Conclusion, or The Appearance of the Unknown

If one thing has been revealed in the past decade it is that the former foundations for architecture’s ethical speculation, contingent as they were on the modernist conveyance of “truth” of construction and “transparency” of program, have largely disintegrated, requiring a vast overhaul of the discipline’s intellectual and ethical assumptions. Architecture can no longer continue to base its moral stance on outdated concepts of Architectural Modernism that were developed almost exclusively in a world before computers and smartphones, not to mention the input of more diverse voices. Accordingly, architects can no longer rely on the related Modernist truths that are no longer recognized, hierarchies that no longer exist, or democracies that are no longer equal. Beyond the dictates of Modernism lies something different—perhaps a still developing post–Aesthetic Turn reality for all involved in the world of design and therefore the design of the world. To imagine this requires a curiosity that pierces our common superficial understanding of reality—a curiosity uniquely specific to a speculatively aesthetic position.

I would suggest that, instead of asking of architecture to “raise awareness” of aspects of contemporary reality already thoroughly better covered in other mediums, or expecting architecture to somehow be an arbiter of the truth of reality, that the discipline recapture its earlier relationship with the unknowable—the one category of human experience that can be relied on to produce curiosity, and to which all humans have exactly equal access, which is to say, none. This is an inverse of a similar sentiment noted by Spinoza when he writes, “In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.”1

The role of designed objects to act as mediators between the human and the unknowable has, in fact, been a foundational aspect of architecture, largely used in the service of religion, and has only been eclipsed since the Enlightenment through the axiomatic belief that all knowledge is, through the mechanizations of humans and science, eventually obtainable. Attentively designed objects within this framework have, as they can all be understood through science, significantly lost the ability to be intellectually or emotionally transporting, invoke curiosity, or prompt contemplation, which would all be the goals of an SA position. Instead, objects in contemporary society are more mundanely positioned as being pre-understood, primarily as material products that confer status or fulfill a particular human need through a particular function—as is blindingly apparent in the non-SA aesthetic positions within architecture. Yet designed objects, a category in which we can include buildings at one extreme of scale, have a well-documented history of production toward other, more intangible goals, where they are not seen merely as “things” but rather as openings into alternative modes of speculative perception—as is the stated goal of SA. While such ambitions have historically been used in the service of religion and the visual arts, they may also be reconsidered toward contemporary architectural ends. Regarding the ability for objects throughout history to prompt such responses, New York Review of Books journalist Peter Brown, describing historic reliquaries and religious artifacts, writes:

They are no longer considered mere decoration. We have realized that somehow, in a mute manner that partly escapes the conscious mind (and that largely escaped rationalization by theologians), the very texture of the materials used and their ingenious fashioning helped to bridge the chasm between the seen and unseen. . . . We must cease to see a mere shimmer of gold and jewels. Instead, we are looking at objects from where one world meets and elevates the other.2

In the first century BCE, Greek essayist (later with Roman citizenship) Plutarch observed in De Auditu that “the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” This sentiment opposes the Enlightenment position where man is charged with the discovery of true knowledge and, accordingly, the “filling” of the vessel of the mind. Plutarch’s “kindling” of the mind rather than its “filling” describes the human capacity for curiosity and speculation, which can be invoked and inflamed through architectural design.

Such ambitions toward the production of curiosity are not inherently religious in nature, and as such this sentiment should not be confused as being in any way in support of a reintroduction of religion into architecture. Instead, the act of prompting curiosity via a speculatively aesthetic position can be a power of incalculable value to the establishment of an absolute baseline of social equality—as it is both a shared and inexhaustible resource to which all of humanity has equal access. Rancière reminds us of the importance of beginning our actions with such an equitable baseline. While this does not mean that such choreographies can ever constitute anywhere near the full efforts of architectural design, they might provide an influential conceptual starting point for design that is not reliant on reductively understood data as found in a CA position—but rather a moment were designer and future users are, for the moment of design instigation, equal in their incomplete ability to fully understand the object, building, or world that they are about to share, always limited, access.

The existing nonaesthetic architectural discourses of the critical and the pseudo-scientific within architecture aim to produce a closure of knowledge and in doing so refuse such equalizing invitations to curiosity. Einstein reminds us that “it is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education,” and perhaps it is even more of a miracle today if it can survive architectural education in particular, so procedural and reductive it has become. Knowledge is, of course, required for architecture to function, remain stable, properly use resources, and provide shelter; yet the sum of these requirements and of its many other responsibilities can also collectively aim toward the goals of producing a more ethically beautiful and just reality via architecture. As with the aforementioned objects, architecture can become more than a merely known and understood physical construction or object, and instead an opening into an alternative way of seeing the world—a speculation, inherently aesthetic in nature.

Architecture has the unique ability—even responsibility—to, as David Ruy suggests, be the “first thing that tells what reality looks like.”3 Architecture can produce speculatively aesthetic qualities that are not knowledge per se, but rather allusions to more distant unknown aspects of the real—the pursuit of which inspires the fires of Plutarch and becomes an ethical reminder of our shared perceptual position within humanity and the limits of its perceptual reach. Architecture that is “about” individual criteria—whether articulated critically, scientifically, or even within an aesthetic position such as CA—prohibits such explorations into higher orders of collective and shared inquiry and produces final closure once the “information” the building is intended to communicate is so received by the (only properly educated) observer. This is an act of finality, of submission, where further inquiry is repressed in the name of completed understanding. This heretical pact by which the architect determines official meaning, and the observer properly receives it, limits the ability for architecture as a discipline to allude to the vagaries of reality and to suggest new possibilities the physical constructs of a speculative future.

