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Aesthetic Theory and Interior Design Pedagogy
Introduction
Interior design pedagogy and aesthetics have multifaceted relationships. Among designers and educators one can find diversity of responses to the significance of aesthetics in the practice and teaching of interior design. The curricula in interior design and architecture programs rarely, if ever, address the subject of aesthetics. In fact, the discourse among interior design educators has been dominated by commentary on almost every aspect of design except aesthetics. While the collective message that can be found in interior design discourse is that a beautiful appearance of an interior setting is a desired quality, the linkage of interior design with the pursuit of beauty and attractiveness is sometimes misinterpreted by critics as lacking intellectual depth.
Most noteworthy interior spaces are judged by their capacity to produce an aesthetic experience; however, the pedagogy of most design programs is not guided or generated through a process that is engaged with aesthetic features or visual thinking. It seems that the artistic features of interior design are often undermined in the current discourse in favor of the more rational, pragmatic, economic obligations of the profession, and consequently professionals in the field rarely address the multifaceted relationships between interior design pedagogy and aesthetics. Consequently, interior design is predominantly discussed in terms of ethics (protecting client health, safety, and welfare) and functional considerations of content or activity, and much less in terms of its image, composition, or visual effect.
The current discourse on interior design education is “far from harmonious” but “the diversity of voices is a registration of interior design's struggle to emerge as a nonhomogeneous discipline and practice” (Preston 2012).
According to some researchers and professional practitioners interior design education is in a state of identity crisis or at a crossroads. Mitchell and Rudner, for example, claim that interior design is disadvantaged by the general perception that it is an inferior design profession to architectural practice (Mitchell and Rudner 2007). This perception is propagated by “the proliferation of numerous, popular television programs which are labeled as ‘interior design,’ but are in fact glorified exercises in decorating.” Other critics argue that in the process of professionalizing interior design and the efforts to gain recognition as a positivistic, pragmatic, and knowledge-based occupation, interior design education lost its clarity (Weigand and Harwood 2007).
The authors of this essay are aware of the claims of autonomy that govern the disciplines of architecture and interior design dialogue. However, we wish to address design aesthetic theory by bridging the interior and the exterior and diminishing the place where the interior and the exterior begin or end. In the discussion about aesthetics, interior design and architecture should be treated as a continuous design discipline that takes a unique place among the arts because it has a distinctive place by virtue of being useful. We believe that anyone involved in the act of design can benefit from the discourse about the physical form and its impact on the individual and society at large. Thus this essay adds another perspective to the disordered discussion about interior design pedagogy in an attempt to offer its audience a broader point of view. It is our opinion that aesthetic theory is essential to interior design education. This is true not because aesthetics needs to prescribe rules and norms for guiding budding designers, but rather because interior design and architecture need aesthetic education to provide capacity for reflection, which the professions are hardly able to attain on their own (Adorno 1977).
Background
Formal education in interior design began in the late 19th/early 20th century. Before that time, interior designers had little or no formal training, if any; they acquired the principles of interior decoration through apprenticeship or a training in the fine arts (Beecher 2012). However, the field transformed itself within few generations from a vocation focused on the arrangement of home furnishings and decoration into a practical profession that takes on numerous branches of contemporary culture. Correspondingly, interior design education shifted over a short time from a residential emphasis to new territories with the intention of expanding student expertise for designing environments such as commercial spaces, healthcare facilities, workplaces, and hospitality venues. Throughout the evolutionary process, the pedagogy in interior design programs embraced more technical content and higher professional standards to meet consumers' and employers' expectations and satisfy the accreditation requirements of the Council for Interior Design Accreditation (CIDA).
Interior design educational programs have been traditionally situated in one of the following: (1) an art department in connection with art practice; (2) home economics schools which evolved into human ecology programs; or (3) within established architectural programs (Beecher 2012). Interior design programs in art schools emphasize artistic expression and interior decoration. Grounded in human behavior, home economics-based programs focus on domestic science and consumers of design (Hildebrandt 2010). Architecture-allied interior design programs center on common denominators between the discipline and provide foundation studios and basic courses attempting to view the professions as a continuum rather than distinct occupations (Beecher 2012). Most CIDA-accredited interior design programs are taught in one of these three settings. Their focus may vary according to each setting, but overall the pedagogical content exhibits similarities because of CIDA's strict accreditation guidelines.
