A quick definition of architecture is that it is the art of building. So understood, the concept includes vernacular, indigenous, and even anonymous construction. In this extended sense, architecture is where we live and work. However, within this broad territory, a concept of architecture has evolved in which it is considered not merely a name for whatever is built for shelter and comfort, but as one of the fine arts. As such, it may be treated in much the same way as other fine arts, such as painting and music. So viewed, the designers of works of architecture—from Andrea Palladio to Frank Gehry—are documented and studied in much the way that great painters are studied. Alternatively, we can view architecture as works of unique creation, emphasizing its differences with other forms of art.
The two perspectives just described explain why there has been a constant debate about whether—given the practical demands of architecture—this art form can ever be as “pure” as painting and music supposedly are. Roger Scruton argues that, even though apparently compromised by its merely utilitarian functions, certain aesthetic constraints are still imposed on architecture. For instance, architecture, Scruton argues, cannot be personally expressive in the way that poems or paintings can. In stating his case, Scruton discusses a famous theory of expression by R. G. Collingwood, which can be found in Part V on Literature (Chapter 50).
Edward Winters considers another view of Scruton’s, one having to do with architecture as a public art and its implications for the question of whether or not architecture is even an art form in the first place. Beginning with this, Winters offers his own analysis of a vernacular architecture, an overlooked place of comfort in the everyday world, namely bars—what goes on in neighborhood bars and why bars are one example of popular places that are, nevertheless, usually excluded from aesthetic analysis.
In the growing urban centers, privileged classes invented new forms of ostentatious expression. Partly as a reaction to this excess, modern architecture embraced a policy of severe economy. Its minimalist “look” was also connected with an important paradigm for a new form of architectural thinking: the machine. One of the most conspicuous effects of the new architectural thinking was the prohibition against ornamentation in buildings. The decorative/anti-decorative argument would eventually become one of the central issues in the modernist/postmodernist debate about the arts.
One of the early proponents of a minimalist or modern approach to building was the Viennese architect Adolf Loos. In his famous essay, “Ornament and Crime,” Loos writes about the relationship between the criminal and tattooing, which Loos sees as a form of decadent bodily ornament. Likewise—so the comparison goes—ornamentation in architecture has immoral qualities. Thus, Loos arrives at his prescription to remove ornamentation from objects in daily use, including buildings.
Years later, Loos’ point of view influenced the work of the architect Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), who, in 1923, published his work, Towards a New Architecture. In that book, he set forth with revolutionary zeal “the lessons of the machine,” which entailed the emphasis of pure forms in simple geometrical relationships. “The house is a machine for living in,” Corbusier announced. Turning away from architectural “styles” such as the gothic or baroque, he found inspiration instead, not only in classical projects such as the Athenian Parthenon, but in the unadorned silos and grain elevators of the American landscape. And he paid close attention to the forms of modern transportation—steamships, airplanes, and automobiles.
In the West, through the 1950s, it was simply assumed that a modernist philosophy of architecture was a settled matter. In 1966, however, Robert Venturi, a Philadelphia architect, initiated one of many challenges to modernist architectural theory in his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Venturi saw decoration on building as a form of communication and as one way to bring architecture back to its contextual, popular, and historical roots. For his own “lessons” Venturi looked, not only to traditional building in the cathedrals and palaces of Europe, but in the more familiar places of Las Vegas and Main Street, USA. The selection in this book is written by Venturi, along with architect Denise Scott Brown.
Another facet of the postmodernist liberation of architecture from the strictures of high modernism involves what is termed “deconstruction.” Christopher Norris’s discussion with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida helps to explain what a “deconstructive reading” of architecture might be, as illustrated by projects of provocative architects such as Peter Eisenman. In his conversation with Norris, Derrida gives an excellent account of how deconstructive strategies work.
Jenefer Robinson’s essay, “How to Experience Architecture,” is a response both to architectural modernism, such as that of Le Corbusier, and to the postmodernism of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. The problem with each is that they are a form of “ocularcentrism,” an architecture based primarily on seeing—a privileging of the eye. On Robinson’s view architecture should be experienced by moving through and around a work so that the body as a whole experiences the emotional feelings the architecture induces.
It has been said that museums are the new cathedrals—that the best commissions, the great creative opportunities for architects are museums, with special emphasis on art museums. Larry Shiner discusses a major issue in the aesthetics of architecture that rests on the differences between museums that are spectacles but that threaten to overwhelm the art they contain, and museums that are deferential to the arts and so are not competitive with them.
There is an old saying, arguably false, that there is no such thing as paper architecture. That quip means at least that unbuilt buildings, that is those in plan only, for example, should not count as architecture for purposes of criticism or evaluation. Jeanette Bicknell, provoking our awareness, argues for a much more inclusive domain of architecture, as she proposes that buildings that once existed but that are no longer should be discussed and appreciated by aestheticians and art historians alongside buildings that still exist.
Hina Jamelle is an architect with practices in Shanghai and New York City. In her essay, she relates digital techniques in architecture to a key aesthetic or sensuous aspect of architecture, which she calls the new elegance. The introduction of digital technology into architecture allows for practical and efficient feedback among various constituents of an architectural project, replacing overwhelming complexity with elegant refinement.