Notes

1. There are few published exceptions to this claim, and those exceptions have garnered very little attention within the field of architectural theory. I refer to books including: Roger Scruton’s The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979), Richard Hill’s Designs and Their Consequences: Architecture and Aesthetics (1999), and Allen Carlson’s Aesthetics and the Environment: Art and Architecture (2000). My own books linking aesthetics with architecture are perhaps too recent to claim any sort of success or failure on this front and include: Aesthetic Theory: Essential Texts (2011), Aesthetics Equals Politics: New Discourses across Art, Architecture, and Philosophy (2018), and Designing Social Equality: Architecture, Aesthetics and the Perception of Democracy (2019).

2. There are authors who have addressed the subject of architectural aesthetics, but they are very limited, including figures such as Roger Scruton and Branko Mitrovic. The point being that while architects make aesthetic decisions, there is no discourse of aesthetics withing architectural practice or education.

1. I once had the pleasure of coteaching a graduate design studio at Yale University with the architect Frank Gehry. For the final review we invited the celebrated sculptor Richard Serra to Yale to discuss the work of the students and ideas prompted by the course. A friendly argument ensued between Frank and Richard regarding how one could reasonably distinguish sculpture from architecture in definitive terms. Serra offered the defining trait of plumbing. If it had plumbing it was not sculpture but architecture. The debate continues.

2. Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” 27.

3. Dickie, “The New Institutional Theory of Art,” 57–64.

4. Saito, Everyday Aesthetics.

5. James Shelley, “The Default Theory of Aesthetic Value,” 3.

6. Such as Saito’s example of laundry being deserving of aesthetic attention. Saito, “The Aesthetics of Laundry” in Aesthetics of the Familiar, 115.

7. This particular insight and framing was presented by architectural theorist David Ruy during a public lecture titled: “Returning to (Strange) Objects.”

1. Population information retrieved from the “2014 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects,” produced by the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA). https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/publications/2014-revision-world-urbanization-prospects.html.

2. In Act II of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the nobleman Jacques, exiled to the Forest of Arden, speaks the infamous words “All the worlds a stage,” which has perhaps been realized to an extent that would likely surprise the Bard himself.

3. It may be that this increased role for architecture withing the human visual field would also meet Morris Weitz’s and Yuriko Saito’s more open definitions of what warrants aesthetic attention, and possibly address George Dickie’s qualifier that art be for an artworld audience, in that all of the “artworld public” exist in the general public that would be exposed to architecture. Only James Shelley’s formalist definition requiring precisely and only the production of pleasure in defining aesthetic value would continue to resist the inclusion of architecture as warranting aesthetic attention.

4. A note that, because of my own limited background, these are all Western examples, and further examination would likely reveal other such instances in other cultures.

5. Vitrivius, Ten Books on Architecture, 6.2.

6. Such a position could also hold that architecture, while perhaps not one of the “official” fine arts, is enough of an art, and that this status combined with its increasing role in defining the visual framework of reality qualify it for some relationship with the field of aesthetics, the extent of which remains to be determined.

1. I find it difficult to include these words here for publication but decided to do so in order to convey the vitriolic disdain felt for aesthetic concerns within early Architectural Modernism. It is worth noting that Architectural Modernism as a movement supposedly had high moral aspirations toward equality—although these are hardly conveyed by Le Corbusier’s sentiments. See Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 143.

2. Corbusier, 144.

3. Macey, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory, 76.

4. The 2000 Venice Biennale was curated, and so named, by Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas. Documentation of the Biennale can be found in the accompanying book: Massimiliano Fuksas, Less Aesthetics More Ethics: The 7th International Venice Architectural Biennale.

5. This is particularly the case as the discipline of architecture is required to deal with the aesthetic concerns of form, color, materials, light, and texture at a greater scale than nearly any other artistic endeavor.

6. I have found no empirical studies within sociology regarding this, but certainly they would be warranted.

7. Martin Pedersen, and Steven Bingler, “How to Rebuild Architecture.” New York Times, December 14, 2014, Opinion section.

1. A useful format for this exercise that I adopted can be found in the article “Artistic Style and the Expression of Ideals,” by Robert Hopkins and Nick Riggle. Hopkins and Riggle suggest that the distinction between “general” style and “individual” style in the work of artists is significant, as it is through the latter that the artist reveals her driving intent. The categories of such artistic intent are divided into Personality (P), Implied Personality (IP), Artistic Personality (AP), or Artistic Ideals (AI). The conclusion for this article is that, as the title suggests, individual artistic style is best justified as an expression of ideals (AI), largely on ethical grounds. While a full excursus of this article is beyond the boundaries of the architectural and aesthetic question before us, its organization is valuable for assessing similarly defined aesthetic categories, as they anticipate future relationships between architecture and aesthetic discourse, particularly with regard to designers’ or artists’ intent and, by extension, virtue aesthetics.

1. For Young’s description see Michael Young, “Fear of the Mediated Image,” The Cornell Journal of Architecture, no. 11 (August 25, 2019): 146–61.

2. See his original article: Michael Meredith, “Indifference, Again,” Log 39 (Winter 2017): 75–79, as well as my response in the following issue titled “Speculation vs. Indifference,” found in Log 40 (Spring/Summer 2017): 121–35.

