Architecture, Aesthetics, and the Predicaments of Theory

Amir H Ameri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032008004
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000511109
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Architecture, Aesthetics, and the Predicaments of Theory offers a critical analysis of the methodological constants and shared critical strategies in the history of theoretical discourse on Western architecture. Central to these constants is the persistent role of aesthetics as a critical tool for the delimitation of architecture. This book analyzes the unceasing critical role aesthetics is given to play in the discourse of architecture.

The book offers a close and critical reading of three seminal texts from three different periods in the history of theoretical discourse on Western architecture—the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and 19th-century Romanticism. The first text is Leone Battista Alberti's Ten Books on Architecture of 1452, the next Marc-Antoine Laugier's An Essay on Architecture of 1753, and last, John Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture of 1849. Additional influential texts from, among others, the 20th and 21st centuries are engaged with along the way to locate and contextualize the arguments within the broader discursive tradition of Western architecture.

The book will interest scholars and students of architecture, architectural history and theory, as well as scholars and students of cultural studies, aesthetic philosophy, art history, literary criticism, and related disciplines.

1

In Retrospect

DOI: 10.4324/9781003175780-1

In the least since the 18th century, the history of Western architecture has been conceived and written as a history comprised of distinct epochs, each marked at its wake by a break with the immediate past. This has been primarily in deference to the distinctive architecture of each epoch and the theoretical proclamations of the proponents of the architecture of that epoch.

The beginning and the end of each epoch have been and are likely to remain a matter of debate among the historians of Western architecture. The placing of these parameters, on the other hand, has hardly been a matter of question. In the various efforts to identify and isolate each period’s unique architectural characteristics, the potential continuities in this history and what may have persisted despite the overt formal and theoretical differences between the various periods have received little attention. This may seem a small but inevitable oversight in the cause of understanding the particular characteristics and the unique identity of each period—conceived as such within distinctly defined or definable parameters in space and time. Although attention to what is overlooked in this view and what constitutes the subject of this study could hardly facilitate the task of identifying the parameters in question, it would perhaps be the more telling not only insofar as each period and its relationship to the preceding periods is concerned, but perhaps also insofar as our own relationship to the past is concerned.

The prevalent use of the prefix “Western” in itself suggests certain continuities or commonalities that presumably transcend the epochal differences. Yet, what exactly is designated by the prefix is rarely addressed, much less methodically specified.¹ What is evident is that the referent is not merely geographical. It is difficult to pinpoint geographic boundaries beyond which one may not find examples of the architecture that is presumed unique to the West. Colonial as most of these latter architectural examples may be in origin—standing in sharp, if not often glaring contrast to the indigenous architecture—what each displaced “Western” example inevitably points to is that the prefix’s referent points to certain cultural continuities in space and time—to certain as yet unspecified shared views, objectives, and/or strategies—that persist through space and time irrespective of the significant divergence of the periods that constitute the history of Western architecture.

Despite the many stylistic revivals beginning with the Renaissance and including the Neo-Classical, Greek, and Gothic Revival movements, among others, it is important to note that any constants in time are evidentially not formal or stylistic. Even the Greco-Roman vocabulary’s resurgence time and again points to no formal continuity. For instance, as we shall see, what the Renaissance architects saw in the vocabulary could not be any different from what the architects of the Age of Enlightenment saw. This is to say that the constants in question are likely conceptual and, to a degree, methodological rather than formal or stylistic. As such, they are likely and more readily encountered in Western architecture’s discursive tradition and the canonical treatises that set out to elucidate the conceptual underpinnings of the architecture of each epoch.

The general disciplinary approach to the study of these historic texts has been to treat each as a unique and context-specific document that opens a window onto the distinct conceptual/theoretical underpinnings of the architecture of its epoch. Accompanied in various degrees with autobiographical information about the authors, the scholarly stress in the individual study of these texts has been on identifying and specifying the unique point of view of each text/author as a reflection of a specific historical context.² Else, these texts have been variously collected into anthologies that offer chronologically organized selective excerpts that are often preceded by brief commentaries that together are intended to offer a glimpse into the specific argument of each text/author in contradistinction to the others.³

Although the intent here is not to diminish or in any way refute these informative approaches to the study of Western theoretical texts, what they generally forgo is the recognition of a broader temporal context to these texts. It is the recognition that each text/author partakes of a tradition of discursive speculation on architecture that precedes and endures it. This is a discursive tradition that, as such, may well have defined objectives, specific critical strategies, and explicit modes of self-validation. This would be a tradition that defines what theoretical speculation entails, which topics/subjects/issues are, and which are not legitimate and worthy of theoretical pursuit, what are the rules of discursive engagement with architecture, and what methodologically constitutes the truth in and of architecture. These are, in turn, the specific focus of this study, i.e., the distinct modes of delimitation and the unique strategies of validation in the Western theoretical discourse on architecture.⁴

Before going further, we may legitimately ask why architects in the West have found it necessary to write about architecture and that too in relative profusion? There are a significant number of architectural traditions that don’t rely on or resort to writing on architecture, at least not in any volume, if at all. Examples include the Islamic architectural traditions, the architectural traditions of the Americas and Africa, among others. Also, concerned as the profession of architecture has been with making habitable artifacts, the place and role of writing on architecture may seem, if not superfluous, in the least tangential. Nevertheless, the Western tradition has historically delegated the crucial task of defining the discipline’s parameters to writing, setting forth a concise definition of its subject matter, and prescribing what the architecture practitioner must do. Consequently, since the resurgence of theoretical discourse on architecture at the outset of the Renaissance, numerous architectural theoreticians, some of whom over time were not practitioners, have made concerted efforts to isolate and mark, once and for all, the boundaries and the margins of the discipline and thereby separate its internal and inherent concerns from the marginal and the extraneous issues that are often said to encumber its progress.

