the Temptation to Cut and Paste

Caught in the glare of stark looming deadlines and professional urgency, the temptation to cut and paste has become an accepted reflex. Specifications are copied, notes are recycled, and decisions are deferred. The act feels harmless, even efficient. But each time we replicate without reconsidering, we disengage from one of architecture’s most profound responsibilities: to care. Architecture is not neutral. Every line, every material specified, carries moral consequence. To specify carelessly is to design without conscience; to specify well is to engage the world as an ethical and material system.

To specify is to decide, and every decision becomes a built condition. The Architects Code of Professional Conduct (Australian Institute of Architects, 2021) requires that architects “act with integrity, competence, and regard for the public good.” The Architects Act 1991 (Vic) adds that the duty of an architect extends beyond the client, encompassing “the environment and the community affected by the work.”

Yet, when tenders need completing and budgets strain, ethical clarity fades under the pressure of production. Standard specifications, reused without review, become a quiet form of neglect, one that rarely attracts attention yet perpetuates harm.

How often do we question the default detail, the convenient assumption, the unseen carbon? Each of these oversights is small on paper but monumental in consequence.

The National Standard of Competency for Architects (AACA, 2021), along with parallel frameworks such as the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Code of Conduct and the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Code of Ethics, all articulate the same truth: the architect is not just a service provider but a moral agent.

Architecture is frequently measured by cost, quality, and time. Yet these metrics omit the most important variable: ethics. When speed and profit are privileged over environmental and social care, the work becomes hollow.

The moral economy of practice demands a different calculus, one that values repair over repetition. Six Degrees Architects have demonstrated this through decades of work, combining creativity with integrity. Projects such as Nightingale housing + the Commons Housing project, prove that ethical material sourcing, reclaimed fabric, and adaptive reuse are not luxuries but necessities. They remind us that true design excellence lies not in novelty but in conscience.

Rachel Whiteread’s ghostly casts of domestic interiors, the voids beneath staircases, the negative spaces of rooms, expose what architecture prefers to forget: the residue of human life embedded in form. Her art reveals absence as evidence. Likewise, our specifications leave traces of our moral absences. When we fail to consider the environmental or human impact of a material, we create architecture that is aesthetically complete but ethically lacking.

We cannot outsource ethics. Each clause in a specification, each checkbox in a procurement spreadsheet, conceals a human story: a worker in unsafe conditions, a mine scarring an ancient landscape, a material whose afterlife will outlast its purpose by centuries. Architecture’s detachment from the origins of its matter is a form of quiet complicity. We must keep looking, keep questioning, keep refining, even when the process feels infinite.

Ethical specification is not a bureaucratic task; it is a creative and poetic act. To specify well is to compose with awareness, to acknowledge that materials carry memory and meaning. The philosopher Jane Bennett, in Vibrant Matter (2010), calls for an “ethics of material vitality” an understanding that matter has agency, that the substances we build with shape us in return.

When we cut and paste, we deny this vitality. We treat materials as passive, interchangeable, lifeless. We stop listening. The practice of care in architecture then becomes an act of refusal to let the living world be flattened into the language of convenience. Yes, this care takes time, and yes, it erodes margins, but it enriches meaning. It is the slow craft of conscience.

The sculptor and the architect share the same challenge: to make with awareness, to engage the resistance of materials as part of the work’s truth. In the end, what matters is not how quickly we deliver but how deeply we care. The world does not need more buildings; it needs more integrity built into the ones we already make.

What matters more: efficiency or ethics, repetition or reflection, profit or principle?

References

• Architects Accreditation Council of Australia (AACA). National Standard of Competency for Architects (2021).

• Australian Institute of Architects. Architects Code of Professional Conduct (2021).

• Architects Registration Board of Victoria. Architects Act 1991 (Vic).

• Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Code of Professional Conduct (2020).

• American Institute of Architects (AIA). Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (2018).

• Six Degrees Architects. (Melbourne)

• Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.