Historically interior design was rooted in domesticity and homemaking, decoration, upholstery, and home economics. The profession's relation to interior decoration is well known. So are its efforts to transform itself into a science-based profession in order to undo the historical associations with a perceived feminine, superficial, and mimetic discipline. Thus “in a body of public and anecdotal discussions that range from scorn and cautiously couched historical respect to positions for and against ‘curtains and cushions', the discipline of interior design expresses overall desire to confront and/or transcend the cultural burden and image generated by this heritage” (Preston 2012). Beecher notes that the pedagogy of interior design has lately been preoccupied with “space planning” – the organization of areas based on functional factors rather than formal considerations – and concern with the impact of the built environment on human behavior from an evidence-based perspective (Beecher 2012). Current education of interior designers promotes “the emphasis on determining users' functional needs,” which “has led to the development of a specific design methodology in which elements like light and color are employed as theoretical and technical tools to enhance the comfort, functionality, and aesthetics of lived spaces” (Beecher 2012).
According to the National Council for Interior Design Qualification (NCIDQ), interior design is:
A multi-faceted profession in which creative and technical solutions are applied within a structure to achieve a built interior environment. These solutions are functional, enhance the quality of life and culture of the occupants and are aesthetically attractive.
This definition was endorsed by CIDA, the accrediting body for interior design education (Weaver 2010). Thus, nurturing students' ability to produce functional and aesthetically attractive interior environments is a central goal of interior design education. However, little discussion has taken place on the pedagogy of aesthetics in interior design education. For instance according to CIDA's professional standards, which outline the expectations for interior design programs and learning outcomes, aesthetics is explicitly mentioned in only one standard, standard 10, labeled “Color”:
Student Learning Expectations
Student work demonstrates understanding of:
- color principles, theories, and systems.
- the interaction of color with materials, texture, light, form and the impact on interior environments.
Students:
As an example of multiple purposes, aesthetics is listed in the footnote once. This should not come as a surprise because the accreditation process is predisposed to the measurable aspects of a program. Aesthetics may appear in the column of the immeasurable, to use one of the famous distinctions of Louis Kahn in reference to the measurable act of design in contrast to the feelings and the thoughts that a great building elicits (Twombly 2003). Ironically, during the accreditation team visit, the immeasurable aesthetics of student work plays a significant role in the overall impression of the quality of a reviewed program and may determine whether it is accredited.
In her analysis of interior design education, Preston points to four conditions that influence the current teaching of interior design. First, the “mixture of unequal and varying portions of embarrassment over and embracement of its origins in the decorative arts.” Second is “design's conception as an applied practice and commercial enterprise.” Third is the unsettled relation to architecture, and fourth, “interior design's engagement with interiority, spatial experience, performance, and temporal inhabitation” (Preston 2012). Detailed discussion of these conditions is beyond the scope of this essay; however, it is apparent that interior design education interior design education needs to address the relationships between the act of design, its subsequent outcomes, and their aesthetic influence on the individual and the collective political impact on society.
Aesthetic Theory and the Design Disciplines
In architecture and interior design, aesthetics occupies a unique position compared to painting, sculpture, and other visual arts. Because of the characteristics of architecture, which blends artistic and practical purposes, the discussion of aesthetics in architecture cannot be debated completely separately from its purpose, function, performance, or usage (Hillier 1996; Lagueux 2004). This is especially true in the discourse about interior spaces where the spatial experience links the space's purpose with its aesthetic character. Any definition of aesthetics as it pertains to interior design needs to encompass (1) the design process and product (i.e., outcome), (2) formal and symbolic aesthetics, and (3) the objective nature of the interior space itself and the subjective nature of people's emotions and perceptions (Cho 2011).
The dictionary definition of aesthetics includes two meanings: “(a) a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, especially in art; and (b) the branch of philosophy that deals with the principles of beauty and artistic taste” (OED 2003). The two parts of the definition link the arts and philosophy as the arenas in which discussions of aesthetics occur. In the arts, the discussion revolves around appreciation of art as it relates to the psychological aspects of aesthetics, specifically the nature of art that arouses aesthetically pleasing responses and the principles of aesthetics.
