Aesthetics of Architecture

Almost the whole course of the history of Western architectural theory has been under the influence of two works: Vitruvius's De architectura libri X (Ten Books on Architecture) and Alberti's De re aedificatoria (On Building). The first was dedicated to the Emperor Augustus; the second, drawn from the first, is a product of the Italian Renaissance. By a turn of fate, although the dates of their composition are 1500 years apart, the dates of their first printed publication are only one year apart — Alberti in 1485 and Vitruvius in 1486 — and they still hold their place together as foundational texts.

Vitruvius and Alberti, like most authors of architectural treatises, mainly consider the practical questions of design and construction, but they also pay attention to the aesthetic side of the subject. Vitruvius, in commenting on the parts of architecture, writes: "All these must be built with regard for durability (utilitas) and beauty (venustas) … Beauty is not gained except when the appearance of the work is pleasing and agreeable, and when its parts are, in respect of the principles of right symmetry, fully proportioned." (De architectura libri I, ii, 2)

Earlier he explains that symmetry rests on "a perfect agreement between the members of the work itself, and a relation between the various parts and the whole, according to a definite part chosen as a standard" (De architectura libri I, ii, 4). The extension of the classical view that the beauty of architecture rests on the unity of composition, set out by Alberti, fell on a path that gave rise to a new theme in philosophy — namely, the special theme of aesthetic evaluation. At the beginning of De re aedificatoria he writes: "It is the property and work of design to give to the building, and to all its parts, the right place, the necessary number, the proper proportion and a beautiful order, so that the whole structure acquires a fully proportioned shape. Nothing in this design is of a nature inseparable from matter … This much we know with certainty, that the design is composed of lines and angles which, with a firm and beautiful order, have been imagined beforehand in the mind, and that an artist has invented the necessary forms." (Alberti 1452)

Later writers, mainly in support — and at times in completion or rejection — turned to these conceptions of the nature of architecture and of the true bearer of beauty in it. For example, in the seventeenth century Sir Henry Wotton, the English theorist, restated the well-known rule drawn from Vitruvius (through Palladio and Alberti) by saying that the aim of architecture is "firmness, commodity and delight." The French architect and theorist Étienne-Louis Boullée repeated Alberti's claim that architecture is defined more by abstract design than by construction: "What is architecture? Can we follow Vitruvius, who says architecture is the art of building? In truth, no, for in this definition there is a great error. Vitruvius confuses cause with effect. To build, one must first conceive … This product of the mind, this process of creation, makes architecture." (Boullée 1790)

All of the above examples connect aesthetic evaluation to the objective qualities of form and composition; that is to say, the foundation of value, and the objects of valuation, are among the principal subjects of aesthetic theory. Thinking about architecture also raises other matters concerning its place among the arts and disciplines, the basic feature of our experience in designing and making, and the connection of the built environment to the other aspects of human existence — such as science, ethics and politics.

When the discussion reaches this point, we are dealing with a modern subject; for although theorising about architecture has its roots deep in Western culture, the writings cited up to this point contain at most only partial thoughts about normative and ontological aspects. Only with the development of aesthetics as an independent branch of academic philosophy — for which the way was opened in the eighteenth century — did conceptual sources rise to the measure of comprehensive philosophical accounts of architecture. One may even, in a sense, count the publication of Roger Scruton's The Aesthetics of Architecture as the start of this discussion, for until then philosophical discussion was limited and the information generally incomplete, whereas Scruton's work is a thorough investigation of the aesthetic experience of architecture, entering into parts of analytical and Continental philosophy.

One use of reading Scruton's work is the search for an answer to the question of how the critical experience of architecture takes place — that is, the following of the Kantian approach, by which the general form of the philosophical question is: "How is such-and-such possible?" Scruton openly praises Kant, and in particular values the account of aesthetic experience in the Critique of Judgment, although his view differs fundamentally from Kant's. Yet, before turning to it, and in order to weigh his work properly and the point at which he separates from a wholly Kantian aesthetics, we must return to antiquity and look at some of the principal pre-Kantian outlooks that have nourished thought.

