HNY 2026

Against Indifference: Architecture + Choice in 2026

Happy New Year. Not as a productivity slogan or a demand for reinvention, but as a moment to pause and decide how we wish to act.

2026 arrives with familiar pressures, climate anxiety, institutional fatigue, social fracture, yet also with an opportunity that is philosophical rather than technical.

The opportunity is to resist indifference.

Architecture is deeply implicated in this choice. It shapes the conditions of daily life while often presenting itself as neutral. Neutral briefs. Neutral standards. Neutral outcomes. Yet neutrality is never innocent. Whether we acknowledge it or not, architecture is always a moral act, because it distributes comfort, effort, risk, and dignity.

At the heart of this lies the question of free will. Are we truly choosing, or merely responding to systems, habits, and constraints beyond our control? The debate is long standing and unresolved, but it is precisely this tension that makes ethical action meaningful.

The existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre argued that humans are condemned to freedom. Even when constrained, we are still responsible for how we respond. For Sartre, refusing responsibility by blaming systems or precedent is an act of bad faith. In architecture, this bad faith appears when we say “this is just how it’s done” or “there was no alternative.” These phrases disguise choice as inevitability.

Yet modern science complicates this certainty. Neuroscientist Benjamin Libet suggested that the brain initiates actions milliseconds before we become consciously aware of deciding. Philosophers such as Sam Harris have used this to argue that free will, at least as traditionally imagined, may be an illusion. If our decisions arise from biology, conditioning, and prior causes, can we really be held responsible?

Rather than undermining ethics, this insight sharpens it. If choice is influenced, fragile, and effortful, then care becomes more important, not less. Responsibility shifts from heroic individualism to reflective practice. Ethics becomes about creating conditions that support better choices.

This is where architecture matters profoundly. The environments we design influence behaviour, stress, attention, and wellbeing. Philosopher and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker argued that human progress depends less on perfect virtue and more on systems that nudge behaviour toward better outcomes. Buildings are such systems. They can support health or undermine it. They can encourage dignity or exhaustion. They can make care easy or make harm invisible.

Long before neuroscience, Thomas Aquinas offered a compatibilist view of free will. Humans are shaped by nature and habit, yet still capable of moral action through reason and practice. Virtue, for Aquinas, is cultivated. It is learned through repetition, example, and environment. Architecture, in this sense, becomes a moral tutor. It trains bodies and minds through daily use.

If Sartre emphasises responsibility and Aquinas emphasises cultivation, Martin Heidegger deepens the question further. Heidegger asks not what we choose, but how we dwell. Human beings are not detached decision makers floating above the world. We are immersed in it. Space shapes thought. Light shapes mood. Silence shapes attention. To dwell well is to be supported in one’s being.

In his writing on building, dwelling, thinking; Heidegger argues that architecture should serve life, not serve as spectacle. Buildings are not objects first and shelters second. They are conditions for existence. This reframes ethics away from intention alone and toward lived consequence. A building that looks impressive yet exhausts its occupants is ethically thin, regardless of ambition or awards.These ideas are echoed in architectural research and education. Environmental psychology has consistently shown that space affects cognition, stress, and health. Scholars such as Sue Weidemann have demonstrated how clarity, comfort, and sensory moderation reduce fatigue and support wellbeing. These effects accumulate quietly, which is why indifference can be so damaging.

In architectural education, Beth Tauke and Megan Basnak argue that ethics, inclusion, and evidence must be embedded into design thinking, not treated as optional overlays. When education rewards speed, novelty, and authorship without reflection, it trains indifference by omission.

Against indifference does not mean against ambition. It means against ambition detached from care. Beauty remains essential. Awe remains necessary. But beauty without responsibility becomes spectacle, and spectacle without ethics becomes hollow.

As we enter 2026, the question is how we act within the freedom we do have.

Wishing you all, a very Happy New Year.

References:

Aquinas, T. (1981). Summa theologica (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). Christian Classics. (Original work published 1265–1274)

Gadamer, H.-G. (2004). Truth and method (2nd rev. ed., J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 1960)

Harris, S. (2012). Free will. Free Press.

Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, language, thought (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published 1954)

Libet, B. (2004). Mind time: The temporal factor in consciousness. Harvard University Press.

Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. Viking.

Sartre, J.-P. (2007). Existentialism is a humanism (C. Macomber, Trans.). Yale University Press. (Original work published 1946)

Sartre, J.-P. (1992). Being and nothingness (H. E. Barnes, Trans.). Washington Square Press. (Original work published 1943)

Sennett, R. (2008). The craftsman. Yale University Press.