The Aesthetics of Architecture

Roger Scruton

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691240374
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Historia de la arquitectura

A landmark account of architectural theory and practice from acclaimed philosopher Roger Scruton Architecture is distinguished from other art forms by its sense of function, its localized quality, its technique, its public and nonpersonal character, and its continuity with the decorative arts. In this important book, Roger Scruton calls for a return to first principles in contemporary architectural theory, contending that the aesthetic of architecture is, in its very essence, an aesthetic of everyday life. Aesthetic understanding is inseparable from a sense of detail and style, from which the appropriate, the expressive, the beautiful, and the proportionate take their meaning. Scruton provides incisive critiques of the romantic, functionalist, and rationalist theories of design, and of the Freudian, Marxist, and semiological approaches to aesthetic value.In a new introduction, Scruton discusses how his ideas have developed since the book's original publication, and he assesses the continuing relevance of his argument for the twenty-first century.

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INTRODUCTION

THE PROBLEM OF ARCHITECTURE

The subject of aesthetics is as old as philosophy; nevertheless, it takes its modern form from Kant, who was the first philosopher to suggest that the sense of beauty is a distinct and autonomous employment of the human mind comparable to moral and scientific understanding. Kant’s division of the mental faculties, into theoretical, practical and aesthetic (or, as he put it, understanding, practical reason and judgement¹), provided the starting point for all later investigations, and gave to aesthetics the central position in philosophy which it occupied through much of the nineteenth century and would, but for established scholasticism, occupy even now. What I say in this book will show the influence of Kant; but I shall try to demonstrate that the division between practical reason and aesthetic understanding is in fact untenable, and that until the relation between the two is re-established they must both remain impoverished.

The first task of aesthetics must lie in the correct understanding of certain mental capacities –capacities for experience and judgement. I shall therefore be discussing questions in the philosophy of mind, and my concern will be to understand the nature and value of our interest in architecture. Now it is necessary to distinguish the philosophy of mind from empirical psychology. A philosopher’s prime concern is with the nature of our interest in architecture, and if he sometimes talks, as a psychologist would, of its causes, then this is only because he thinks of these causes as casting light on the aesthetic experience. For the philosopher the question is not what causes us to prefer Lincoln cathedral to the minster of York, but rather, what is aesthetic preference –what is it, to prefer one cathedral to another? And what significance does such a preference have for us? The philosopher wishes to describe aesthetic experience in its most general terms, so as to discover its precise location in the human mind, its relation, for example, to sensation, to emotion and to judgement. This task he conceives of as a necessary preliminary to any discussion of the significance and value of art. Suppose, for example, that it were shown that people prefer smooth stone to rough, straight lines to squiggles, symmetrical to irregular forms. Those are psychological observations of no relevance to aesthetics. Nor are the explanations of those preferences relevant to our enquiry. It does not matter that the preference for smooth against rough can be ‘explained’ in terms of Kleinian psychology,² or the preference for symmetrical forms in terms of the organisation of the optic nerves. Those facts are, no doubt, of some interest in themselves; but they presuppose, for their proper understanding, the kind of study that I shall be engaged in. If I refer to psychological hypotheses in the ensuing chapters, it will therefore only be because some of them have been thought to be especially relevant to the nature and validity of aesthetic argument.

But now, it will be said, psychology too is concerned with the nature of experience, and not only with its causes. How then is it to be distinguished from the ‘philosophy of mind’ that I shall be engaged in? A simple answer is this: psychology investigates facts, while philosophy studies concepts. But, as recent philosophers have shown,³ that answer is far too simple. Philosophy does not merely describe the concepts of the common understanding, nor does it deal only with concepts, if that is meant to imply that its conclusions are innocent of matters of fact. Indeed, there is no more troublesome question for philosophy than the question of its own nature, and the reader must necessarily rest content with a partial answer. Philosophy, as exemplified in these pages, attempts to give the most general description possible of the phenomena to which it is applied. Such a description tells us, quite simply, what we are talking about when we refer to something. If we do not know what we are talking about, then all scientific enquiry is pointless. Usually the knowledge of what we are talking about is tacit and unarticulated; the task of philosophy is to make it explicit. And that is not a simple task. As we shall see, many writers on the topic of architecture have either failed to make explicit, or failed even to possess, a knowledge of the thing which they purport to be discussing.

Furthermore, philosophy is not interested in any particular person’s ‘concept’ of architecture, or of the aesthetic, or whatever. It is interested only in the concept to which it can ascribe a general significance. For philosophy also aims at the discovery of value. The only interesting philosophical account of aesthetic experience is the account which shows its importance, and this is the account that I wish to present.