If not all criteria can be addressed in a design solution, then to choose any one or a selected few is to ignore all of other the possible points of intellectual or emotional entry that architecture might elicit. The extensive breadth of architecture’s potential reach is one of its greatest creative and ethical assets, and to subject it to such reductiveness is a repression of the imagination and diminishes its potential to be understood within countless other speculative scenarios. As has been previously described, acts of such selective analyses are more often than not artistic decisions masquerading as scientific ones; yet they force the building to be read along the lines of the latter rather than the former. Judging or explaining a building against reductively scientific criteria is automatically dismissive of any aesthetic speculation it might prompt in the viewer, as the aesthetic is, as we have seen in the common AA position, assumed to be antithetical to the truths of the scientific.

Such nonaesthetic and reductively scientific and functional goals for design are rarely purely scientific, for to be so they would require postconstruction analysis of their efficacy in order to conform to the stringent requirements of the scientific method. Instead, most fall into the ineffective and exhausted pattern of diagnosis and repair, where a selected problem is observed, and it becomes the defining ambition of the architect to solve it through design, at the expense of addressing a host of other possible problems. Accordingly, such solutions are required to be simplified into a graphic for easy digestion by the client and public (SU or CA). They also, when presented through such requisite diagrams, train the public to view architecture in decidedly nonaesthetic, primarily AA, terms—terms that produce near-immediate closure. Architecture here is seen as a simple solution to simply identified problems rather than an opportunity for collective curiosity and other forms of speculative and aesthetic conjecture.

Through accepting the inequitable basis and hierarchical procedures of the critical, or the reductively and often falsely scientific, architecture is limited to being solution based rather than aesthetically engaged as an open-ended instigator of allusive curiosity in which all can indefinitely participate—the ultimate direction of an SA position. The demystification of architecture, through its shift into a discipline of transferrable intellectual content rather than one perceived through speculatively aesthetic experience, has been observed in a larger cultural context by Steven Shaviro, who notes that

Science is now in the process of scrubbing psychology from the human world, just as it previously scrubbed psychology from the natural world. That is to say, the psyche itself is rapidly being de-psychologized, as paradoxical as this might sound, even the decentering’s of subjectivity proposed by psychoanalysis and deconstruction have not really prepared us for this eventuality.4

He continues to describe how this leads to the undermining of

common intuitions about our own inner sensations, or what the philosophers call qualia. . . . that there is a certain vividness and intensity to my inner life. But this qualitative dimension of my experience is something that I cannot capture and put into words.5

It is the aesthetically qualitative that architecture has neglected in the service of the nonaesthetic via the scientifically and critically quantifiable, both of which are today considered to be equally creatively and functionally legitimizing. It is not being argued that architecture return to only the phenomenology of individual qualitative experience, nor to any form of religious piety, but rather that through a new aesthetically derived equitable SA baseline, prompted through curiosity rather than reductive statements of symbolism (CA) or hidden aesthetic agendas (SU), architecture can shed the conventions that rely on meaning derived from privileged insight to be established by architects upon proverbial pedestals—and observers who are required to be appropriately educated to decipher such meanings. Instead, as a new baseline for action, architecture can be liberated to emphasize collective experiences of curiosity toward the unknown and inaccessible.

While rote understanding of defined criteria will always play a role within the discipline of architecture, it need not define every aspect of it. There is value in aesthetic speculation and the curiosity it can produce, as there is value in the equitably empowering ability for all to access such speculation equally, without the requirement of a “correct” understanding. Being unsure, despite Enlightenment claims toward the contrary, can itself be a path to new forms of speculation about the status of reality for humanity, and it may even be the trait that best defines us. An architecture that seeks to begin its processes through this equalizing position of curiosity about the unknown might not only prompt reconsiderations of our commonly shared traits but lead toward new understandings of the nature of our physical and social environments.6

Aesthetics, and specifically Speculative Aesthetics (SA) within architecture are not determined to be successful or not successful based only on immediate pleasure given, although it may still provide immediate pleasure. An SA position is also not judged successful or not based only on the immediate consumption of a simplistic message, although it may communicate. Rather an SA position allows the aesthetic impact of architecture to unfold into its communities more slowly, over time, relying on the best intentions, virtues, and especially the aesthetic courage of the designer toward their realization. SA allows for an interest in aesthetics, form, and the desire to produce pleasure but is also infused with the desire to use aesthetic intent to produce curiosity and therefore invite speculation toward the production of a more virtuous and perceptually humane built reality. This also allows architecture to become more speculative, in that it is relieved of the obligation that the final form perform only in the present to produce pleasure or clearly broadcast a simple positive or virtuous message.

The purpose of this text is not to write the final definition of Speculative Aesthetics but rather to offer it as a possibility for consideration as a platform for additional contributions over time, all part of a larger multidisciplinary emerging effort to reintroduce aesthetics into architecture, but without inheriting the liabilities of previous aesthetic positions. It is my hope that a Speculative Aesthetic position can be fruitful territory for future developments—and offer a springboard to reconsider the value of aesthetics in the future production of our built environment. Among its peers, the Speculative Aesthetic position seems to offer the most promise, in that it liberates designers, through not only function but also aesthetics, to speculate on a more complete image of the future of our physical reality and therefore the appearance of the world.