Introduction - Architecture and Aesthetics

The SAGE Handbook
of Architectural Theory
Introduction: Architecture and Aesthetics
Contributors: John Macarthur & Naomi Stead

Editors: C. Greig Crysler & Stephen Cairns & Hilde Heynen
Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory
Chapter Title: "Introduction: Architecture and Aesthetics"
Pub. Date: 2012
Access Date: October 18, 2015
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: London
Print ISBN: 9781412946131
Online ISBN: 9781446201756
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446201756.n8
Print pages: 123-136
2012 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE knowledge. Please note that the pagination
of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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2012 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. SAGE knowledge
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446201756.n8
[p. 123 ]
Chapter 6: Introduction: Architecture and

Aesthetics
JohnMacarthur and NaomiStead
This section of the Handbook covers what is perhaps the least developed area of
modern architectural theory, that is, the relation of architecture to aesthetics and the
idea of art. This might seem surprising to those outside the discipline, because if
architecture is something more than the management of natural and social situations,
we might expect to find a justification for this claim in philosophical aesthetics or
theories of art and artistic affect. Instead, we find a dispersed discussion of pleasure
and entertainment, of taste, of ennui, of distortion and constraint, of abstraction and
corporeality. We read discussions of affects that might be considered aesthetic and
of practices that might be called artistic, but in the later twentieth century there is little
serious attention given in architectural discourse to the older questions of whether
architecture is an art, how it relates to the other arts, whether it aims to please the
senses, and if so, how.
This situation is not entirely one of negligence on the part of architectural theorists. Its
cause is, in the first place, a subterranean fault-line in modern Western culture between
two concepts usually thought complementary: art and aesthetics. Do archi tecture and
other artistic practices come first and then aesthetics studies which explains them? Or is
there an innate aesthetic feeling, in the first place for nature and human beauty, which
then becomes the basis for the etiolated and arcane practices we call art? This is a
question of precedence that turns into one of comprehensibility. As Barnett Newman
rather testily puts the painters' side of the argument, aesthetics is for the artist as
ornithology is for the birds (Newman 1952). Architecture has in recent decades been
firmly on the art side of the divide, believing in the autonomy of architecture and that its
particular and specific values and historical trajectory are immanent in the problematics
thrown up in everyday architectural practice (see Chapter 2). The architectural theory of
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such matters is more likely to occur in discipline-based journals than, say, the Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism; Bernard Tschumi's famous discussion of the pleasures
of architecture (1994) describes feelings a layperson could not share, for reasons we
will expand on below. Similarly, while architectural discourse has a general interest in
painting and the other arts, it sees itself as a different species to birds like Newman.
Painters, musicians, dancers, architects all draw on the authority of art in different
ways at different times, and this raises the further questions of whether there is art-as-
such, of which [p. 124 ] architecture is a form, or whether art is just a category into
which we place painting, architecture, and so on.
The poor fit between art, the arts, and aesthetics is as much historical as conceptual.
Western architecture is an idea, a discipline, and a defined corpus of buildings going
back to the ancient Mediterranean. The other disciplines have similarly long and
concrete histories, but none would have been called art until the Renaissance nor
thought of as a set with systematic differentiations until the paragone, the ritual debate
that began in the seventeenth century on the merit of the different arts. Aesthetics
emerged out of British empiricism across the eighteenth century and had no particular
place for art. Aesthetics is the study of our reflection on the pleasure or displeasure
of sensory experience. Its paradigm is nature, and art is gathered up into aesthetics
through the ancient idea of mimesis, or the role of art to imitate the beauties of nature.
Aesthetics, however, did offer the basis for a general concept of art-as-such by positing
an aesthetic faculty of mind. In the older, open set of arts based on disciplinary
knowledge and socio-economic structures like guilds, it was not incongruous that Filippo
Brunelleschi was a goldsmith, nor that his architectural practice was not distinguished
from his mechanical engineering or his studies of optics. Aesthetics differentiated these
practices and, what is more, proposed to rank arts such as goldsmithing, architecture,
painting, and poetry relative to how they served the aesthetic faculty. These systems
of the arts, such as those formulated by the Abb Batteux, Jean le Rond d'Alembert,
and Immanuel Kant, are quite risible and largely confined to the eighteenth century.
They have echoes and effects later in history in the Arts and Crafts' rejection of them,
in the curriculum of the Bauhaus, and so on, but their more significant effect is the
introduction of externalities into the old rivalry between the arts: for instance, the idea
that architecture differs from (is better than) sculpture because the former deals with
space in a way that is a fuller exercise of the sensorium, or, conversely, the idea