In Book IX, Vitruvius, in giving an account of the geometric discoveries of Plato and Pythagoras, discusses the wisdom of antiquity. After setting forth the famous theorem of the Pythagorean triangle, he says: "When Pythagoras discovered this truth, he confidently held that the gods, the patrons of science and art, had bestowed it as a gift … and it is said that he sacrificed in thanksgiving for it." (1914 : 252) Although Vitruvius is concerned with the practical applications of the theorem, the reference to Pythagoras and the mysterious nature of his discovery bears witness to the general view that behind sensible forms there exists a transcendent abstract order expressible by number.

So when Vitruvius, Alberti, Palladio, Wotton and others speak of the importance of proportion, they prepare a metaphysical theory of regularity. From this view, beauty is the result of designing combinations in which the choice of suitable units or modules, and the carrying out of various operations (and modulations) upon them, gives rise to right symmetria and eurythmia. The principal Pythagorean view, to which Plato and the Neoplatonists after him gave a fresh form, is that empirical order is the result of applying abstract principles to a medium, or of expressing those principles through a medium — which, in our subject, is matter. In some cases the number of modules and the patterns of their combination is small and all combinations rest on these; in other cases the modules vary according to the nature of the subject. Each system rests on its own units and modulations. But these variations are of little weight against the wide and continuous agreement that the place of beauty is right composition, and that the rightness of composition follows a cosmic law.

Although Vitruvius was not printed until the fifteenth century, many manuscripts have come down to us from the Middle Ages, and from these manuscripts and other evidence it is clear that throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, theory and practice of design drew upon the Greco-Roman metaphysics of architecture. Here arises the question: if the source of the change of European architecture from Greek to Roman, and then to Gothic, was a philosophical change, what was that change? In its place, the medieval builders inherited a Christianised form of Platonic thought that treated symmetry and proportion as a divine ordainment. These views were also blended with elements of Scripture, and architecture became a powerful instrument for the symbolic reflection of transcendent reality. The use of geometry in the detail and the whole of the building, as before, dominated the work of design; but the growing tendency to natural forms and to the variety in them gradually enriched the forms of architecture.

Erwin Panofsky, in his Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951), put forward an interesting — and, of course, debatable — view about a general parallel between the rise of the great Gothic cathedrals and the rise of scholastic philosophical and theological treatises (such as Aquinas's Summa Theologiae); he held that both reached out for "totality, clarity and coherence." What the architectural works themselves attest is the integration of theology, ethics, nature and history in the plan, the elevation and the fittings of the great cathedrals — to interpret and to understand which calls for more (not less) than the power of perception and aesthetic enjoyment.

When we understand what assumptions the people of the ancient and medieval worlds held about the real value of form in architecture, it no longer surprises us that they identified beauty with a single quality and treated aesthetic experience as an encounter with properties whose nature is independent of our experience of them. Aquinas's definition of beauty (Summa Theologiae 1.39.8) — which involves wholeness (integritas), due proportion (proportio sive consonantia) and clarity (claritas) — is an important post-Platonic statement of this way of thinking, although his last condition brings in relativity, since "showing forth in clarity" is a relative attribute that depends on the capacity of the knower.

The thought of relativity led to the issue of the hierarchy of the knower's nature, which conditioned the experience of beauty — and also the extension of the very domain of beauty. The dispute between Claude Perrault and François Blondel, two French architects of the classical school, that took place exactly on these matters in the seventeenth century is well known. Perrault (1674), citing his own edition of Vitruvius (1673), questioned the prevailing view that the object of aesthetic experience is "the harmonic unity arising from right order and proportion." In its place he set up the categories of compelling (convaincantes) and arbitrary (arbitraires) beauty: the first kind is always pleasing; the second is subject to subjective factors such as custom, prior familiarity and chance correspondences. Hence he held that beauty is not purely objective, but the product of agreement between minds. Blondel (1675), in his answer to him, while discussing the importance of architecture as a bridge between painting and sculpture, defended the objectivity of harmonic unity in proportional orders. Boullée later strongly supported Blondel's view and expressed his certainty that proportion arises from the symmetry present in nature: "The fundamental law that governs the principles of architecture springs from order." (Boullée 1790)

