The Anti-Aesthetic

Anti-Aesthetic (AA) Architecture is not considered with aesthetic intent, as aesthetic qualities are irrelevant to and even harmful to architecture and society.

The Anti-Aesthetic is the default position with regard to aesthetics within architectural theory and practice today, as has been outlined previously. One could make the claim that the proto-anti-aesthetic position could be found in Plato’s Republic where, as described by theorist Michael Young, Plato “feared the forsaking of moral essence through the seduction of the senses, in other words, ethics compromised by aesthetics.”1 An AA position assumes, as previously noted, that aesthetic qualities, often visual, are either superficial or used by those in power to nefariously hide otherwise visible truths. This accounting produces architectural forms that have aesthetic properties that are not determined by an architect intentionally but are rather an aftereffect of the solutions to the functional problems as presented by the client. That is not to say that architecture developed within the AA framework does not have aesthetic qualities, only that they should be of no concern to the architect.

The AA position within architecture has not only more than a century of momentum within the profession but has also received contemporary support in the form of adjacent theoretical positions that advocate for a similar stance, notably that of indifference, as introduced by architectural theorist Michael Meredith, primarily his article Indifference, Again.2 In this article Meredith advocates for what he describes as techniques that are “anti-aesthetic . . . through an acceptance of non-design: the banal, generic, and unoriginal.” In a later response to this article, I identify multiple problems with Meredith’s position, which can be summed up in his own words as “employing anti-aesthetic aesthetics of appropriation, ready-mades, and lists.” He is more specific about the formal architectural agenda of the project of indifference and writes regarding its associated architects that “they play, collect, scroll, re-appropriate, and reuse, taking little interest in tabula rasa innovation or authorial originality.”3

At the root of all of my disagreements with this position is the fact that the position of indifference to aesthetic qualities is nearly synonymous with any historic AA position, but also that this produces an inherent contradiction that is evident in all AA positions; notably that one cannot design anti-aesthetically in the same way that one cannot hum antimusically, because the act of humming is always musical, even if it is only the humming of single note. One cannot “unhum” with one’s mouth as a way to counter the musicality of humming. If one is considering aesthetics, even by trying to look nonaesthetically considered, one is, by definition, working aesthetically, and therefore cannot be designing anti-aesthetically. More clearly, while an architect can have an anti-aesthetic theoretical stance, one cannot design anti-aesthetically. Therefore, the most forceful rejection of aesthetic ambitions is to ignore them in favor of championing what is automatically produced by the systems of capitalism within which we all exist—in other words, the generic (which is still an aesthetic). As such, while the opposite of a pro-aesthetic theoretical position can be an anti-aesthetic theoretical position, the opposite of a pro-aesthetic design position can only be to design with the intent to be generic.

Another analogy might be to imagine an author who holds an anti-authorship theoretical position. This author could argue this position along many lines, perhaps that authorship is authoritarian, egocentric, or as Herder originally suggested, is a fallacy because it is history or a zeitgeist that is responsible for creative production. However, if an author were to write about their anti-authorship position, they would become authors and therefore be, in fact, working against their positions as they existed prior to writing. Designing indifferently, as Meredith champions, yields only the “banal, generic, and unoriginal”—yet to design toward these ends as an architect is still an aesthetic position. While within architecture holding such a position that valorizes the generic may provide brief personal or academic success, it seems unlikely to offer any long-term benefits as an operating strategy for architecture’s relationship with the world at large. To valorize the generic is to be indifferent to appearance of the physical world, including neglecting the qualities of identity and culture that define the time in which we collectively exist.4

As we have addressed the arts as being the categorial distinction most historically valued for aesthetic attention, our argument should address the Anti-Aesthetic position as it has impacted artistic practice in order to further illuminate AA’s role within larger creative and architectural culture today. One significant and early modern corollary from the arts that also sought to define an AA position was Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain sculpture—a readymade urinal placed on its side in an exhibition for the Society of Independent Artists in New York City in 1917. While the original urinal was pulled from the exhibition, the controversy it prompted led to an important inquiry: Was it art? Could anything now go in an exhibition or museum? Could art be about manipulating concepts instead of paint? These questions, in turn, opened doors for further challenges to the boundaries of art curation, be they dead sharks (Damien Hirst), starving dogs (Guillermo Vargas), or performing artists staring deeply into visitors’ eyes (Marina Abramović). However, as Clement Greenberg notes, such a trick of placing a urinal into an artistic exhibition context only works once. The second artist to place a urinal in a gallery does not yield the same intended effects as the first, as the impact of the work is theoretical or conceptual, not aesthetic, and therefore exhausted upon its initial introduction. Were this not the case, and artists could continue to achieve fame and praise through the continual placing of urinals in galleries and museums, in which case galleries and museums would rather quickly become restrooms of unimaginable scale. The same situation exists within architecture, in that an architect who produces a generic building that is championed for its cleverness or brilliance, can only be a one-off. The second architect to produce a generic building is confronted with the loss of the novelty that accompanied the original. If this were not the case, there would be a race to produce the most generic architecture, which itself would, ironically, be a nearly entirely aesthetic endeavor.

With these considerations in hand, I do not accept that an AA position has anything further to offer to architecture. We should disqualify the Anti-Aesthetic from being a valid position to continue to guide a new generation of architectural thought and production, independent of whether it is an AA position that emerges from Architectural Modernism, critical theory, or contemporary indifference. Casting aesthetic and, by extension, visual ambitions in architecture as nefarious, superficial, or unworthy of attention forces its aesthetic qualities to be defined as the formal after-effects of capitalism, or to be actually or ironically generic—all of which offer the ultimate success to merely economic concerns over cultural ones.