“Formalist Aesthetics” in “On the Appearance of the World”
Formalist Aesthetics
My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn’t that enough for a whole lifetime?
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, “White Nights”
Formalist Aesthetics (FA) Architecture is considered with aesthetic intent such that the aesthetic qualities are intended to produce feelings of pleasure in the viewer.
In his aforementioned “Default Theory of Aesthetic Value,” James Shelly defines perceptual formalism as the case where an entity is seen to have value “strictly in virtue of its perceptual properties,” which he describes as primarily visual, although sometimes auditory.1 This is a contemporary reading of a two-millennia-old definition of formalism that has roots at least as far back as Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, where he outlines that sense-derived pleasures could be shared by everyone, independent of any thoughts one may have in association with the object being viewed.2 It should be noted that, while formalism is well-trodden intellectual territory in the arts and literature, its trajectory within architectural history is somewhat different and requires some explanation in order to assess Formalist Aesthetics as a contemporary aesthetic position for architecture.
The modern concept of formalism in architecture was synthesized from Aristotle’s position by the Renaissance architectural theorist Leon Battista Alberti in his 1452 book De Re Aedificatoria, more commonly translated as On the Art of Building: In Ten Books.3 Alberti’s aesthetic position is decidedly formalist, relying heavily on the use of proper proportions through what he terms lineaments, which function as an abstract system of organizing lines that govern a building’s shape, entirely unrelated to the communication of abstract concepts.4 In his Ten Books Alberti also offers the further distinction that aesthetic experience is produced by what is essential, not extraneous to the overall composition. He writes, again altering Aristotle’s primarily biological ideas about “shape” for use in architecture, that “beauty is a definite proportional relationship between all parts of that to which these parts belong, so that nothing can be added, reduced, or changed, without making it less deserving of approval.”5 Alberti’s writings had tremendous influence from their publication through the early twentieth century, when new efforts were made, unsuccessfully for architecture, to champion the position of aesthetic formalism against the then emerging Anti-Aesthetic positions of Architectural Modernism, later combined with the AA positions of critical theory.
In these early twentieth-century efforts to support FA we can include, in particular, Bloomsbury Group art critic Clive Bell, in particular through his essay “The Aesthetic Hypothesis,” the first section in his 1914 book Art. In this work Bell proposes an extreme position of FA that describes a means for the reception of visual art.6 An important aspect of this is his inclusion of architecture and objects of design as deserving of aesthetic consideration—he specifically notes a wide range of items including “pictures, pots, temples, and statues.”7 The key concept in Bell’s argument is that the presence of significant form in a work of art, or architecture, is solely responsible for any aesthetic sensation the viewer may encounter. Bell’s significant form relies “exclusively on the visual properties of forms and the relations of forms, including their color.”8 It is important to note that, for Bell, significant form exists independent of the viewer and is therefore a wholly objective quality.
Bell’s work is included in annals of FA in architecture because he offers an important call for legible three-dimensionality in painting and architecture as, for him, the appearance of this depth more frequently leads to the aforementioned state of “aesthetic contemplation” brought about by the presence of significant form. Bell divorces the need for additional conceptual information from the process of aesthetic judgment and notes that “to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions.”9 He further qualifies this by writing, “for the purposes of aesthetics, we have no right, neither is there any necessity, to pry behind the object into the state of mind of him who made it.” Aesthetic judgment or, in his terms, aesthetic contemplation is an act utterly independent of abstracted information generated by context or proposed by the original creator, thus offering an extreme FA position—one with architectural significance in that it explicitly includes architectural forms as warranting FA judgments.
