. Science is the name given to the aspiration to acquire such information about the empirical world and there is no reason why this same standard shouldn’t apply to ethical choice-making. For example, if we know through sound methodological techniques and full data transparency that solar thermal provides a better return on investment than photovoltaics, this may productively guide public policy. Without this approach, public policy in sustainability remains blind guesswork or, even worse, falls victim to the lobbying efforts of vested interests.

Hard sustainability recognizes that even with the desire to act ethically and to acquire information to properly validate our choices, it is crucial to remember that as individuals and as groups, we may still be very wrong. Our own personal experience shows us this in spades. What we once thought was absolutely beyond doubt at the age of twenty seems thoroughly absurd at fifty. History gives us far too many examples of groups and cultures that caused great harm even as they tried to do the right thing.  Enthusiasms and certitude are the stuff of the Siren song. Hard work and an avowal of human limitations are the context for the difficult voyage ahead. It is best, then, to maintain some level of skepticism to protect against ourselves. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked, one should not confuse certitude for certainty.

Sustainability requires the best in us as human beings and this means wrestling with difficult questions, conflicting values, inadequate understanding of the empirical realm, and accepting the potential for mistakes both grand and small. Sustainability requires that we ask deeper questions and fight against the easy answers—persuasion should be the watchword, not consciousness-raising. It is a call to arms to think more critically and dare to go against the grain of cultural shibboleths and personal sentimentality. To paraphrase the great music critic Charles Rosen, hard sustainability is not for everyone but for anyone. 

(1)  Refer to the chapter Ujjval wrote entitled “Matching Owner and Architect Expectations: Green Advocacy and the Necessity for Informed Consent” in Green Building and the Construction Lawyer: A Practical Guide to Transactional and Litigation Issues, ABA Forum on Construction Law, 2014, p. 126.