In philosophy, the discussion of aesthetics involves how to define art. To illustrate, the nature of art comprises three broad subjects: (1) the intention of art (how to define a work as art), (2) standards of taste (whether universality exists in aesthetic judgment), and (3) the nature of aesthetic judgment (whether aesthetic judgment is a matter of taste or a cognitive function) (Wartenberg 2007). Aesthetic theory is a relatively recent branch of philosophy which lacks a clear definition, and its contemporary reach is difficult to delineate. Harrington notes:
Deriving from the Greek word for “perception” – aesthesis – aesthetics refers to the study of pleasure in perception. Although some of its meanings have changed since its first appearance in eighteenth century Enlightenment thought, aesthetics remains the key term today for that branch of philosophical inquiry that is concerned with the grounds for experience of pleasure in sensory objects. In particular, aesthetics refers to the grounds for intersubjectively valid “judgements of taste” about sensory objects.
The discussion of the nature and appreciation of beauty treats the psychological aspect of aesthetics, that is, whether a particular form arouses a certain aesthetic response and experience. The psychological aspect of aesthetics has been treated in environmental psychology using empirical research methods. Researchers in environmental psychology have explored the relationship between the environment and human response (Carlson 2006). Jon Lang discusses three types of aesthetics – sensory, formal, and symbolic aesthetics – based on Santayana's three values in aesthetics – sensory values, formal values, and expressions or associational values. Formal aesthetics is concerned with “the appreciation of shapes and structures of the environment” (Lang 1987), and symbolic aesthetics deals with “the associational meaning of the patterns of the environment that give people pleasure” (Lang 1987).
The desire for beauty in architecture is fundamentally rooted in human experience from the dawn of history (Pallasmaa 2010). In De Architectura (On Architecture), the only noteworthy survivor of architectural theory and practice from the ancient world, Marcus Vitruvius Pollio stresses the significance of aesthetics as one of the essential qualities of architecture. Although the precise date of the publication is unknown, it was probably written during the second decade of the first century bc, and has influenced two millennia of architectural theory and practice. Vitruvius defined “beauty” (venustas) along with firmness (firmitas) and utility (utilitas) as the three requirements for architecture:
And all these buildings must be executed in such a way as to take account of durability, utility and beauty. Durability will be catered for when the foundations have been sunk down to solid ground and the building materials carefully selected from the available sources without cutting corners; the requirements of utility will be satisfied when the organization of the spaces is correct, with no obstacles to their use, and they are suitably and conveniently oriented as each type requires. Beauty will be achieved when the appearance of the building is pleasing and elegant and the commensurability of its components is correctly related to the system of modules.
Alberti noted that “every aspect of building, if you think of it rightly, is born of necessity, nourished by convenience, dignified by use; and only in the end is pleasure provided for, while pleasure itself never fails to shun every excess” (Alberti [1486] 1988). It is one of the earliest testaments to the uneasy balance of the forces that act in architecture and by extension in interior design. In his classic text The Architecture of Humanism, Geoffrey Scott writes about the difficulty of studying the art of architecture in comparison to the science and history of architecture, claiming that the difficulty stems from a lack of agreement about the concept of the beautiful:
Too many definitions of architectural beauty have proved their case, enjoyed their vogue, provoked their opposition, and left upon the vocabulary of art their legacy of prejudice, ridicule, and confusion…Not only do we inherit the wreckage of past controversies, but those controversies themselves are clouded with the dust of more heroic combats, and loud with the battle-cries of poetry and morals, philosophy, politics, and science.
To the Greek philosophers the product of architecture was perceived as a work of art, which permitted them to think that, outside in the macrocosmos, an objective criterion of the “beautiful” exists. But even then the “beautiful” was never defined purely and simply by the subjective pleasure it produces. The idea of the “beautiful” was generally associated with the need to measure and apply the rules of proportion as a device or as the reflection of an order external to the human being. Socrates talked about the harmony that characterizes the work of artists and architects, and several centuries later Alberti wrote in response “We should follow Socrates' advice, that something that can only be altered for the worse can be held to be perfect,” a theme he repeats: “Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within the body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse” (Alberti [1486] 1988: bk. 6, ch. 2).
