Suppressed Aesthetics

Suppressed Aesthetics (SU) Architecture is secretly considered with willful aesthetic intent, although resulting aesthetic qualities are described as the result of non-aesthetic considerations.

A Suppressed Aesthetics (SU) position may be understood as an in-between state located between an Anti-Aesthetic position and a position where aesthetic qualities are valued. Within an SU position an architect freely designs with aesthetic ambitions, but then hides these ambitions behind other narratives that are intended to describe the appearance of the building to be the result of nonaesthetic factors. I believe there are multiple contemporary architects operating, some with great professional success, according to the SU position. To operate in such a manner requires walking the fine line of designing aesthetically but never revealing one’s interest in designing aesthetically or toward particular architectural appearances. Holding, consciously or unconsciously, a SU position allows a designer to have aesthetic ambitions as long as they are never discussed publicly, and the aesthetic outcome of the building is presented as being the after-effect of other, more serious, functional concerns.

One of the most celebrated buildings of recent decades has been the Seattle Public Library, designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Rem Koolhaas and his firm, Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). The physical form of the building is that of a giant faceted crystal, with angular planes and sloping reflective surfaces. Koolhaas presents this unusual faceted aesthetic form as being the inevitable result of careful programmatic study of the interior workings of library staff. The official OMA description of the project describes these internal workings and how they produce the strange form, as follows: “The library’s various programs are intuitively arranged across five platforms and four flowing ‘in between’ planes, which together dictate the building’s distinctive faceted shape.”1 According to this view the aesthetic form of the building is merely a result of intense study of the needs of the client and a keen understanding of the relationships between the various functional uses, resulting in building’s forceful aesthetic appearances. By taking this position and popularizing its account, Koolhaas not only benefits from appearing as an attentive architect, carefully attuned to solving functional problems in contemporary library design but is also able to resist any criticism that the building is the result of aesthetic intent, therefore inoculating him against artistic criticism.

The project designer at OMA who worked with Koolhaas on the Seattle project was Joshua Prince Ramus. In a public debate I had with Prince-Ramus, later published as the article “You Are Playing a Fool’s Game: A Public Exchange between Mark Foster Gage and Joshua Prince-Ramus on Museum Plaza and Beauty,” he rather directly defined the SU position that he and Koolhaas operated within when he stated (rather surprisingly to me at the time) that “you still have your own personal aesthetic agenda, but that is not what you are debating with the client.”2 Further along in our debate, as also noted in the article, he stated, “It is much more powerful to know what you think is beautiful and be able to justify it on issues that simply have nothing to do with that.”3 There is some irony in the fact that the then–architecture critic of the New York Times, Herbert Muschamp, described the building, in aesthetic terms, as “big rock candy mountain of a building.”4 I find the accuracy of his claim unimpeachable.

Any nonarchitectural observer of this visually massive crystalline gem of a building set in the heart of downtown Seattle would be hard-pressed to extract the fact of the building’s radical form from intricate functional concerns. This is because nonarchitect observers and users of buildings judge them aesthetically. For most users, the knowledge of a building’s “creation story” will never become apparent by simply viewing the final structure. Prince-Ramus said as much when he noted, “Far and away, the largest reaction to it during design was, ‘It is terribly ugly, and it is going to blight the city.’ . . . the general public did not inform themselves of the ideas behind the project or understand its performative ambitions.” As is visible in this statement, it is the public’s responsibility to “inform themselves” of the ideas of the project, rather than be allowed to judge it aesthetically without the input of the architect—despite the fact that it occupies a full and very public block within downtown Seattle.

Suppressed Aesthetics inoculates architects against aesthetic criticism because by assuming such a position they are making no aesthetic claims or, as is the case with Koolhaas and Prince-Ramus, ever even referring to the formal, visual, or aesthetic properties of the building—despite the building obviously having incredibly significant formal and aesthetic properties. The architect who operates in this mode is free to explore any aesthetic directions so long as they are hidden within other narratives. The reason why SU is problematic should be obvious: it is predicated on the manipulation of the truth for personal gain, either economically or egotistically. Furthermore, SU seems to offer, at least in the case of Koolhaas, disdain for the general public of viewers who judge the building aesthetically as opposed to “informing themselves” regarding the architect-prescribed functional narrative of the building. I believe it to be self-evident that the SU position, being predicated on distain for the public and the withholding and manipulation of truth, offers no fertile ground for any architecture that has positive ethical and moral aspirations for the future of the built environment.