This dispute was in part the result of misunderstanding, since Blondel — like Aquinas — accepted the relativity of the natural human faculties for the analysis of beauty (just as Boullée and Perrault acknowledged the objectivity of some properties of beauty). In any event, a new round in which philosophers and non-philosophers turned to non-objectivist theories of aesthetics began here. For example, Edmund Burke, in his work entitled A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), gives various psychological explanations of the qualities of architecture and of the reasons of our pleasure — and, among other things, claims that if we find Stonehenge "great", it is because, in seeing it, we imagine the difficulty of its erection.

The claim that philosophical aesthetics began with Kant, like every general claim, is open to question. But there is no doubt that the Critique of Judgment (1790), like the rest of Kant's great works, is one of the foundations of the definition of modern philosophy. Kant's main innovation in aesthetics, like in his theoretical and ethical thought, was the inversion of the relation between subject and object, and his guidance that the cure for sceptical hesitations is to attend to this matter: when it is the structure of the mind that conditions the realm of its experience and understanding, it is, in general, impossible for external realities to escape the perceiving mind. The possibility of being object (independently posited) for experience is among the conditions of anything that comes into being.

For Kant, judgments about beauty, while subjective, can be true or false. When I say "this arched gate is beautiful", my purpose is not to make a simple statement of liking; rather, beyond the principle of liking, I want to say that my liking is the result of a judgment about its quality. For Kant, whenever the free play of the imagination meets a thing that has form, this judgment is unavoidable. Form here means the workings of the mind's tendency to organisation. And since both this tendency and the imagination exist in every conscious soul, if I attend to the gate merely as a formed object and look at it free of every practical or scientific aim, an experience like mine — and the pleasure that goes with it — will arise for any other person placed in like conditions. In other words, the aesthetic judgment itself confirms the validity of a shared subjectivity.

From the standpoint of the older Vitruvian metaphysical rationalism, subjectivity does not change in nature by becoming shared, and so its hand falls short of what — by the credit of rationalism — the knowledge of beauty in architecture reaches. But that the Kantian view is incompatible with that kind of objectivism about form which Aquinas and Blondel had in mind is open to debate. Kant's general view too may not, in the discussion of aesthetic experience generally, and in architecture in particular, agree with the distinction he draws between "free" and "dependent" beauty.

The experience of sensible forms such as a rainbow, or smoke that rises in the form of a hat-feather — for the sake of looking at them, and without any attention to their scientific nature and practical function — are pure cases of judging free beauty. Opposed to them, and far later, stand the practical judgments about dependent beauty. The experience and the judgment in this latter case depend on how the nature of the thing in view is conceived. So when, by way of recognising its function, we reach the judgment that the "chapel" is beautiful, that beauty is dependent and that judgment is practical.

Even so, it is obvious that any theory of the aesthetic experience of architecture must accord with the fact that buildings are objects for use. Those whose judgments have always sprung from this truth — that the things they observe are usable structures designed for that very use, such as a house, a church or an airport — must not entirely empty their minds of this matter. Architecture is not abstract sculpture, and any theory of the nature of architecture and of our experience of it that seeks to impose such an illusion goes astray.

The result of Scruton's particular reading of Kant is the acceptance of the greater part of general theoretical and scientific philosophy and the adoption of the structure of Kant's aesthetic theory, with this great change: what was secondary in the Critique of Judgment becomes fundamental in the aesthetics of architecture. The experience of architecture is normally a judgment about the sensory perception of something recognised as a building, and its pleasantness too rests on this very recognition. On this basis Scruton can build a theory that mixes elements of intentionalism and other anti-empiricist sources. For example, from Hegel and Wittgenstein he takes the idea that the conditions of an individual's subjectivity, and consequently of his form-giving imagination, presuppose the prior presence of a community in which forms suitable to action have been current.