The proposition according to which the architect should search for harmony did not disappear in modern aesthetics. But this harmony was no longer thought of as based on objective criteria. The “beautiful” was no longer central because the work of architecture was intrinsically beautiful but rather because it provided a certain type of pleasure that could be coined as beautiful (Ferry 1993). The break with antiquity with regard to the “beautiful” may be traced to the treatise published in 1750 by the Prussian rationalist philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who is credited with the creation of the term “aesthetics.” Baumgarten defined beauty as the sensation of pleasure that accrues from arrangements of forms in harmony with reason and logic. He used the term “aesthetica” as an analogue to “logica,” maintaining that while logic seeks to establish the principles that should govern the implementation of reason, aesthetics search for the principles that should govern judgments of taste (Harries 1997). The analogy implies that the pleasure we take from viewing a painting is similar to the enjoyment we experience when smelling a rose. In other words, Baumgarten maintained that taste resembles reason.
The concept of aesthetics is central to The Critique of Judgment by Immanuel Kant, arguably the most influential philosopher of the modern era. Published in 1790, it is the last of his three philosophical treatises. Although architecture was not essential to Kant's exposition in his aesthetic theory, his seminal book influenced the philosophical discipline of aesthetics and consequently affected the theoretical architectural debate in the next two centuries. In the first part of the text, Kant probes into the subjective act of perceiving something as beautiful. He contends that beauty is independent of any concept one may associate with the things one judges to be beautiful (Mitrovic 2011). “Kant argues that aesthetic judgments neither communicate any information about the physical properties or causes of their object, nor express any judgment about the moral worth or practical utility of their object. They express purely the pleasure of the spectator on apprehending the object” (Harrington 2004). Kant excludes any concept of function from the judgment of beauty and introduces his famous hypothesis that our pleasure in beauty is due to the “free play” of the cognitive powers of imagination and understanding. In other words, beauty is not an “objective” property of a beautiful thing. Rather, the judgment of beauty is subjective; it is inherent in the person's cognitive mental processes, or is in the mind of the beholder, as David Hume claimed in 1777. Andrew Ballantyne offers the following explanation:
Despite the passing of generations since that realization, it has not passed into common sense, so we still have not developed a habit of saying “that object produces in me a feeling of beauty.” What we still say is: “that object is beautiful,” even though we know it's only a manner of speaking. This isn't to say that architecture is altogether personal without objectivity, because within any given culture we can expect a degree of consensus in the responses, and one can design with expectation that some gesture will be recognized – there is an element of unpredictability involved, but we can set in place conditions that favor an appropriate response.
Kant's definition of architecture and its aesthetic potential appears in the following passage:
[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 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.
Readers of this statement often think that Kant claims that architecture cannot be art due to its usefulness. However, Kant maintains that architecture has a place in his systems of the arts despite its utility. Accordingly, we may evaluate how well a building performs its function, which in the judgment of fine arts will be irrelevant because it will be a judgment of reason and not an aesthetic judgment. Richard Hill explained why Kant wished to separate his theory of aesthetic experience from our ordinary pleasure of objects. He writes:
The explanation lies in his desire to explain how aesthetic judgements can arise from subjective experience and yet have objective validity. He wished to account for the fact that the pleasures of art can involve something more than an assertion of a personal taste. This led him to the thought that if aesthetic judgements are to have objective validity they must be universally held by humans. Therefore they cannot be dependent on the immediate feelings of pleasure we have when confronted with objects. These by definition are individual, of “private validity” only. Then he makes the suggestion that aesthetic satisfaction is based on a universal feature of the mind, one that we all possess by virtue of the fact that we are able to understand the world at all.
In spite of Kant's short and scattered discussion of architecture, his contribution to the philosophy of architecture played a significant role, transforming it from a discipline focused on the Vitruvian values of beauty and utility to a post-Vitruvian discipline concerned with understanding architecture's expressive dimension. Kant's theory opened the door to the conception of architecture as expressing ideas. While he assumed that architecture must express moral ideas, Kant opened the door to scholars who argued that architecture should express ideas of its own function (Schelling), ideas of the nature of physical forces and its own construction (Schopenhauer), or metaphysical ideas (Hegel) (Guyer 2011).
