Output details

Air Rights

This chapter sets out to question the parameters of ’agency’. Rights accrue to agents and agencies that define and circumscribe their powers to act or be acted upon. The question examined here is how far can we imagine the air not only as an active agent but also as a thinking agent and a moral agent? In play is the philosophical problem of ‘the good’, and its location; at stake is the interiorisation of architecture; in question, the legislation to render buildings airtight.

The original paper was written for the 2008 AHRA Conference entitled ‘Agency’. This chapter builds on research that first appeared in an earlier article on the growth of air-conditioning and the ‘great indoors’ where, like cyberspace, it never rains (‘Metaphors of Experience: the Voice of Air’, Philosophical Forum, June 2004, pp. 161-177).

The paper seeks to reinstate the object of sustainable practice, the air. It poses a significant challenge to current thinking on sustainability strategies in the built environment. To build the case three examples of potential agents are examined to establish the conditions under which they might be understood to accrue rights and responsibilities: the boundaries of ‘organism’ and how singular an organism has to be to possess rights (the extent of ‘animal’ rights); the boundaries of ‘machine’ and how sentient a machine has to be to possess rights (see ‘robot rights’); finally, the boundaries of architecture, its potential for ‘intelligence’ and its capacity to act as a moral agent (memory versus smart). In this scenario the commonly held air becomes a paradigm of ‘the good’ – and airtight buildings an ethical challenge.