3. Meredith, Indifference, Again, 78.

4. An alternate ancestry of the project of indifference can also be found in affect theory, which makes a brief appearance in architectural theory in the 2008 exhibition Matters of Sensation at the Artists Space gallery in New York City, where the curators Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich describes the affect-based design work with sentiments similar to those of the position of indifference (although preceding it by a decade) in that it “seeks to answer no questions, solve no problems, and broach no oppositions.” Quote taken from Huljich and Spina, Matters of Sensation: Exhibition Catalog.

1. My italics. See Rem Koolhaas, “Seattle Central Library: Project Description,” as featured on the official Office for Metropolitan Architecture website: https://www.oma.com/projects/seattle-central-library.

2. Joshua Prince-Ramus and Mark Foster Gage, “You Are Playing a Fool’s Game: A Public Exchange between Mark Foster Gage and Joshua Prince-Ramus on Museum Plaza and Beauty,” Perspecta 40, no. 7 (October 2007): 102–3.

3. Prince-Ramus and Gage.

4. Herbert Muschamp, “The Library That Puts on Fishnets and Hits the Disco,” New York Times, May 16, 2004, Architecture section: 1–3.

1. Borrowing the term from Peter Eisenman’s “Duck Soup” where he similarly describes this work. Eisneman, “Duck Soup,” Log 7 (Winter/Spring 2006): 141.

2. Gage and Prince-Ramus, “You Are Playing a Fool’s Game,” 102–3.

1. Shelley, “The Default Theory of Aesthetic Value,” 1.

2. Aristotle, “Eudemian Ethics,” 1214a1–1249b25.

3. Mitrović, “Aesthetic Formalism in Renaissance Architectural Theory,” 321.

4. See Book VI of Alberti, On the Art of Building, 447–49. Also see Branko Mitrović, Serene Greed of the Eye: Leon Battista Alberti and the Philosophical Foundations of Renaissance Architectural Theory (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2006).

5. Alberti, 150.

6. As a trivial aside, Clive Bell was also the brother-in-law to Virginia Woolf.

7. Bell, “The Aesthetic Hypothesis,” 42.

8. Clive Bell’s work on significant form has recently received new attention in the neurosciences through studies of cortical activation correlating with the experience of beauty. For this fascinating research, see Zeki, “Clive Bell’s ‘Significant Form’ and the Neurobiology of Aesthetics.”

9. Bell, 48.

10. As a trivial aside, Geoffrey Scott was one of Edith Wharton’s closest friends.

11. Scott, The Architecture of Humanism, 120.

12. Scott, 117.

13. Shelley, “The Default Theory of Aesthetic Value,” 1.

14. Zangwill, “In Defence of Moderate Aesthetic Formalism.”

15. Zangwill, “In Defence of Moderate Aesthetic Formalism,” 82. Here Zangwill is referring to how Kant distinguishes free and dependent beauty insection16 of The Critique of Judgement.

16. Zangwill, 185. For more of Zangwill’s exploration of Kant and moderate aesthetic formalism, see his book, The Metaphysics of Beauty, which is a general defense of formalist positions that includes reprinted versions of his previous contributions to this discussion. Also see his paper “In Defence of Extreme Formalism about Inorganic Nature: Reply to Parsons,” British Journal of Aesthetics 45:185–91.

1. While important work on virtue philosophy and virtue aesthetics has been done by figures such as Rosalind Hursthouse, Roger Pouivet, Michael Slote, and Chrisine Swanton, I take this more recent aesthetic definition from Alan Wilson in his 2020 article, “The Virtue of Aesthetic Courage,” 455.

2. Roberts, “Aesthetic Virtues: Traits and Faculties.”

3. Roberts, 443.

4. He continued: “The second point is that in architecture, this idea of promoting equality through design was based itself on a certain sociology. Architecture was part of this big project with the genius architects of the Werkbund and the Bauhaus, etc. But this big activist project of reshaping all forms of life was more-or-less based on the idea that equality was brought by the social and economic process itself. This idea was very powerful in the sociological tradition: the idea that modernity means a homogenization of the conditions of life, which means equality. . . . The architectural dream—I think—was based on this idea that equality comes by itself, by the very process of modern life. It was the presupposition even under the Marxist theory that equality is marching with the transformations of production. We know now that that was not at all the case. Buildings that were supposed to promote equality were based on this idea of modernization. And now those cities are just ghettos for drugs, criminality, and now terrorism. This is not a critique of architecture, but the point is that it is not a question of functionalism versus nonfunctionalism. It is this double relation or double play with equality.”

5. Wilson, “The Virtue of Aesthetic Courage,” 463.

1. Durant, 367.

2. Peter Brown, “The Glow of Byzantium,” The New York Review, July 14, 2016: 37.

3. Ruy, “Returning to (Strange) Objects.”

4. Shaviro, Discognition, 106.

5. Shaviro, 106.

6. Some text in this section was published in an earlier iteration in Mark Foster Gage, “East of Reality: On the Granular Perception of Architecture,” PLAT Journal 9 (2020): 1–14.