Shifting Norms of Aesthetic Judgment
Aesthetic judgment in general and of interior design in particular is never fixed forever. Change is the norm. With the evolution of modernism in the late 19th century and the manifestation of the modern in architecture, the theory of aesthetics shifted radically. Modern architectural thinkers repudiated traditional restrictions and decoration and reconceptualized space-time following the logic of function. “Modernist architecture embodied modern modes of living, thinking, and production based on rationality, efficiency, calculation, and the obsession with novelty and abstraction” (Lu 2012).
The modern aesthetics of architecture claimed a basis in psychology that led to the stipulation for an empirical proof, prescriptions for practice, and normative concepts of form. Colin Rowe maintained that the emphasis on “objectivity” led architects to argue that their architecture was founded on facts, data, analysis, programs, function, and other scientific, measurable precepts (Rowe 1994). In his book The Architecture of Good Intentions, Rowe notes:
From Mies van der Rohe there follows possibly the most succinct statement of what – until not very long ago – was to be considered modern architecture's avowed aim: Essentially our task is to free the practice of building from the control of aesthetic speculators and restore it to what it should exclusively be: building.
(Rowe 1994)
Modern architects' refusal to recognize the role of individuality and subjective will in the design process became the dominant attitude in architectural discourse. The popular mantra pursued by architects in Europe and America was “form follows function,” which devalued the image of buildings unless they carried a strong social and political mission or a “utilitarian task” (Reisner 2010).
Architecture and design schools were not unaffected by the new attitudes toward aesthetics. By the late 1920s, modernism began to shape architectural education in the US through the influential pedagogical model of the Bauhaus. Due to turbulent political times in Germany the school existed for only few years (1919–1933), yet its influence on design education is still felt in design schools around the world. It was predicated on a radical approach to design pedagogy which embraced “learning by doing,” collaboration, formal and technical experimentation, and social responsibility (Simon 2012). When the Nazis disbanded the Bauhaus, many of the school's teachers emigrated to the US and relocated to American design schools. The influence of the Bauhaus masters – Josef Albers, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and László Moholy-Nagy, and their collaborators – on design education in North America cannot be overstated. In a few years their ideas revolutionized the design pedagogy in design schools. In particular, there was the course on “Basic Design,” which consisted of two hours of lectures six days a week, plus 20 hours a week in the workshop, where students using their hands and power tools undertook a series of two- and three-dimensional exercises investigating form, space, and perception with variety of materials and media, endorsing the concept of a unified beginning for students in all fields of design (Simon 2012).
In due course, the ideological attitudes of the founders of the canonical modern history of the mid-20th century such as Sigfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner lost credibility, and by the 1980s new approaches to architectural aesthetics such as postmodernism surfaced. With the publication of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown “became the most prominent debunkers of the formalist aesthetics of modernism by explaining what architects could learn from the popular built environment” (Macarthur and Stead 2012). The thirst for philosophy or some form of cerebral authority changed aesthetic discourse toward content and meaning rather than pure aesthetics in the 1980s. The tendency for architectural theory at the end of the 1980s to open itself to other disciplines such as philosophy, literature, and gender studies was not unique to architecture. Other disciplines in the humanities were looking to cultural studies and literary criticism for their theoretical models. “But in order for architecture to take its place among other humanities disciplines, it had to be reconceived as a kind of discursive, text-based practice itself” (Allen 2012). Two strains of architectural theory were predominantly influential on academic practice in this period: first, the critical project, which consisted of a fusion of “Marxian critical theory and post-structuralism with architectural modernism” (Gage 2011). Second, the introduction of the computer as a design tool, which “allowed designers to organize large bodies of data in the forms of various new diagrams and mapping; its graphic capabilities gave designers access to new illustrative and collage tools, and provided a means of producing entirely new families of form” (Gage 2011).
Interior design education was influenced by these developments to a lesser degree. However, it is obvious that the rapid technological and social changes since the 1990s – the speed of information exchange, and the use of creative technologies – presents new, complex challenges to the design disciplines' practice and education.