I shall be concerned with such questions as the following: what is it to enjoy a building? What kind of experience is derived from the contemplation of architecture? What is taste? Are there rules which govern the exercise of taste? And so on. While those questions concern mental phenomena –understanding, experience, taste –they also impute to them a certain characteristic kind of object. Now it is impossible to describe or understand a mental state in isolation from its object: it might be said that the object, or at least a certain conception of the object, is of the essence of a mental state.⁴ Consider, for example, the emotion of jealousy. It would be impossible to describe the nature of jealousy without exploring the nature of its characteristic object. A person feels jealousy not as he would a fleeting sensation in his toe; if he is jealous, he is jealous of or about something –his jealousy is ‘directed’, it has an object and not just a cause. Jealousy, therefore, will involve some characteristic conception of its object, and to describe jealousy is to describe this conception (the conception, as one might put it, of a rival). In just such a way, a theory of architectural appreciation cannot stop short of giving a theory of its proper object. We shall then be led, at every juncture, into an enquiry into the nature and significance of architecture.

In the light of that, it is not surprising that theories of architectural appreciation have tended to concentrate not so much on its form as on its object. They attempt to say what architectural appreciation is by describing what we respond to in buildings. Functionalism, in one of its many forms, asserts that we appreciate the aptness of form to function. Other theories argue that we appreciate symmetry and harmony, ornament and execution, or mass. There is also the popular view, associated with the work of Frankl and his followers, that the object of appreciation is space, or the play of interlocking spaces. Now clearly, if we are to think of the analysis of the object of architectural interest as casting light on the nature of appreciation, then we must consider the object only under its widest possible description. As I shall show, none of the theories that I have mentioned provides a satisfactory description, since each ignores some feature of architecture that is both intentional and of the greatest architectural significance. Their claim to give a priori grounds for critical judgement is therefore unconvincing. In place of such theories, I shall try to approach the question more formally, concentrating on appreciation in itself, in abstraction from its object. I shall then try to say how that object must be, if appreciation is to have the significance we demand of it.⁵

It is essential to distinguish architectural aesthetics, as I conceive it, from something else that sometimes goes by the same name, but which one might call, for clarity’s sake, architectural theory. Architectural theory consists in the attempt to formulate the maxims, rules and precepts which govern, or ought to govern, the practice of the builder. For example, the classical theory of the Orders, as it is found in the great treatises of Vitruvius, Alberti, Serlio and Vignola, which lays down rules for the systematic combination and ornamentation of the parts of a building, belongs to architectural theory; so too do most of the precepts contained in Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and Seven Lamps. Such precepts assume that we already know what we are seeking to achieve: the nature of architectural success is not at issue; the question is, rather, how best to achieve it. A theory of architecture impinges on aesthetics only if it claims a universal validity, for then it must aim to capture the essence, and not the accidents, of architectural beauty. But such a theory is implicitly philosophical, and must be judged accordingly; we will wish to know whether it succeeds in establishing its claims a priori, by a consideration of the phenomena in their most abstract and universal guise. As a matter of fact it has been characteristic of architectural theorists, from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier, to claim this universal validity for their laws. And no architectural aesthetics can leave such claims untouched. Vitruvius, Alberti, Ruskin and Le Corbusier cannot all be right in believing that their favoured form of architecture is uniquely authorised by the rational understanding. As we shall see, they are all wrong.

It may still be thought that there is no real subject of architectural, as opposed to general, aesthetics. If philosophy is to be as abstract as I claim it is, ought it not to consider the aesthetic experience in its full generality, in isolation from the accidental constraints imposed by particular art forms and particular conceptions of success? Why is there any special need for a philosophy of architecture, other than the purely ephemeral one, that architecture is misunderstood by so many of its present practitioners? Is there not one and the same concept of beauty employed in the discussion of poetry, music, painting and building, and is there not one single faculty involved in the appreciation of all those arts? Once we have made the distinction between architectural aesthetics and architectural theory it may seem that little remains to the former other than the delineation of abstractions that have no special application to the practise of the architect. And it is certainly true that philosophers have approached the subject of aesthetics as though it could find expression only in such comprehensive abstractions, and could make none but passing and inessential references to the individual forms of art.⁶

Now as a matter of fact architecture presents an immediate problem for any such general philosophical theory of aesthetic interest. Through its impersonal and at the same time functional qualities architecture stands apart from the other arts, seeming to require quite peculiar attitudes, not only for its creation, but also for its enjoyment. Generalised theories of aesthetic interest, such as those of Kant and Schopenhauer,⁷ tend to give rather odd accounts of architecture, and those philosophers who have treated the problem seriously –among whom Hegel is perhaps the most prominent⁸ –have often described the appreciation of architecture in terms inappropriate to the other forms of art. For Hegel, for example, architecture was a medium only half articulate, unable to give full expression to the Idea, and hence relegated to the level of pure symbolism, from which it must be redeemed by statuary and ornament.