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that sculpture differs from (is better than) architecture because it is not instrumental
(see Eisenman's interview with Richard Serra in Serra 1994). These historical and
conceptual uncertainties are the unstable ground across which the architectural theory
of aesthetics, art, and pleasure is dispersed. We will now attempt to map and organize
that discourse as a context for the three chapters that follow.
These three chapters divide the field of aesthetics in architecture into three parts.
Chapter 7, by Jorge Otero-Pailos, addresses architectural phenomenology, the most
prevalent and influential modern discussion of the perceptual basis of architectural
experience. Chapter 8, by Sandra Kaji-O'Grady, examines concepts of artistic
technique, namely, form, formalism, and formlessness in architecture through the lens
of systematic and serial practices in architecture, art, and music. Chapter 9, by Bart
Verschaffel, examines disciplinary coherence, looking into the interrelation between
architecture and the other arts, and between aesthetics and art history, by examining
the figures and practices of the artist, the architect, and the engineer. In the first part of
this introductory chapter, we will talk through and around these three chapters, placing
their subject in historical context, and discuss some of the factors that have led to
the re-emergence of interest in architectural aesthetics. This re-emergence has three
underlying conditions: the historicization of earlier systems of normative aesthetics,
which have become relativized in this process and thus opened as a new theoretical
material; a growing interest in the place of architecture within a hierarchy or system
of the other arts, which has overlapped with contemporary artists' fascination with
architectural themes and techniques; and a thoroughgoing post-critical moment in
culture that has heralded a revaluation of beauty, among other things, as we see with
the popularity of Umberto Eco's On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea (2004).
[p. 125 ]
The second half of this introduction will be dedicated to an issue not directly addressed
in the three chapters to come, which is that of pleasure, and the joint problem or,
rather, the paradox it presents in architectural aesthetics. The majority of discussions of
aesthetics in architecture are concerned with the anti-aesthetic, of which there are two
distinct kinds: first, in the sense of the exploration and manipulation of negative affect
(not the traditional sensual pleasure in beauty, but its contrary disgust, boredom, or
ennui, at ugliness, formlessness, or the abject), and, second, the anti-aesthetic as that

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which attempts to go beyond the aesthetic. Leaving aside aesthetic questions, and
the aesthetic norms and canons of architectural tradition, the anti-aesthetic eschews
the idea of architecture as something to be known simply through being felt, and it
champions this outside or excess to the aesthetic as a space of critical potential. So in
this schema of anti-aestheticism, the question of pleasure produces a confusion is
this a pleasure at negative feelings? Or is it an anti-aesthetic pleasure? The matrix of
responses to these questions, which think the anti-aesthetic through pleasure, offers
another way through this complex field. But first to the origins of modern aesthetics, as
they bear on architecture.
Historical Perspectives Kant

Immanuel Kant's aesthetics, contained in the Critique of Judgement, remains the
strongest philosophical expression of modern ideas on aesthetic feelings and practices.
Kant argues that beauty exists in judgements of taste and is fundamentally subjective:
beauty is what we feel; it is not a quality of objects in themselves. In the Analytic of the
Beautiful, Kant gives four conditions that are required to be satisfied if we are to be
sure that our judgement is aesthetic, as opposed to an act of reason or a realization
of morality (1911, 122). The first moment of this analytic is that we must have no
interest in the actual existence of the object, only noting the pleasure it gives us. Kant
distinguishes this pure pleasure from agreeableness, where a desire is satisfied,
and from the pleasure we have in the good, which we ought to have. The second
stricture is that when we make the judgement that a tree is beautiful, we imagine that no
person should disagree. The judgement of beauty is thus universal, but it is so without
a concept. That is to say there is no concept of the beauty of trees on which we have
prior agreement. If that were the case, our judgement would be rational, not aesthetic,
as we would be comparing the object to its concept. The third definition says that in
beauty we admire the form of the purposiveness of an object, but not its purpose. To
admire the beauty of a tulip is to admire the form of its completeness and is distinct
from the botanist's admiration of the flower as a mechanism of reproduction. The fourth
point is related to the second, supposing not only that none should disagree with our
judgement but also that all will necessarily agree with us a common sense that

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is a commonality of the relation of sensation to feeling, which means that beauty is

necessarily intersubjective.
Fine art for Kant is a kind of human productivity that imitates God's creativity. It has
the appearance of being natural, yet at the same time we know that it is not (1911,
45). He still has the older sense of art as making and makers' knowledge, but this is
not aesthetic for the reason of the third moment of the analytic of the beautiful; that
is, craft has a purpose. Kant similarly rules out of aesthetic judgement what he calls
the agreeable arts, as in entertaining conversation, in which we have an interest
because it is conducted with the aim of enjoyment. Fine art objects are by contrast
intrinsically final, whole in themselves without reference to the use or pleasure they
might entail. In this, nature is the model of art and superior to it, but Kant also thinks
that there are aesthetic ideas, which exist only in the fine arts (1911, 48). [p. 126 ]
Fine art is the result of genius, where an artist, by their talent, goes beyond imitating
the established rules of art and thinks newly created aesthetic ideas such as new
conceptual knowledge.
Kant's aesthetics and his definitions of fine art remain the definitive explanation of our
uses of beauty and art in the modern world. With his rigorous subjectivism, he does,
however, make a division of the fine arts and a comparative estimate of the worth of
the fine arts (1911, 51, 53). Within this exists Kant's definition of architecture and its
aesthetic potential:
[Architecture] is the art of presenting concepts of things which are

possible only through art, and the determining ground of whose form
is not nature but an arbitrary end and of presenting them both with a
view to this purpose and yet, at the same time, with aesthetic finality. In
architecture the chief point is a certain use of the artistic object to which,
as the condition, the aesthetic ideas are limited (1911, 51).
Architecture's limits, then, are manifold. Aesthetic ideas are the obverse of concepts
for Kant: reason dealing in concepts, and the imagination in ideas. Thus, architecture's
presenting concepts of things only possible through art (in the broader sense of
artifice), rather than semblances of nature, already takes it down a peg. It is common for
laypeople and readers of Kant to think that architecture cannot be art because it must

