During the last few centuries, so many layers have covered the elementary set of ideas constituting architecture, that we do not see them any more through the alluvial sediments of ambition, vanity, politicization, aestheticization, fashion trends, bad copies, and gross misuse. Our subject is actually elementarily enormous and biologically clear: to build a house is a good thing, perhaps the best man can do. The first houses of Neolithic land-tillers clearly show the love and care for their fellow men and women. Building a roof to shelter us from bad weather, or levelling the floor so that children can play on it and that old people do not stumble across bumps seems so self-explanatory and banal for us today, that we do not any more consider those elementary motives from which architecture is born and rather position architecture into aesthetic, sociological, legislative and technological categories, in which the love and goodness primarily contained in architecture are irretrievably lost.
In complex times, when the global borderline between good and evil is increasingly changing and disappearing in a limbic haze, the reception of architecture and architects often takes on undesirable characteristics and the whole profession is set into unacceptable contexts of collaboration with the darkest forces of politics and entrepreneurship. This is certainly true of a part of our profession, requiring a differentiation that architects are not ready to implement for a number of reasons. Such incentives are usually counteracted by ignoring and by the presentation of positive examples, which is a legitimate, but, seemingly, insufficiently analytic method.

The Internet competition for the 41st Zagreb Salon is open to everyone who in their works examines the topics of good and evil through architecture, which has somewhat radically been compressed into the title Quest for Ethic. Without fear of repetition, pathos and positivism, we offer the ethic aspect of architecture as the dominant property of contemplating space and the orientation point for evaluation of architecture. To those who are repelled by such a pretentious title, we offer more erotic subtitles, such as Ethic is beauty and Architecture is a good thing. The ethic approach as re-aestheticization must necessarily lead to new and previously hidden dimensions of goodness and beauty in architecture.

Mice Gamulin, MA