Christine Macy
Certainly, the siting of Ghost 13 was unforgettable—a foggy coastal landscape of windswept bluffs, roaring surf, and grazing sheep. And the community in the rustic circular barn felt warm and welcoming—over two hundred students, practitioners, and aficionados of architecture assembled to hear exceptional architects from across North America, Australia, and West Africa speak about their work. The enthusiasm and passion in the wind- and rain-battered barn was palpable. Who couldn’t help but feel this was an extraordinary gathering of people and ideas? Yet it was the images that were the focus of the event. Projected into the darkened space, slide after slide brought us to sites and places around the world, to witness and experience works of architecture through the eyes of their creators.
The pictures were beautiful. Well lit, well framed, well photographed, they showed houses made of simple or sumptuous materials in spectacular settings. The works of architecture transformed landscapes into sweeping panoramas or, just as effortlessly, focused attention on fragile ground covers or exposed rock outcroppings. The architecture modulated our imagined movements through these homes, making them (and us) feel measured and poetic. It arrested our gaze and transfixed our attention, focusing our awareness on texture, light, color, and material.
In reflecting on the Ghost 13 conference—and the works these exceptional architects shared with each other—I came to realize that a big part of this event was about beauty, created through the craft of well-designed houses. Ghost 13 spoke to the value of beauty in architecture.
When architecture critics write about beauty, they often turn to the evocation of experience—as I did in the first paragraphs of this essay. Yet the concept of beauty as a feeling is only one view of the matter, albeit one with a long tradition in the West. Back in the 1930s, Ananda Coomaraswamy, who was at that time a curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, wrote about a theory of art that he saw as being fundamental to all cultures since the beginning of human artistic activity. Setting aside religious art (which is a large portion of traditional artistic production), he investigated the art of everyday objects, such as a bowl, a weapon, an item of clothing, or a dwelling. Although such items are made to be used, they are also, according to Coomaraswamy, “philosophically linked to the inner life of a people” through their form or ornamentation.1 In most cultures in the world, objects are considered well made when they successfully express a concept or idea. In this worldview, art is thought of as “rhetoric,” or a kind of knowledge. In the West however, we call it aesthetic and think of art as a kind of feeling.2 The Greek word “aesthetic,” Coomaraswamy says, refers to a perception by the senses, especially by feeling. To identify our approach to art with feelings is to apply art only to the life of pleasure and to disconnect it from the active and contemplative lives.3 Rhetoric, on the other hand, implies that “what is said or made must be effective, and must work, or would not have been worth saying or making.”4
So when we in the West think of art as an aesthetic experience, rather than as a well made idea, we create a false opposition between beauty and utility. We separate art from its place at the center of culture, where everyone understands that it serves its purpose well, and we put it in a marginal position where beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In the history of humankind, a beautiful object has been something that is correctly and well-made, which expresses an idea and serves its purpose well.5 And in architectural history, well-designed buildings have always been repositories of meaning. And the title of the Ghost 13 conference—“Ideas in Things”—recognized this.
Craft is required for something to be correctly and well made. Coomaraswamy again:
Craft, of course, is not simply a matter of repeating a known formula. Each work of architecture has its causes, which include the requirement of the commission, the architectural idea, and the materials and the means employed. Just as each commission is unique, so too is each site, the materials employed, and, of course, the architectural idea that directs the creation of the work. In this, each designer has an opportunity to demonstrate his or her skill.
Private houses for well-to-do clients who are passionate about architecture have long provided an opportunity for architects to perfect their artistry in the design and detailing of space, materials, and assemblies. Shim-Sutcliffe’s Integral House in Toronto is an excellent example of the level of artistry achievable under favorable circumstances. In this work, they were given the opportunity to pursue the relationship between digital and handcraft in a house that explored the resonance between music and architecture. On a tighter budget, Olson Kundig conceived of the Chicken Point Cabin in northern Idaho as an “instrument” to be played through mechanical devices configured into the building—sharing, as Tom Fisher points out in his contribution to this volume, that the perfection of architectural craftsmanship can be equally found in dwellings made with modest means.8 In both cases, as Peter Buchanan reminds us, craft is skill that is matured through patient repetition and practice.9
The final aspect of art that Coomaraswamy considers is its appreciation. Of the two sorts of pleasure—what we experience through our senses and what we understand in a work—it is the latter we have in mind when we think of culture. The pleasure of comprehension does not infringe on…the pleasure of the senses, but includes a very great deal more than that.…Once we understand a work of art from all these points of view we can derive intellectual pleasure from the sight of something that has been “well and truly made.”10
The projects shown at Ghost 13: Ideas in Things were exceptional for the way they elicited both kinds of pleasure: sensory delight in color, composition, material, framing human activities and sites, and the intellectual pleasure of seeing architectural ideas realized with exceptional craft and artistry. The conference, and this publication, is an opportunity to reflect on the ideas that inform well-made things, and to critically engage in a discussion of the purpose and craft that goes into the making of a timeless architecture.
1 Ananda Coomaraswamy, “A Figure of Speech or a Figure of Thought?” in Coomaraswamy, Vol. 1, Traditional Art and Symbolism, Selected Papers, ed. Roger Lipsey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Bollingen Series, 1977), 13.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 14.
5 Ibid., 27.
6 Coomaraswamy, “The Philosophy of Medieval and Oriental Art,” in Coomaraswamy, Vol. 1, ed. Lipsey, 49.
7 Ibid., 49–50.
8 Thomas Fisher, “Seeing the World Whole,” in this volume, 13–20.
9 Peter Buchanan, “Construction and Composition, Concept versus Craft,” in this volume, 185–93.
10 Coomaraswamy, “The Philosophy of Medieval and Oriental Art,” 62–63.