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be useful. However, Kant is more subtle than this. If architecture necessarily implied
utility (or pleasingness), it would not be a fine art at all, whereas in his system of the
arts it is included and seen to be superior to music. Its problem, rather, is that although
we can consider a building as possessing its own finality, without thought of its use,
architecture nevertheless has a concept of this subsequent use. This means we might
consider how well or how badly it performs a use in which we have no interest, and this
would be a judgement of reason, not an aesthetic judgement.
Historical Perspectives the Twentieth

Century
In part, the lacuna of aesthetics in architectural theory was caused by the failure of
the very great claims made for it in the early to mid-twentieth century. The modern
aesthetics of architecture claimed a basis in psychology, and thus the possibility
of an empirical proof of the aesthetic merits and failures of buildings. This led to
precepts, prescriptions for practice and normative concepts of form, which, despite
claims to scientific status, tended towards the customs of pre-existing European
and American architecture. The aesthetics of architecture became a reactionary
field, most often practised by non-architects, and one largely pitched against the
theoretical developments published in progressive architecture journals and described
elsewhere in this Handbook. For most of its history, in most cultures, architecture
has been a rhetorical culture, concerned with meaning, authority, and propriety, and
in its more saturnine moments with the limits and failures of meaning. Architectural
theory, especially in the post-war period, has returned to this rhetorical conception,
but in a critical mode: thinking of architecture as a nexus of power and knowledge, of
ideologies and spatial disciplines, of industrial production, colonial management, and
the normalization of subjects. By contrast, if one thinks of architecture as a matter of
sense, as a source of sensuous pleasure, and, what is more, a pleasure that ought
to be necessarily and universally shared, then architectural aesthetics could, and
has been, a normative discourse. The best-known treatment published in our period,
Roger Scruton's Aesthetics of Architecture (1979), is opposed to cultural relativism
and claims aesthetical justification for a particular strand of Western architecture:

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classicism. Similarly, texts such as those of Rudolf Arnheim describe some of the basic
techniques of architects of scale, movement, texture, frontality, threshold, and so on
as having a direct and certain description in [p. 127 ] human psychology, and in
view of which various architectural cultures merely cloud our understanding (1977). For
most of the late twentieth century in architectural discourse, aesthetics meant this kind
of foundationalism, or equally troubling simplistic sociological surveys of popular and
professional preferences for one building over another.
Given the perceived dangers of essentialism, progressive discourse has tended to

avoid the word aesthetic when addressing kindred topics such as the pleasure of
architecture, desire as a spatial structure, sensuous embodiment, and buildings as
devices of seduction. Safely bracketed by the word negative, aesthetics is sometimes
used in variously ecstatic accounts of abjection, ascesis, monstrosity, mundanity, pain,
and violence. Along with these concepts are studies of various sites of architectural
pleasure, such as shopping arcades, parks, fairgrounds, brothels, and bachelor pads. In
general, then, the older, dowdy aesthetics focused on the concept of beauty and hence
the claims to innate value that architectural theory has been impatient with. Only a few
commentators, such as Anthony Vidler (1992; 2000) have been concerned to show
how much a negative and apparently non-normative aesthetics is in fact based on the
older concepts of sublimity and picturesqueness and ultimately triangulated with beauty.
This is a situation of the arts as a whole where an interest in beauty and pleasure
was understood as anti-intellectual, and aesthetics as the attempt by reactionaries
to normalize an uncritical account of art. Beauty has since returned as a respectable
interest with its own intellectual trajectory to do with the eclipse of critical culture (in the
sense of cultural works critical of cultural norms and institutions) and the rise of a new
criticism, expository and evaluative (Elkins 2003). We will return to this issue towards
the end of this introduction, in a discussion of the current post-critical moment and its
repercussions for aesthetics in architecture.
The nails in the coffin of normative architectural aesthetics were driven by historians
who relativized its prescriptions but treated these as moments of intellectual history.
For example, the aesthetic and psychological theories of Heinrich Wlfflin, August
Schmarsow, Geoffrey Scott, and others at the turn of the twentieth century were long
considered arcane predecessors to the mid-century founders of canonical modern
history, such as Sigfried Giedion (1941; 1948; compare with 1981) and Nikolaus

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Pevsner, whose ideological comportment had, by 1980, lost them all credibility.
However, when looked on with some historical objectivity by intellectual historians
such as Harry Mallgrave, Eleftherios Ikonomou, and Mark Jarzombek, figures such
as Wlfflin are now understood as crucial to architectural history; their aesthetic
ideas are no longer assessed as programmes to be enacted, but as problematics
that drove and can now explain the intellectual history of architecture's recent past.
Thus contextualized and relativized, the aesthetic theories themselves become a new
resource.
Jorge Otero-Pailos's chapter in this volume (Chapter 7) follows in this tradition as