Perhaps the most forceful advocate of FA in architecture prior to the development of the AA positions of Architectural Modernism and the introduction of critical theory into architecture was Geoffrey Scott, an architectural historian and author of The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste.10 Published in the same year as Bell’s aforementioned book, Scott’s 1914 chapter “The Mechanical Fallacy” is targeted against the scientific and mechanical narrative of the early twentieth century that sought to isolate areas of human inquiry into increasingly specialized disciplines. A significant aspect of Scott’s text is that it is written against architecture being justified only by means of its legible structure and construction—that is to say, Architectural Modernism. For Scott, human intervention in the aesthetic qualities of architectural form is crucial and required, as our senses have their own requirements for aesthetic satisfaction that cannot be satiated with a mere conceptual understanding of structural truth. While not against “good construction” he opposes its misuse as the only criteria for aesthetic judgment, writing that the science of construction is a “perhaps a natural ally, but certainly a blind master.”11 This drive toward disciplinary autonomy, which took the form of mechanical-cum-tectonic purity in the case of architecture, is the subject of Geoffrey Scott’s derision as well as the body of ideas from which Architectural Modernism eventually emerges. Scott argues against the assumption that either good construction or legible structure, as is revealed in a “mechanical” aesthetic, produces beautiful or good architecture. For Scott, architecture, particularly in the era of mechanical production, must resist the temptation to be simplistically reduced to the presence of mere structure or precise means of truthful assembly. The act of judging a building aesthetically must encompass greater formal issues than what he derisively refers to as “intellectually tracing forces” (i.e., structure).12
After more than a century of dormancy within architecture, a valid FA position is beginning to reemerge within architectural theory. This contemporary FA position, however, should not be confused with pure aesthetic hedonism, which as Shelley notes is where “the aesthetic value of an object is the value it has in virtue of some pleasure it gives.”13 Aesthetic hedonism therefore is not limited to perceptual properties in the pursuit of offering aesthetic pleasure, as the contemporary FA position would be—as it descends from Alberti, Bell, and Scott. For instance, within a position of aesthetic hedonism, aesthetic value could come from an architect receiving pleasure from personally carving geometric shapes into the side of a building, even if the resulting forms were universally considered to be astoundingly ugly. Within aesthetic hedonism, the physical act of carving need be the only producer of pleasure that justifies the aesthetic value of the work. The contemporary FA position is more focused and requires pleasure to emerge from the visual appreciation of work purely for its perceptual aesthetic properties rather than any other form of individual pleasure it might provide, for instance within the process of its making. Therefore, FA is not aesthetic hedonism but instead considers a building’s value to be contingent primarily on the pleasure it provides to those who view it, namely, its users and the community in which it exists.
Within the past two decades FA has begun to be addressed in greater detail within analytic philosophy and has attracted some cursory interest in architectural theory circles. This interest has arisen primarily through Kendall Walton’s critique of what was eventually defined as extreme aesthetic formalism and Nick Zangwill’s resulting position of moderate aesthetic formalism. Walton’s and Zangwill’s refinements to FA are made through the refining of the definition of extreme aesthetic formalism, which is a claim that all aesthetic properties of an artwork are formal, whereas within moderate aesthetic formalism only some aesthetic properties in an artwork are formal, while others are not.14 This division somewhat echoes Immanuel Kant’s distinction between free and dependent beauty found in section 16 of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, where he notes that not all appreciation of beauty is contingent on pure aesthetic judgment. Zangwill claims as much when he notes that “Kant was also a moderate formalist, who opposed extreme formalism.”15 In Kant’s position, there are two facets to beauty: free beauty, which presupposes no concept, and dependent beauty, which does presuppose a concept that aesthetic judgment is rendered against. Kant’s concept of free beauty, then, is largely a precursor to the contemporary architectural aesthetic position of FA. Zangwill’s further exploration of Kant holds that it is through dependent beauty that we understand the nonformal aesthetic properties of art and that “some works have non-formal aesthetic properties because of (or in virtue of) the way they embody some historically given non-aesthetic function.”16 For instance, picture a red circle painted on a white background. Such a painting of a red circle has aesthetic properties of redness and circleness, which are independent of more complex abstract concepts. However a nonformal aesthetic property might be that the painting is of a Japanese flag, which, as a dependent concept, determines the shape and color of the red circle against the white background for accuracy—but this flag history is not perceivable and is therefore a nonformal aesthetic property.
Formalist Aesthetics as a valid aesthetic position was largely exiled from the architectural theory and practice by the sequential appearance of World War I and Architectural Modernism, but it also bears the weight of more than a century of sustained critique against it. As such, it seems unlikely that such a position could be successfully resurrected into architecture in a productive manner for two reasons:
- There is already a century of arguments and theoretical momentum within theory levied against it.
- It, being contingent on pleasure, offers a seemingly helpless position for a contemporary architectural culture confronted with the global crises of inequality, climate change, and the fallout of the Coronavirus pandemic. In short, it seems tone deaf for architecture’s contemporary response to a world on fire to offer only brief moments of pleasure.
That is not to suggest that an FA position is without cultural value, which I believe is not the case, but only to note that resurrecting it in a largely unaltered historic state would ultimately be a losing proposition for the future of aesthetic engagement within architecture.
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