A Research Study on the Pedagogy of Aesthetics in the Design Studio
In order to explore the pedagogy of aesthetics in the design studio, a research study was conducted in three design studios in architectural and interior design programs at a major university in the US (Cho 2011). The primary objective of the study was to examine how aesthetics (the discussion of beauty) is taught in design studios and how instructors and students understand the current status of aesthetic education. Three design studios were selected as research sites based on two criteria: those taught by professors “(a) who received at least one teaching award from their respective university,” and “(b) who were recommended by each school's associate dean/department chair for their ability to help students produce design outcomes with high aesthetic qualities” (Cho 2011). Each of the three studios was observed once a week throughout one academic semester. Data garnered from these observations were supplemented with insights gained from interviews with each of the three studio professors and 40 of the students. The three studios included one undergraduate interior design, senior-level, CIDA-accredited studio, one elective graduate architecture studio, and one graduate architecture core studio, all in NAAB-accredited programs. Students voluntarily participated in the research.
Photographs of student work were taken regularly and used to document the design evolution and outcomes. Discussions that took place during desk critiques between each student and the instructor were audio-recorded. In addition, all lectures, class discussions, and reviews done during the semester-long study were audio-recorded. Students were interviewed once in the middle of the semester to explore their perceptions of aesthetics, and at the end of the semester they completed an open-ended questionnaire where they were asked to reflect on their studio experience. Interviews with the instructors focused on each person's teaching philosophy, strategies, and understanding of aesthetics. Interviews were conducted primarily in a semi-structured format with all the data from the recordings transcribed. The verbal transcriptions and visual materials were analyzed qualitatively using a grounded theory method.
According to Glaser and Strauss, a grounded theory method is “the discovery of theory from data – systematically obtained and analyzed in social research” (Glaser and Strauss 1967) and is “a qualitative research method that uses a systematic set of procedures to develop an inductively derived grounded theory about a phenomenon” (Strauss and Corbin 1990). Further, a grounded theory method is seen as appropriate when no theory exists to be tested or when a theory exists, but is too abstract to be tested (Suddaby 2006).
As shown by the discussion at the beginning of this essay, there is very little information, dialogue, or debate to be found about aesthetic education in design studios in the literature. Therefore, the grounded theory method was determined to be an appropriate approach for this study since no theory exists regarding the pedagogy of aesthetics (Cho 2011). It was also determined that the use of multiple data-collection tools (i.e., observations, student interviews, instructor interviews, and visual material reviews) would provide important insights that would help in understanding if, when, and how aesthetic education was integrated into each studio.
The design studio is central to interior design and architecture programs. One-third to one-half of the required professional coursework for interior design and architecture students takes place in the studio. The essence of the studio experience is the development of design solutions under criticism. It follows the dictum of Aristotle, who maintained that “What we have to learn to do we learn by doing.” In the studio setting and during the learning process, the instructor typically poses a problem and then works individually by coaching the students as they develop their design solutions. The inherent problem in the coaching process is that the instructor cannot make the solution clear because there is no single-track agenda and because there are no right answers. The student must put different things together and bring new ideas into being while dealing in the process with many variables and constraints.
Aesthetics is part of the dialogue that takes place between the instructor and the student as the design process ensues. The process makes use of words and actions. While the instructor is explaining and demonstrating, the student is listening and imitating (Schon 1987). The studio setting enables students to experiment in a safe place and it is where students are expected to synthesize the information they learned in previous architectural history, basic design, technology, or studio courses (Anthony 1991; Demirbas and Demirkan 2003). The design studio is a world with its own culture, language, norms, and rituals.
Among other findings, in this study Cho found that the design studio does provide students with an environment where they can apply aspects of aesthetics that complement their studies in other courses, such as history of interior design or architecture, visual design, photography, drawing, or design communication. However, both students and instructors noted that there was very little actual discussion of aesthetics in the design studio. The informants listed possible reasons for this conundrum, pointing to the negative connotations associated with the term “aesthetics,” insufficient time, and the difficulties of discussing aesthetics in the context of the studio. Students and instructors stated that placing too much emphasis on aesthetics would take too much time at the expense of other important considerations such as use, social aspects, and/or human behavioral aspects. In addition, the instructors stated that the course content required by the accrediting bodies did not provide enough room for dedicated discussion of aesthetics in the curriculum, and concern was expressed that the term “aesthetics” was unclear – noting that “beauty is in the eye of beholder.” Perhaps this lack of attention to the topic of aesthetics can be explained by the point of view that aesthetically pleasing design solutions are the result of an innate ability rather than something that can be taught.