he critiques the architectural phenomenology of the mid- to late-twentieth century.
In this phenomenology is an example, perhaps the dominant example in our recent
history, of an architectural aesthetics properly said, and it constitutes one of the three
lines of inquiry that can describe the whole of the field of architectural aesthetics, and
that are covered in the three chapters in this section. Although generally preferring
the term poetic to aesthetic, phenomenology is the dominant mode in architecture
where the question of sense and affect is posed. It proposes to explain directly how
the spaces we inhabit make us feel. Architectural phenomenology proposes that one
should recognize and value unmediated experience, and the ongoing currency of
this idea is witnessed in the popularity of Juhani Pallasmaa's The Eyes of the Skin:
Architecture [p. 128 ] and the Senses (1996). The idea that architecture can be made
better through understanding our perception of space and putative spatial archetypes
begins in the eighteenth century, takes its modern form in the late-nineteenth century
in empathy theory, grows in empirical psychology in the mid-twentieth-century, and
is reviving today in an uptake of neuro psycho logy. However, the dominant idea for
understanding architecture as a matter of sense in the mid- to late-twentieth century
was phenomenology. This was only loosely related to the philosophical phenomeno
logy of Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Otero-Pailos'
short history of architectural phenomeno logy reveals it as a strange concoction of
proper phenomenology, pop psychology, old-fashioned humanism, and, more recently,
evolutionary psychology, which makes kin of writers as diverse as Christian Norberg-
Schulz, Ernesto N. Rogers, Kenneth Frampton, and Charles Moore. Otero-Pailos
shows that the ideas and historical trajectory of archi tectural phenomenology are best
understood as a battle for intellectual hegemony in the academy. Paradoxically, this

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sensibility for direct experience requires cultivation through a highly theorized account
of architectural history. Phenomenology nevertheless remains the strongest case we
have of architectural thinking claiming the authority of a fundamental outside, something
beyond the particular concepts of art or architecture specific to a culture or time.
Architecture and the Visual Arts

An important contextual shift that has contributed to the new interest in architectural
aesthetics is the interplay of architecture and the visual arts. Architecture is currently
more likely to be understood as an art than at any time since art nouveau. This shift
is a part of a wider retreat of architecture from ideas of social and functional utility,
which is beyond our present discussion, but, as much as this, it has to do with the
increasing value within architectural discourse of claiming the name of an art. Whatever
one thinks of the practical or social utility of building, of its representational powers or
its abilities to create or normalize spatial conditions, architects treat these as so much
material that can be manipulated. The social and material matter of building is, to a
certain extent, material for the architect in the same way that lived life is material for a
novelist or filmmaker. A house may be a place to live and a real-estate investment, but
to an architect it is more like what the theme of adultery, say, or the prodigal son, might
suggest to a novelist. Architectural techniques (such as scale, directionality, sequential
planning, typological recognition) assume that the manifold social and material relations
of a building can be momentarily totalized as a material that can be worked with these
same architectural techniques. This situation is familiar to us through the concept of
media, having a conceptual model in the sculptor's work with chisels on marble, with
the cinematographer's use of camera movement to make narrative, and the whole
conception of the fine arts that has, since the eighteenth century, been organized
around media and their appropriate techniques.
To think of architecture as an art does not require a basis in aesthetics, and indeed,
the concept of architecture as an art is in a degree of conflict with an aesthetic view.
Strictly put, aesthetics considers our reflection and judgements on our sensuous
experience, and thus makes no in-principle distinction between our judgement of the
beauty of a tree, a painting, or a symphony. Kant goes to some lengths to show that
art presents aesthetic ideas nature does not possess, but these are ideas nonetheless

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applicable to our aesthetic feeling for nature. Following on from this, the whole aesthetic
enterprise assumes the homology of aesthetic judgements of art and nature. Aesthetical
thinking is therefore sceptical of axiomatic distinctions [p. 129 ] between forest
clearings and buildings, let alone historically and culturally limited distinctions between
architecture and sculpture. Much of the architectural theory that deals with matters
that are roughly aesthetic, in fact takes as its premise the existence of art as a discrete
kind of human activity, and a set of the arts that can be understood through their
differences and complementarities. Aesthetic concepts are often wheeled in to make
these differentiations, but at a second order. Most architects will thus distinguish what
they do from sculpture around a concept of space. Modern architects generally accept
the postulates of early-twentieth-century thinkers that space is an object of sense that
can be directly perceived, despite the lack of an orifice for space to enter the body.
Rather, the eyes, hands, ears, locomotive potential, skin, and the whole body make
space the principal percept of the sensorium understood as a whole. But if they know
these arguments, most architects will use them to explain a more basic point, which is
why an architectural concept of space differs from sculpture and the relative positions of
its fabric. In short, space is generally understood as the medium of an (architectural) art,
one that distinguishes it from other arts and their media, and aesthetic arguments are
marshalled to this end.
This is a situation not of architecture alone, but rather of all the arts. Michael Fried's
strongly conventionalist view of painting holds that all its issues and problems are
imminent in its historical and conceptual development and the idea of painting as an
art, and the existence (or not) of an aesthetic faculty are weak external contexts (1967,
1998). Fried's is a more considered and argued version of what most architects have
thought of architecture since the widespread notion of architectural autonomy arose in
the 1970s. Here, a history-of-ideas approach to architecture, whether variously Marxian
like the work of Manfredo Tafuri (1987; Tafuri and Dal Co 1979) or hermeneutic like
that of Joseph Rykwert (1972; 1980), served an interest in self-referential form as
varied as the ur-classicism of Aldo Rossi or the ur-avant-gardism of Peter Eisenman.
Autonomous architecture looked like art one might say it took its conceptual model
from the idea of art and assumed there were sister arts, but there was little at stake
in their interaction. This situation has changed since the 1990s, with an increasingly
high value placed on interdisciplinarity in both architecture and the visual arts: the

