Speculative Aesthetics

Speculative Aesthetics (SA) Architecture is considered with aesthetic intent such that the aesthetic qualities convey a gestalt sense of the set of ideals that the designer has for the future of the built environment. This requires an acceptance that architects can never know in advance the social and cultural impact of their work, but that does not mean that their work cannot aim toward just social and cultural goals.

Within a Speculative Aesthetics position aesthetic qualities are valued, so that it is by default not an Anti-Aesthetic position. SA is also neither a Communicatory Aesthetic position, as there is no specific meaning to be conveyed, whether it be symbolic, metaphorical, narrative, talent-based, nostalgic, or to convey relevance by being for or against a current architectural “style,” nor a purely Formalist position, in either the extreme or moderate sense of the term—as it has no corresponding ambitions toward only the production of pleasure via perception. Instead SA seeks to, through aesthetic qualities, primarily visual appearances, to allude through a gestalt reading to the ideals that the designer has for the future of the built environment—as they are determined to be of value by the designer based on their experience. This cannot be a definitive claim but rather an acknowledgment as an ambition that may fail. In my previously noted conversation with Jacques Rancière he described this aspect of aesthetic practice as follows:

The artistic is about the implementation of an idea. It implies some kind of anticipation of the result, which may be put to the extreme in the case of political art. Instead, the aesthetic means that you don’t exactly know what will be the effect of what you are doing.

An SA position within architecture offers multiple advantages for architectural theory and practice when compared to the previously described positions of Anti-Aesthetic (AA), Suppressed Aesthetics (SU), Communicatory Aesthetics (CA), and Formalist Aesthetics (FA). These are briefly outlined as follows:

1. SA, unlike AA, allows for the consideration of aesthetic properties in establishing the cultural value of architecture.
2. SA, unlike SU, allows for aesthetic discourse and discussion to occur in the open, unsecreted, and has no inherent position of disdain for the public of viewers and users.
3. SA, unlike CA, allows for the production and conveyance of virtue and meaning without resorting to simplistic messages, single-authored intent, or the requirement for an educated and correct interpretation.
4. SA, unlike FA, allows for the possibility of nonhedonistic formal pleasure, without such formal pleasure being the primary qualification for architectural value.

Based solely upon the cursory consideration outlined above, we can conclude that SA offers value for consideration among its peer categories, and it may surpass them in contemporary relevance as it is the only option not limited to the pursuit of pure pleasure and allows for aesthetic intention containing both virtue and ideals without reducing such intentions to simplistic communication devices.

In this, SA shares some features with the larger contemporary movement toward virtue aesthetics, which as described by Alan T. Wilson “encourages a re-focusing of philosophical attention onto the aesthetic character traits and qualities of agents, in the same way that virtue ethics and virtue epistemology have encouraged us to focus on moral and intellectual character traits.”1 SA, however, is not entirely synonymous with virtue aesthetics, because such positions, as Tom Roberts suggests, contain and require aesthetic faculty virtues, which refer primarily to aesthetic talents of the individual, such as “skill with drawing” or “perfect pitch,” that are less germane to the subject of architecture, as it is a collaborative enterprise.2 Instead, SA primarily adopts from virtue aesthetics Roberts’ concept of aesthetic trait virtues which are all character traits that are not contingent on the agent’s faculties, but rather their intent, and can include virtues of the creative individual such as “aesthetic forms of generosity, honesty and authenticity.”3

This SA position I am articulating also integrates a key component of Jacques Ranciere’s ideas about equality: that creative practices cannot start out with the ambition to repair inequalities but rather must assume that equality exists as a condition of their origins. To return to my conversation with Rancière, he notes the unsure quality of designing equality as a fix versus taking it as a starting point. SA can assume equality as a starting point without endeavoring to fix all of society’s ills. Rancière recounted to me that

At this point we meet the problem of the egalitarian purposes of architecture. I think that it evinces a kind of double bind. On the one hand, there was this architectural dream to promote equality though design and through building. But equality cannot be a product; it must be a point of departure. That is the first point.4

The emphasis on designers’ speculative ambitions toward a more just built environment, rather than the production of specific but necessarily simplistic virtuous messages that are intended to emerge from form is a defining characteristic of SA. In SA, therefore, the virtue and ideals are located in the designer’s intent rather than being “correctly” extractable from architectural form. That does not mean that such architectural form does not have virtuous effects, only that it is not the responsibility of architectural form to convey such virtuous intent through direct messaging. In short, architecture may, through an SA position, freely deploy aesthetic intent with the ambition that architecture act toward a more just present and future, without claiming success in advance, rather than merely appearing to do so in the present.

If an architect is operating within an SA framework contingent on agent virtue, they are less likely to be either intentionally or unintentionally doing harm to the built environment. An SA position therefore has the dual function of providing a platform for aesthetic speculation and can also act as a failsafe against doing harm through architectural design or its negligence. Furthermore, the inclusion of virtue within an aesthetic position allows one working within an SA framework to have formal and aesthetic interests that operate above the level of pleasure but below the level of enforcing immediate communication-based resolution, as CA requires. As such, SA can be both formalist and communicatory, whereby formalism can still operate in the pursuit of pleasure via perception, and the communicatory aspect of architecture is lodged in architects’ larger moral intent rather than acting merely as a messaging device for one-liners, such as “rockiness” or “doveness.”

An SA position requires of designers what Wilson refers to as aesthetic courage, which seems a precisely calibrated response to its opposite within architecture—a Suppressed Aesthetic (SU) position—where aesthetic intent is hidden so that the architect can avoid criticism in aesthetic registers. SU therefore is a position of vulnerability, and as an anti-SU position, SA requires the possibility of personal risk, called “courage,” which within architecture today would be to open oneself to aesthetic critique of one’s work. Wilson suggests, however, that this vulnerability to critique is, in fact, one of the operating characteristics of aesthetic courage and would also be active within an SA position within architecture. He writes that an artist, or by extension an architect, who is

willing to endure hardships in order to create an aesthetically valuable series of works has a better chance of succeeding than one who is easily defeated when faced with the prospect of personal risk.5

The benefit of assuming such risk is that designing with an SA goal, in not describing an absolute future outcome, allows for a more participatory role of the viewer—which we will call curiosity. Curiosity can be generated by aesthetic operations by allowing for a limited formalism of intent unencumbered by the need to provide specific meanings or solutions to current problems. Put another way, curiosity is an invitation to future users and viewers of a work of architecture to participate in its interpretation and meaning instead of being provided with it. This has the added effect of increasing the amount of attention given to the structures of our built environment. When in a curious state, a person becomes attentive, receptive, investigatory, and alert to information, and so an SA position prompts in viewers the desire to become more attentive, receptive, investigatory, and alert to the built environment that defines the visual backdrop of their contemporary urban reality.

Architects need to think in these more expansive terms enabled in Speculative Aesthetics in order to prompt higher-fidelity observation and questioning about the very nature of our reality itself and what we, as individuals, communities, countries, and as a species, want it to be moving forward. This requires of architecture the need to be a curiosity-generating device within contemporary culture—a key aspect of an SA position, for it may only be through curiosity that architecture can keep alive its cultural value and more justly participate in the creation of new and nourishing human environments.