Although Scruton's book and his later articles are the most ordered and extensive conceptual studies of our subject, the most current written sources today listed under the heading of philosophy of architecture lie within what is broadly called "Continental" philosophy — that is, those branches of theoretical and political thought that branch out from existential phenomenology and structuralism, and include hermeneutics and post-structuralism, deconstruction and postmodernism. Some writers, leaning on essays such as Heidegger's "Building Dwelling Thinking" (1971), have tried to construct a kind of phenomenology corresponding to the experience of place and the vessel of dwelling. Yet, even if these efforts are powerful, they need a more general framework of the kind that Scruton suggests. Hence it may be better to take these two approaches as complementary rather than opposed.

The question of how buildings carry meaning — supposing they do at all — is, like the matter of the relation between architecture and broader cultural aspects, a shared theme of analytical and Continental writings. Both groups of writers — left, like Habermas, and right, especially Scruton and Watkin — feel justified in relating the theoretical and practical aspects of architecture to political ideas, following Ruskin. One of the principal targets of the most recent critiques is the utopian character of the modern movement, expressed in the writings and works of its leading representatives, such as Gropius and Le Corbusier. The latter's views on the nature of architecture and the basis of its aesthetic values somewhat recall the earlier Neoplatonic traditions of the pre-modern era. But beyond this, they express the view of the messianic architect who delivers the saving truths of a social-revolutionary plan — whose announcement the logic of history has required — to a world fallen into forgetfulness. Le Corbusier expresses it thus: "A great age has begun. A new spirit has arisen … if we challenge the past, we shall know that the time of styles has ended, and that a style belonging to our own age has come into being; and there is in truth a revolution at work." (1922)

If such views once had a legitimacy, the basic shortcomings of modernist architecture had long been at work, in secret, undermining its foundations; but the philosophical attack upon it took aim at its historicist and totalitarian assumptions. The collapse of Marxism-Leninism and the rise of fundamentalist relativism among left thinkers led to the appearance of weak, transient and contextualist thoughts about the role of the architectural element in social politics.

This recent change also forms one of the important layers of postmodernist thought. Although in this period a long file fell in behind the term "postmodernism", some of its earliest uses lay in the context of architectural criticism; and in this same context a line was drawn between two kinds of reaction to modernism. The first, associated with Derrida and Rorty, is defined by the claim that demonstrable rational truth does not exist; therefore the metaphysical belief in God and the foundationalist programmes of Cartesian and Kantian rationalism have all failed, and no "meta-narrative" remains. The demand for reasons is usually a cover for the exercise of power, and in the end imaginations and notions that cannot be demonstrated by any means are stamped as valid.

The second post-modern reaction has been called by Kenneth Frampton (1985) "critical regionalism." Like its fundamentalist counterpart, it too denies universal doctrines and policies — but not as a general assault on holistic reason; instead, it pays attention to local customs and ways and seeks vernacular solutions to issues defined according to their local and vernacular setting. This way of thinking about architecture has counterparts in moral and social philosophy, in the manner of the series of works begun by Alasdair MacIntyre with After Virtue (1985).

A final word: the work of thought about the nature of the built environment will no longer go forward without thought about the natural environment. The distinction between nature and human skill is a truly philosophical issue; but whatever definition this distinction may have, it is hard to deny a difference of kind and degree between what has been built and the landscape context in which the building stands. As the analytical and Continental traditions move closer together, and as the philosophers and aestheticians of both traditions come to understand each other's interests, much hope is held out that interest in the philosophy of architecture will grow and become part of a larger philosophy of environment — at the centre of which the metaphysics of balance will once again come to stand.

Translation of the entry "Architecture, Aesthetics of" from the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1998.