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designlike practice of artists such as Andrea Zittel, Jorge Prado, and Thomas Demand,
and the artistic comportment of architects such as Rem Koolhaas and Herzog and
de Meuron (Ursprung 2002). The value placed on interdisciplinarity in contemporary
culture began in a critique of disciplines as arbitrary constraints on creativity, which led
to various collaborations of architects and visual artists. Jane Rendell's book Art and
Architecture: A Place Between documents the issues and some indicative practices
(2006). As this process has accelerated, its terms have changed, and issues around the
basis for collaboration have led to a reassertion of disciplines, which Rosalind Krauss
calls the differential specificity of media in contemporary art. Now that media are no
longer given as material constraints, artists make rooms, painters work in photomedia,
and much art is ephemeral; media has become a conceptual issue, and many of the
deeper questions of aesthetics have re-emerged from the practical intersections of art
disciplines.
In Chapter 8, Sandra Kaji-O'Grady explains the architectural concept of form and

formalism as it developed in the 1960s alongside formalist poetics and minimalism
and serialism in the visual arts and music. Serialism explains some of the recent
history of architectural concepts of form and form-making procedures, and it is also
an interesting parallel to some of the intermedial exploration of the present day. In this
discussion, Kaji-O'Grady opens the issue of the anti-aesthetic that so characterizes
twentieth-century culture, for the affect supposed by many kinds of formal procedure is
not pleasure in the simple sense of [p. 130 ] eighteenth-century aesthetics, or even
heightened awareness, but rather boredom, ennui, disgust kinds of affects that are
much more than merely negative. This level of conceptual practice in architecture asks
whether it needs affect at all, if, rather than pleasing us, architecture can present the
limit of the human. It is thus anti-aesthetic in a second sense of thinking that art can
take us beyond the aesthetic. By beginning in sensuous forms, architecture might take
us to forms of non-conceptual cognition.
Understood in its strongest forms of autonomy from use, art cannot have a purpose
in pleasing. Thus, there is ultimately a conflict between understanding architecture
as an autonomous art discipline working through a historically unfolding formal
problematic and aesthetics, which would show that all this has a purpose in confronting
the sensorium in some other useful way. This conceptual conflict needs to be
understood historically. It is the rise of aesthetic theory, and particularly Kant's concept

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of purposiveness without purpose, that gives terms to the claims of architecture's

autonomy from sense and hence, paradoxically, from aesthetics. The fourth chapter
of this section will thus open the question of the disciplinarity of architecture. Bart
Verschaffel shows in Chapter 9 that the concepts of artistic media and sensory affect
cannot be resolved without considering the concept of architecture per se, as a
discipline or form of knowledge understood as a relation between knowledges.
There are real and complex histories of how architecture has or has not been an
institution at different times in different cultures, but this history is not what interests
us here. Rather, Verschaffel shows that one cannot understand architecture merely
as a set of operations, nor in the affects that architecture might produce, but that the
discipline needs also to produce a logical concept of itself and these relations. If we
look to history or to comparative cultural analysis, it might seem that architecture exists
(or not) almost by accident, in the differing ways that building has been organized in
various cultures and times. To speak of these relations with the definite article as the
discipline of architecture might be ultimately ideological. Nevertheless, this ideology
requires a continuing process of becoming coherent. Architecture seeks a licence for its
institutional existence, and thus autonomy, by claiming autochthonous concepts such as
design and a persona, the architect. That we find it useful to speak of the architecture
of the Australian Aborigines, or the architects (rather than masons) of the Gothic
cathedrals of Europe, is a matter not of historical truth or anachronism, but of a demand
for conceptual coherence. The discipline is that contingent totality from which we can
project a future practice and use the resources of our numerous pasts. To this extent,
architecture continually produces its own essence as a discipline, distinguishing itself
from engineering and the visual arts, finding in its own history fundamental distinctions
that might be visible only in retrospect.
The three chapters that follow each have particular aims and, especially in the cases of
Otero-Pailos and Kaji-O'Grady, quite specific intellectual histories to map. Nevertheless,
it is our proposition that in this section of the Handbook we have laid out three axes
of sense perception, artistic technique, and disciplinary coherence that can be used
to survey the field of the architectural theory of matters aesthetic. There are further
contexts and issues in the field that are not addressed directly in the chapters, and we
will attempt to cover them in the remainder of this introduction. Earlier, we raised the
issue of architecture as a critical discourse and the recent eclipse of this idea, an issue

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also treated elsewhere in the Handbook. We can align a number of other important
contexts around this concept and its historical shift: the anti-aesthetic tone of much
critical discourse, and the history that, despite appearances, connects the post-critical
return of beauty and aesthetic thinking with an earlier concept of pleasure.
[p. 131 ]
Pleasure
Although the high-theory discourse of the 1970s and 1980s was resolutely anti-
aesthetic, this was an alliance of two kinds of anti-aesthetic that can be exemplified in
two very different kinds of pleasure. The first of these was anti-aesthetic, which was
largely popularist in that it opposed the operation of aesthetics as a distinct mode of
thought, particularly that there was a contemplative aesthetic pleasure different in kind
from everyday enjoyment. The second would be better called a negative-aesthetics
of pain, disgust, ordinariness, and boredom, that is, an aesthetic developed from
the original anti-aesthetics of the sublime and the picturesque. The pleasures of this
negative aesthetic, the pleasure of a proximate distance from abjection and terror, are
not so different from eighteenth-century explanations of the enjoyment of tragedy or
sublime landscapes, but they are exactly the pleasures that the first true anti-aesthetes
opposed.
In the 1960s, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown became the most prominent
debunkers of the formalist aesthetic of modernism by explaining what architects could
learn from the popular built environment (Venturi et al. 1972). The original empirical
formulation of aesthetics by the Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Edmund Burke
assumes not only individual preference but also the communication and display of this
in an intersubjective taste. In eighteenth-century doctrines of civic humanism, such as
those of Joshua Reynolds, the discussion of what was within and without the bounds
of taste was considered an important way to construct the social realm. Venturi and
Scott Brown exploded the consensus of their day, famously taking the good and bad
examples from Peter Blake's God's Own Junkyard (1964) and asserting opposed
preferences. Blake diagnosed the problem of 1960s America by showing how far
civic space had degenerated from Jeffersonian architecture. Venturi and Scott Brown

