Architecture’s Aesthetic Allergy

Architecture’s lack of a relationship to aesthetic philosophy today is a product of the belief that, in the most positive case, aesthetic concerns in architecture are merely superficial compared to the more important subjects of function, and, in the most negative case, that aesthetic considerations in architecture are nefariously abused by those in power to obscure truths they wish to remain hidden. The first critique is perhaps nowhere more visible than in the (warning: offensive) words of one of architectural modernism’s key founders, Le Corbusier, who in 1927 stated regarding aesthetic concerns that they were “of a sensorial and elementary order [. . .] suited to simple races, peasants and savages.”1 Le Corbusier’s socially appalling but also aesthetically suppressive belief was that the aesthetic qualities of physical material were base concerns and needed to be replaced by the “rational contemplation of form.”2 This hard anti-aesthetic position was further calcified into architecture by the subsequent adoption of Marxist critical theory as it was developed by members of the Frankfurt School in interwar Europe and folded into architectural theory in the decades that followed. This would later come to be called the “Critical Project” in architecture. While I have written about the adoption of these ideas and their anti-aesthetic implications for architecture in greater detail elsewhere, what is important to note here is that the primary ambition of the Critical Project within architecture was to reveal the underlying, and often unseen, political, social, and economic power structures that govern the societies in which we live, and to introduce, in the words of David Macey, “a form of self-consciousness that can act as a guide to emancipatory action.”3 Aesthetic ambitions ran counter to these goals as they were seen to merely further obscure unseen power structures, and therefore suppress the self-consciousness that was required for action.

For the descendant discipline of architecture today, aesthetic considerations in both professional and theoretical circles continue to be dismissed as an unimportant superficial layer of appearance that obscures the “real” aspects of architecture that should be more seriously engaged. This perspective is perhaps nowhere more visible than in the 2000 Venice Architecture Biennale curated by the star Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas, titled “Less Aesthetics, More Ethics.”4 Such an anti-aesthetic position is a difficult territory for architecture to exist within.5 In a contemporary moment of reflection, we might now begin to realize that decades of not only nonaesthetic, but anti-aesthetic theory that have governed the discipline of architecture may have had the result that, among other consequences, a vast rift now separates how architects and designers discuss and legitimize their work relative to how society receives, understands, and values it—which I suggest is primarily aesthetically.6

Instead of engaging the subject of aesthetics in either architectural theory and practice, architects today tend to employ abstract “concepts” to justify their production, whether through the familiar use of architectural symbols, signs, and indexes, or other “scientism-based” criteria such as sustainability. (What is your “concept” is the typical refrain heard ad nauseum in architectural juries the world over.) The public at large, however, judges architecture aesthetically and does so significantly without the knowledge to interpret such works in terms of their concept, signifying value or ability to function in particular ways that are described by architects. This disjunction between how architects produce architecture, devoid of aesthetic concerns, and how users experience and understand architecture, aesthetically, has generated decades of architecture of questionable cultural value and service—a situation that has been noticed by numerous observers. For instance, architect Steven Bingler and editor Martin C. Pedersen, noted as much in the New York Times, saying that the profession of architecture “has flatly dismissed the general public’s take on our work.”7 This is perhaps not a life-threatening situation, but these sentiments herald an ever-widening divide between an architecture that is developed without aesthetic discourse, and a population that judges architecture aesthetically.