Architecture as an Art/Not-Art

So what exactly is the current relationship between aesthetics and architecture? Those in either field would likely be surprised to find that there is not much of one, at least not connecting any of the contemporary worlds of architectural theory, architectural education, architectural practice, and aesthetic philosophy.1 Why is architecture so rarely considered worthy of aesthetic attention within philosophy?2 Or why is the field of aesthetics not worthy of the attention of architects or architectural theorists? Perhaps it would be a natural starting point to ask if architecture is deserving of aesthetic consideration at all. Aesthetics has until recently, as defined by Wilde and Pater, been a discourse reserved for the arts, and within those arts attention has been directed nearly exclusively toward painting and sculpture, with photography and music in very distant third and fourth places, respectively. Largely missing from this equation—and despite the time- and beauty-entwined circumstances of her birth—has been architecture. In order to recalibrate these relations, I believe there needs to be a precise, surgical procedure that gently decouples aesthetics from pertaining only to the “arts,” toward a qualified, not all-inclusive, “distribution of the sensible,” as articulated by Rancière. It is in this interstitial territory that the future value of aesthetic discourse for architecture will be shown to exist.