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responded that they preferred the lively inauthenticity of the commercial strip to the
good form of the University of Virginia. They argued that architecture should give over
its elitism and self-reference and establish a broader constituency in the republic of
taste. The British Townscape movement, which explicitly revived the picturesque as an
analytic of vernacular urban qualities (Cullen 1961), had influenced Venturi and Scott
Brown, who started out in the real sociology of suburb culture, studying with Herbert
Gans (1968; 1974). A variety of sociologically-based studies began to show that the
pleasures of modern architecture escaped most people, and that if such architecture
had any cultural meaning it was to identify the powers of commerce and government.
Although there have been numerous denunciations of the social disasters of modern
architecture, Philippe Boudon's study of the modification of Le Corbusier's worker's
suburb Pessac was significant in showing how popular taste had the power to deflate
the form-follows-function arguments by which architects avoided discussing their
aesthetic judgements (1972).
Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, in which educational attainments and

aesthetic discretion are shown not merely to distinguish classes but also to be
actually exchangeable in the real economy, did much to strengthen a social critique of
architecture (Bourdieu 1984; Bourdieu and Darbel 1990; Dovey 1999; Stevens 1998).
Bourdieu, however, draws back from describing culture merely as a calculus of class
and wealth. As much as his aim is to critique the given-ness of legitimated culture,
it is also to defend everyday concepts of enjoyment from an aesthetic concept of
pleasure as something demanding, rare, and difficult to obtain. In his scathing attack on
Jacques Derrida's reading of Kant's aesthetics, Bourdieu claims that aesthetics makes
the ascesis of scholarship the model for all human enjoyment. In architecture, these
kinds of sophisticated defences of popular taste led to critiques of architecture such
as Diane Ghirardo's collection Out of Site (1991). Earlier versions of this anti-aesthetic
tended to celebrate the spectacular [p. 132 ] and the excessive, the unrefined
aspects of popular taste, but this shifted in the 1990s to an interest in everydayness
and an admiration for the matter-of-factness and expediency of the vernacular built
environment, an interest that continues into the present (Harris and Berke 1997). While
claiming authority from Michel de Certeau (1984) and Henri Lefebvre (1991), this
everydayness has much to do with the rediscovery of the sociological aims of Team
10 and the Smithsons' interest in ugliness, much of which can be traced back to the

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first aestheticization of vernacular architecture in the picturesque (Lichtenstein and

Schregenberger 2001; Risselada and van den Heuvel 2005). At the beginning of the
twenty-first century, we could map this area of investigation between Rem Koolhaas's
celebration of the low quality, excess, and ephemerality of the commercial architecture
he calls junkspace (2002), and Atelier BowWow's careful mapping of what they call pet
architecture, the small-scale eccentric vernacular caused by the spatial parsimony of
Tokyo's land-tenure system (2002). Both constitute an outside to critique architectural
practice and its aesthetic norms, but to the extent that both have moved some distance
from a simple account of pleasure, they merge with the other kind of anti-aesthetic.
One of the general antimonies of aesthetic discourse is that of the facile and the
demanding. From Arthur Schopenhauer to Walter Benjamin, writers have claimed
that aesthetic feelings should be easy or difficult, common or rare, contemplative and
abstract or immediately haptic. If the first anti-aesthetic we have described champions
an account of pleasure as something natural and immediate, its opposite, an account
of the pleasure of architecture as something ascetic, abstract, and demanding to
experience, draws on a line of philosophical thinking from Kant and Schopenhauer
to Theodor Adorno. The high point of this strand of thinking in architecture is the
deconstruction of the 1980s, which modelled itself on post-structuralism in literature
and cultural studies but quickly took up the name of Derrida's philosophical mode
probably because of the awful pun involved. Sandra Kaji-O'Grady's chapter in this
section explains how much of the concept of form in deconstruction derives not from a
philosophy of language but from serialist accounts of form as procedure, taken from the
visual arts and music. Nevertheless, the language and literary side of post-structuralism
was also fundamental, especially around the concept of pleasure and excess, derived
by Bernard Tschumi from Roland Barthes, Derrida, and Georges Bataille, and we will
now turn to this important strand.
Transgression and Jouissance in

Architecture
Tschumi's influential article-cum-artwork of 1975, Advertisements for Architecture,
includes an image of Le Corbusier's modernist Villa Savoye in ruins, before its