These findings support Scott's argument that the difficulty in studying the art of architecture derives from the lack of an agreement on what constitutes beauty (Scott 1924). These findings also reconfirm the tendency in architecture to avoid discussions about subjective aspects of architecture such as aesthetics and focus, rather, on more objective aspects such as utility and function (Rowe 1994).
It seems that the assumption inherent in most design programs is that aesthetics is a contentious subject which should be avoided in design discourse and that students can absorb the ideas of form and beauty by osmosis or through the creative process of the studio environment. Consequently student work in the studio is predominantly discussed in terms of ethics, content, activity, and use, and much less in terms of imagery, look, visual values, composition, or other design language aspects. Unfortunately, this lack of attention to aesthetics devalues one of the key aspects of a design education, as pointed out by Johnson, who argues that aesthetics are one of the important issues in the fields of architectural and interior design:
The worry is that informed discussion of esthetics as an interpretive issue is now almost absent from professional architectural journals and from open public debate, even though it is warranted as a public concern of the highest order among architects, planners, fine arts commissions, and design review boards.
The Nature of Aesthetics: Subjective vs. Objective and Visual vs. Experiential
In this study Cho found that the language used during design studio discussions about the nature of aesthetics was twofold, comprising: (1) formal attributes, such as appearance, looks, form, shape, and proportion, and (2) emotional attributes, such as impressive, interesting, intriguing, powerful, or preferable. This is in keeping, on the one hand, with Bell's ([1914] 2007) argument of “significant form,” whereby aesthetics resides in the objective attributes of the form of the architecture or interior space. On the other hand, it also supports the arguments of Kant ([1790] 1911) and Hume ([1777] 1985), whereby aesthetics has subjective attributes that relate to the emotional responses of the viewer (audience or user). For example, Kant argued that aesthetic judgment involves feelings that are subjective in nature.
In addition to the twofold nature of aesthetic discussions, the language used by the instructor and students occupied two primary realms: (1) the visual and (2) the spatial. In other words, discussion of the aesthetics of architecture and interior design occurred primarily when people talked about the visual aspect of a space, that is, color, finishes, materials, exterior, facade, and form or shape of the space or building; or when they described spatial experience, such as spatial quality, spatial organization, and sequence of spaces.
Figure 28.1 shows two representative natures of aesthetics and two realms where aesthetic discussions took place in the studios.
Aesthetic Education in the Design Studio: A Place Open to New Aesthetics
Clearly, the way aesthetics was introduced in the studio varied with each instructor's teaching philosophy, methods, and strategies; however, several themes emerged in the study. First, instructors tended to use precedents and examples to illustrate their aesthetic preferences. Three types of sources for precedents were normally used in design studios: (1) visual materials from architecture and interior design books, drawings of buildings, and artwork; (2) written materials that the instructors distributed to the students, such as book chapters and articles about aesthetic theories and principles; and (3) verbal communication in the form of storytelling, discussions regarding concepts, and descriptions of design work of particular designers or architects. In the use of precedents, instructors tended to reiterate their “hero architects or designers” works in an attempt to encourage students to study their special qualities. The precedents and examples were introduced at different stages throughout the design process, such as in the early conceptual stages, during design development, or in final presentations. Precedents were used as a way “to expose students to good examples and further develop students' ideas” (Cho 2011).
A second emergent theme for teaching aesthetics in the studio was found in deliberations made about the proper use of materials and finishes and prototypes of space. Oftentimes the instructors used verbal and visual articulations to enhance the students' design vocabulary – encouraging students to engage and articulate their ideas and design intentions in a clear verbal or graphic way using the aesthetic principles of design.
Interestingly, although aesthetics were seldom discussed overtly in desk critiques or discussion in the studios, conflicts were observed to arise between the instructors and students about aesthetic preference. Such conflicts were most prevalent when the instructor maintained a strong preference for particular aesthetic characteristics and tried to impose his aesthetics on the students by virtue of his authority. Figure 28.2 shows a diagram of students' reactions to conflict over aesthetic preference. The x-axis indicates the instructor's degree of aesthetic emphasis, and the y-axis depicts the degree to which the aesthetic preferences of the instructor and student were similar or dissimilar. When an instructor imposed his or her own aesthetic, students reacted, feeling that the project was no longer theirs.