It is not difficult to see why Hegel should have thought that. It is natural to suppose that representational arts, such as painting, drama, poetry and sculpture, give rise to an interest unlike the interest aroused by such abstract arts as music and architecture. But it is also natural to suppose that music has expressive, sensuous and dramatic powers in common with the representational arts. Only architecture seems to stand wholly apart from them, being distinguished from the other arts by certain features that cannot fail to determine our attitude towards it. I shall begin by discussing these features, since a grasp of them will be essential to understanding later arguments, and since they will show what a frail and fragmentary thing is this concept of ‘art’ that we have inherited.

First among these distinguishing features is utility or function. Buildings are places where human beings live, work and worship, and a certain form is imposed from the outset by the needs and desires that a building is designed to fulfil. While it is not possible to compose a piece of music without intending that it should be listened to and hence appreciated, it is certainly possible to design a building without intending that it should be looked at –without intending, that is, to create an object of aesthetic interest. Even when there is an attempt to apply ‘aesthetic’ standards in architecture, we still find a strong asymmetry with other forms of art. For no work of music or literature can have features of which we may say that, because of the function of music, or because of the function of literature, such features are unavoidable. Of course a work of music or literature may have a function, as do waltzes, marches and Pindaric odes. But these functions do not stem from the essence of literary or musical art. A Pindaric ode is poetry put to a use; and poetry in itself is connected only accidentally with such uses.

‘Functionalism’ has many forms. Its most popular form is the aesthetic theory that true beauty in architecture consists in the adapting of form to function. For the sake of argument, however, we might envisage a functionalist theory of exemplary crudeness, which argues that, since architecture is essentially a means to an end, we appreciate buildings as means. Hence the value of a building is determined by the extent to which it fulfils its function and not by any purely ‘aesthetic’ considerations. This theory might naturally seem to have the consequence that the appreciation of architecture is wholly unlike the appreciation of other forms of art, these being valued not as means, but for their own sakes, as ends. However, to put the point in that way is to risk obscurity –for what is the distinction between valuing something as a means and as an end? Even if we feel confident about one term of that distinction (about what it is to value something as a means), we must surely feel considerable doubt about the term with which it is contrasted. What is it to value something as an end? Consider one celebrated attempt to clarify the concept –that of the English philosopher R. G. Collingwood.⁹ Collingwood began his exploration of art and the aesthetic from a distinction between art and craft. Initially it seems quite reasonable to distinguish the attitude of the craftsman –who aims at a certain result and does what he can to achieve it –from that of the artist, who knows what he is doing, as it were, only when it is done. But it is precisely the case of architecture which casts doubt on that distinction. For whatever else it is, architecture is certainly, in Collingwood’s sense, a craft. The utility of a building is not an accidental property; it defines the architect’s endeavour. To maintain this sharp distinction between art and craft is simply to ignore the reality of architecture –not because architecture is a mixture of art and craft (for, as Collingwood recognised, that is true of all aesthetic activity) but because architecture represents an almost indescribable synthesis of the two. The functional qualities of a building are of its essence, and qualify every task to which the architect addresses himself. It is impossible to understand the element of art and the element of craft independently, and in the light of this difficulty the two concepts seem suddenly to possess a formlessness that their application to the ‘fine’ arts serves generally to obscure.

Moreover, the attempt to treat architecture as a form of ‘art’ in Colling-wood’s sense involves taking a step towards expressionism, towards seeing architecture in the way that one might see sculpture or painting, as an expressive activity, deriving its nature and value from a peculiarly artistic aim. For Collingwood ‘expression’ was the primary aim of art precisely because there could be no craft of expression. In the case of expression, there can be no rule or procedure, such as might be followed by a craftsman, with a clear end in view and a clear means to its fulfilment; it was therefore through the concept of ‘expression’ that he tried to clarify the distinction between art and craft. Collingwood put the point in the following way: expression is not so much a matter of finding the symbol for a subjective feeling, as of coming to know, through the act of expression, just what the feeling is. Expression is part of the realisation of the inner life, the making intelligible what is otherwise ineffable and confused. An artist who could already identify the feeling which he sought to express might indeed approach his work in the spirit of a craftsman, applying some body of techniques which tell him what he must do to express that particular feeling. But then he would not need those techniques, for if he can identify the feeling it is because he has already expressed it. Expression is not, therefore, an activity whose goal can be defined prior to its achievement; it is not an activity that can be described in terms of end and means. So if art is expression, it cannot be craft (although its realisation may also involve the mastery of many subsidiary crafts).

Those thoughts are complex, and we shall have cause to return to them. But clearly, it would be a gross distortion to assume that architecture is an ‘expressive’ medium in just the way that sculpture might be, or that the distinction between art and craft applies to architecture with the neatness which such a view supposes. Despite the absurdities of our crude functionalism (a theory which, as Théophile Gautier once p...