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restoration, under the title Sensuality has been known to overcome even the most
rational of buildings followed by the subtext Architecture is the ultimate erotic act. Carry
it to excess and it will reveal both the traces of reason and the sensual experience of
space (1996, 533). Although the statement is intended to shock and confront, Tschumi
is not critiquing the Villa Savoye, nor anyone's opinion of it, but rather the existence
of the canon, its foundation in beauty, its projection into a future. Tschumi appears to
be transgressing the values of the discipline, but this is in fact a second order where
transgression becomes a value in itself. Bataille's surrealist anthropology of the 1930s
was being rediscovered at this time by Barthes and by Derrida (Bataille 1996; Derrida
1981; Caille 2001). Bataille's interest in the cultural anthropology of debasement and
sacrifice was theorized by Derrida as the possibility that the radical disruption of a
limited economy, say that of a literary genre or of norms of sexual conduct, could
explode into the general economy and make all existence equally unruly. When
Tschumi publishes an [p. 133 ] image of a person being thrown out of a window under
the title To really appreciate architecture you may even need to commit a murder, he
raises this same possibility where architectural ideas and concepts might develop
to a stage where they have no happy relation with the rest of life. Advertisements
for Architecture is a polemical theoretical text, but one can see its consequences in
Tschumi's Parc de la Villette project in Paris, where the brief of uses is disaggregated
and homogenized on a logical process bearing no relation to the actual buildings'
programmes. Similar ideas are at stake in Peter Eisenman's House VI: the conjugal bed
is split down the middle, and formal schemas from Le Corbusier and Gerrit Rietveld are
overlayed and inverted so that an upside-down green stair crosses a more usable red
one.
These architectural pleasures cannot be separated from the idea of valuing innovation
and progress in art, or, to a degree, the denigration of obsolete culture. One of the
principal problems of aesthetics is how to account for change in art, Hegel famously
thinking of it as a continual development towards its sublation into pure spirit. Since
Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx, it has been common to compare artworks not only
on their pleasingness or their aesthetic ideas but also on whether they progress
or retard the development of human spirit. Deconstruction was explicitly avant-
gardist, or neo-avantgardist another aspect of its punning name lay in references
to the constructivism of the early twentieth century, and Tschumi's form vocabulary

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is borrowed from Russian avantgardists in particular. Given this, another way to

understand the pleasures Tschumi supposes architecture can provide is to think of
them within the temporal structure of avant-gardism. The term is borrowed from military
parlance and means being ahead of a main force, confronting and testing the enemy
the better to prepare the main body of the army coming behind. Avant-gardists therefore
see and act differently from the rest of us, but this is because they are literally ahead
of us, already dealing with our immediate future. As John Rajchman has explained,
the unlikely pleasures of avantgarde architecture, finding a split down the middle of
your bed and so on, are synecdoches of future pleasures (1998). The unpopularity and
even the incomprehensibility of avantgarde architecture connote a future in which it will
be popular and in which our current feelings will be obsolete. The model here again
is the historical avant-gardes such as futurism and constructivism, variously rabidly
individualist or collectivist, that were anti-humanist in their belief that not only society but
also the body and the emotions could be constructed. Despite new names, the affect
this kind of anti-aesthetic supposes lies firmly within the history of the sublime. As Burke
said of the sublime, these difficult pleasures are nevertheless supposed to be enjoyed
in the present; as Nietzsche might have said, by those who are up to the demanding
task. Tschumi's concept of architectural pleasure draws heavily on Roland Barthes.
In The Pleasure of the Text (1975a), S/Z (1975b), and Sade/Fourier/Loyola (1997),
Barthes develops a concept of the distortion, transposition, and invention of language,
which he calls its systemacity, as the basis of the reader's pleasure in writerliness.
The idea is the familiar one of formal constraint, as in poetic scansion, but understood
structurally through Roman Jakobson's idea of poetry's systematic misalignment of the
axes of grammar and syntax in speech. In part, Barthes's project was a defence of the
literary avant-garde for example, the novels of his friend Alain Robbe-Grillet, which
are difficult to read as language and also on occasion describe sex crimes. Following
the one-time surrealist George Bataille's recuperation of the pornography of the Marquis
de Sade as literature, Barthes asks what it is that the reader enjoys in descriptions of
sexual torture, coprophilia, and so on. The answer is that the pleasure one expects of
narrative and sequence carries one through de Sade's interminable list of degrading
acts to a point where being the reader becomes [p. 134 ] unbearable, and what is
writerly and readerly are revealed as naked constructions of the text. Then there is a
moment of excess or refusal, and any self-possessed pleasure in reading collapses
into a kind of literary joy that parallels the orgasms pursued so systematically by de

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Sade's characters. In the literary pornography of de Sade and Bataille, a transgression

of language and structure follows out of the transgressive sexual acts their texts
represent, and the space of representation itself collapses. Barthes distinguished the
pleasure of the readerly text (his example is Balzac's Sarrazine) from the jouissance of
the writerly texts he admired.
Perhaps it is the difficulty of translating jouissance that left Tschumi's article with
the title The Pleasures of Architecture, but it is certainly this arc from syntactic
procedure to new affects that he and other architects such as Daniel Libeskind, Zaha
Hadid, Coop Himmelblau, and Eisenman sought. The Barthesian model of orgasmic
architecturalness is an extreme and even pompous claim for the enjoy-ability of
architecture, but to an extent, it is a hyperbole useful in describing a wider and slightly
more plausible claim: the idea that a libidinous attitude to space could act as a critique
of the sociopolitical basis of building. Much progressive architecture since the 1970s
has been anti-aesthetic in the sense of claiming to escape normative aesthetics into an
embodied critical state that is, nonetheless, embodied like an affect. For some decades
in the late twentieth century, the strongest term of approbation for an architectural work
such as this was critical, a term that followed Walter Benjamin's call to politicize the
aesthetic (1973 [1935]), and the Frankfurt School's idea of critical theory.
The Critical
The political side of critical architecture is the concept of ideology critique drawn from
Marxism, which suggests that we consistently naturalize and misunderstand the