As a result of this study, it can be concluded that the design studio is a place where students are exposed to aesthetics in new ways and that it is also a place where students must learn to negotiate aesthetic dilemmas with instructors, clients, and/or reviewers. The educational challenge is to invent a workable symbiosis between applied science and artistry and to provide a venue whereby students can be acculturated into the design community (Cho 2011).
Lessons: Implications for Design Educators
Studio instructors do not have the luxury of being able to always rely on empirically measurable “facts.” The challenge in dealing with aesthetic values in design education is the need to clarify the reasons for supporting certain solutions without the comfortable certainty of reliable truth. In architecture and interior design there are numerous contradictory measures of values that must be reconciled in the educational process – with aesthetic discourse being a fundamental component of these values. Clearly the absence or marginalization of aesthetic theory in interior design and architecture education exacerbates problems of critical thinking in the disciplines. In addition, the exclusion of discussion about aesthetics in interior design and architecture curricula intensifies tendencies of students to embrace fashionable trends too hastily, and dismiss more subtle theoretical propositions.
Issues covered in this essay offer several suggestions to design educators regarding the pedagogy of aesthetics. First, instructors need to understand that students' aesthetic preferences may differ from their own. In particular, students in advanced school years tend to have a clearer preference for certain aesthetics than beginning students; thus, instructors need to approach studio instruction while considering students' varying levels of knowledge and design experience.
Second, educators need to deal with both the objective and subjective aspects of aesthetics. Even though aesthetics involve subjective preference, certain objective commonalities and principles exist in aesthetics, and students want to know why some designs are more aesthetically attractive than others. As Ballantyne pointed out, there is a certain degree of consensus in the aesthetic response (Ballantyne 2002). Thus, instructors must deliver the objective principles of aesthetics and formal aspects relating to aesthetic judgment, such as proportion, balance, principles of color, and the nature and proper use of material.
Third, educators need to know the unique nature of the aesthetics of interior design and architecture. As opposed to other domains in which aesthetics is discussed, such as philosophy, art, or sculpture, in interior design and architecture, function, performance, and utility are important elements that explain the rationale of their existence. Basically, the aesthetics of interior design occurs both in visual and spatial realms. Compared to the aesthetics of architecture, in interior design the spatial experience of interior space is even more important and should not be neglected in any discussion of aesthetics.
Hence, the pedagogy of the aesthetics of interior design needs be based on: (1) an acknowledgment of possible differences in the aesthetic preference of the instructor and the students; (2) an understanding of subjective preference in aesthetics and its objective principles and nature; and (3) an understanding of aesthetics in terms of both the visual and the spatial. It is our hope that this essay will stimulate a beneficial discussion, draw attention to the pedagogy of aesthetics, and provide insights for design educators interested in advancing interior design and architectural education.
Last Words
The last words belong to Mark Foster Gage:
Architecture today faces multiple master-narratives that seek to further transform it into a sustainable-cum-scientific endeavor. Undoubtedly our buildings must be sustainable. They must be efficient, power saving, resource responsible, and easily maintained. To propose anything less is to abdicate our responsibility to our limited resources. This responsibility to our resources, however, should not be confused as the only way in which we can judge our architecture. There must be an equally significant way to judge architectural values in nonscientific terms as well – that is to say in terms of its physical, formal, and aesthetic impact. Aesthetic theory is the obvious starting point through which to understand this distinction.
(Gage 2011)
In this passage, interior design could easily be substituted for architecture. Good design is essentially valued for its formal properties. Other conceptual properties can be significant and worthy endeavors, but they are not the primary reasons for which design is culturally valued. Design “must be more than what it does, how little it costs, how quickly it was built, or how much energy it can save” (Gage 2011). Aesthetic theory has long been absent from the curricula of design schools. “Nonetheless, aesthetic theory is not a frivolous pursuit: as it is the branch of philosophy that deals with not only artistic categories of the beautiful but also the forms and products of architecture and design as they directly relate to individual and collective users” (Gage 2011). Clearly, aesthetic theory should be an integral part of design pedagogy.
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