interests that cause the world to be the way that it is. It should then be possible,
according to the Marxist position, to undo such misapprehensions by revealing the
interests at stake, so as to then reorganize socio-economic structures. But how is
this ideology critique possible by architectural means rather than by, say, journalism
or forensic accountancy? What is critical architecture at the level of affect? A certain
displacement or distance between the programme of uses and the architectural
programme might suffice, but this sounds like the older distinction of architecture over
building as a matter of value. What is new in so-called critical architecture is a reversal
of the values of affect. If architecture, under the model of a traditional aesthetics,

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pleases by placing the subject, a critical architecture misplaces one. The subject of the
architecture is separated from the subject of the building and that displacement, like
Barthes's critique of the assumed roles of reader and writer, collapses the self-evidence
of living in the world as it is. The model of a critical architecture is then well served
by a concept of pleasurable excess. Trained architectural consideration is always in
excess of need or of the uses imagined for a building and thus implies a critique of
the necessity of building per se, and this can be affecting. But to find those extreme
examples where we might be able to call this affect pleasure (or anti-pleasure) those
occasions where a building might actually be uncanny and disorienting, aid in seduction,
or cause compulsive shopping then we have something that looks like evidence for
the claim that architecture can spring from syntactic procedures to the general condition
of the economy or to the structure of thought since the enlightenment or to other much
larger extra-architectural matters.
Some of the most interesting and useful contemporary architectural theory arises out
of this strand of thought. This includes Anthony Vidler's early translations of Barthes's
[p. 135 ] ideas on de Sade into eighteenth-century archi tecture (1987) and his later
theorization of the psychopathologies of space (1992; 2000), Denis Hollier's writing
on Bataille (1989), Mark Wigley's engagement with the philo sophy of Derrida (1993),
and so on. As much as these works bear on aesthetic issues, they bear on the whole
condition of architecture, and we have already moved a long way beyond the remit of
this section. The last point we need to make, however, is that this moment of critical
architecture is over, at least in part because of the return of aesthetics in the simpler
older sense.
The Post-Critical
The so-called post-critical moment is a watershed across the humanities. In it, the
long line of licence between political critique, and the criticism practised in literature or
architecture, has finally snapped. In the most interesting overview, Ian Hunter (2006)
claims that all critical theory continued the persona of the metaphysician at the same
time as it critiqued metaphysics. The literary tropes and inaccessibility of Derrida are
in Hunter's view a continuation of seventeenth-century spiritual exercises based on
scholarly ascesis. There are few today who think that the exercise of architectural

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issues in a building commissioned and built under the normal conditions of capitalism
has any political potentiality. It is an often heard complaint that architects use theory
aesthetically, and in the terms of our present discussion this is the aesthetics of
demanding-ness. In these terms, the good architect will struggle to a personal epiphany,
and the difficulties of theory are a train parallel to design on which these personal
qualities can be evidenced. These are matters dealt with elsewhere in the Handbook
(see Chapter 2), but it is interesting that a crucial article by Robert Somol and Sarah
Whiting (2002) gives a role to Dave Hickey, the art critic who (along with others) has
made beauty hip again (Hickey 1997; 2009). This looks to us like a dialectic, a return
to an easier, lighter, and common sensical account of aesthetic feeling, with a history
going back to David Hume.
The eclipse of the ascesis of high theory and its etiolated concept of difficult and
sometimes painful architectural pleasures is perhaps no different to the earlier critique
of the dry authoritarianism of modernist formalism. Modernist architecture is on the
ascendant in most of the world, having achieved in late capitalism and commercial
branding the success that evaded its earlier socialist mode. It would be a pity if the
newfound popularity of modernism translated directly into a popularist account of
architectural aesthetics. The most interesting theory of architectural aesthetics today is
not theory at all; it is criticism. The collapse of the grander claims for critical architecture
has allowed a space for the return of practical criticism of architectural works, and
this, in time, will encourage reflection on how and why we judge some buildings more
pleasing than others.
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446201756.n8


Introduction - Architecture and Aesthetics

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Introduction - Architecture and Aesthetics

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The SAGE Handbook

Contributors: John Macarthur & Naomi Stead

Chapter 6: Introduction: Architecture and

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Historical Perspectives Kant

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is a commonality of the relation of sensation to feeling, which means that beauty is

[Architecture] is the art of presenting concepts of things which are

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Historical Perspectives the Twentieth

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Given the perceived dangers of essentialism, progressive discourse has tended to

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Jorge Otero-Pailos's chapter in this volume (Chapter 7) follows in this tradition as

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Architecture and the Visual Arts

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In Chapter 8, Sandra Kaji-O'Grady explains the architectural concept of form and

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of purposiveness without purpose, that gives terms to the claims of architecture's

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Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, in which educational attainments and

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first aestheticization of vernacular architecture in the picturesque (Lichtenstein and

Transgression and Jouissance in

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is borrowed from Russian avantgardists in particular. Given this, another way to

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Sade's characters. In the literary pornography of de Sade and Bataille, a transgression

Marxism, which suggests that we consistently naturalize and misunderstand the

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