With the significant role the discipline has traditionally assigned to theoretical writing has come not only a persistent divide but also an admittedly tenuous relationship between thinking and making or theory and practice. Seeking a judicious balance between the two has been as persistent an objective in the history of theoretical discourse on architecture as has its deployment as a potent critical tool and regulatory strategy.

The proposition that architecture must perpetually seek a “balance” between thinking and making or else the theoretical and the practical goes as far back as Vitruvius’ proclamation in first century bce that “architects who have aimed at acquiring manual skill without scholarship have never been able to reach a position of authority to correspond to their pains, while those who relied only upon theories and scholarship were obviously hunting the shadow, not the substance. But those who have a thorough knowledge of both, like men armed at all points, have the sooner attained their object and carried authority with them” (Vitruvius 5). Being armed at all points has since proved not a simple metaphor but an essential and critical tool for regulating architecture. Cases in point are the various canonical treatises on Western architecture since the Renaissance, formulated as each has been in response to a cultural paradigm shift. Each treatise sets out to rearm architecture anew by supplanting the prevailing architecture, criticized for lacking sufficient armor. At the outset of the Renaissance, it was the demand for theoretical content in architecture, as a counterbalance to mere practical considerations, that proved paramount to the legitimization and transformation of architecture from a medieval trade to a professional discipline. Leone Battista Alberti laid the foundation in 1452 when he claimed: “I should explain exactly whom I mean by an architect; for it is no carpenter that I would have you compare to the greatest exponents of other disciplines: the carpenter is but an instrument in the hands of the architect. Him I consider the architect, who by sure and wonderful reason and method, know both how to devise through his own mind and energy, and to realize by construction, whatever can be most beautifully fitted out for the noble needs of man, by the movement of weights and the joining and massing of bodies. To do this he must have an understanding and knowledge of all the highest and most noble disciplines. This then is the architect” (Alberti, Art Of Building 3).

For Marc-Antoine Laugier, writing at the outset of the age of enlightenment, it was, as it had been for Alberti at the outset of Renaissance, once again insufficient theoretical armor that called for a new architecture. Proclaiming “there is no work as yet that firmly establishes the principles of architecture, explains its true spirit and proposes rules for guiding talent and defining taste” (Laugier 1), he placed the blame back on Vitruvius because “always avoiding the depths of theory, he takes us along the road of practice and more than once we go astray. All modern authors … give no more than commentaries on Vitruvius, following him uncritically in all his errors” (Laugier 2). In turn, John Ruskin in 1849 would try to regain the balance that he saw lacking in the work of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, noting “uniting the technical and imaginative elements as essentially as humanity does soul and body, it [architecture] shows the same infirmly balanced liability to the prevalence of the lower part over the higher, to the interference of the constructive, with the purity and simplicity of the reflective, element. This tendency, like every other form of materialism, is increasing with the advance of the age” (Ruskin, Seven Lamps 10). The proponents of Modernity, and in turn Post-Modernity, would attribute no less imbalance to the works of their immediate predecessors and contemporaries in justification for their own theoretical undertakings.

Of course, the oft-repeated and much-desired balance has been as diverse and seemingly ever-shifting in definition as it has been persistent through time. The purported imbalance—invariably voiced from a middle point—may be made to point to either side of the theoretical/practical dichotomy to the same effect. A case in point are the purported theoretical excesses of the 1980s and 1990s, which are to be remedied and ‘balanced’ by a new pragmatism in the early 21st century.⁵

Lamenting the theoretical excesses of the 1980s and 1990s, we are told: “more perhaps than anything else, the certainty of theory vanguardism has retarded the development of a culture of innovation in schools of architecture, which requires a more fluid, interactive relationship between thinking and doing, as well as an expanded definition of what counts for architectural knowledge” (Speaks, “After Theory” 74). We are offered a similar assessment noting, “after their great flowering in the 1990s, history and theory are now content to rest on passé, post-structuralist laurels” which account for “the inutility of history and theory, not their instrumental value” at present (Lavin 83).

As a counterbalance, a new “pragmatic/entrepreneurial disposition,” we are told, “has made a strong break with the avant-garde. Not simply another intellectual fad or crutch for architecture, however, this break requires that we reexamine in architecture the problematic relationship between thinking and doing” (Speaks, “Theory Was” 212). Prudently armed and balanced “interactively” in thinking and doing, a new class of “intellectual entrepreneurs and managers of change,” we are promised, will “confront the fiercely competitive world thrown up by the forces of globalization” in search of the very balance that, from a 21st-century perspective, proved all too elusive in the 1980s and 1990s, due no less to the purported theoretical excesses of the age (Speaks, “Theory Was” 212).

In sympathetic response, another author agrees “that design theory is finally and fortunately shedding the negativism and nihilism of Deconstruction and Marxism” (Kelbaugh 19). However, the author asks, “let’s continue to be theoretical, but in a more pragmatic way that addresses environmental, social, and economic problems and opportunities, as well as aesthetic issues…. Let’s stop the pendulum before it swings from too little theory to too much theory. Maybe a little balance—that would be radical” (Kelbaugh 19). The irony is not so much that a little balance would be radical. Rather, it is the sheer number of times it is evoked as if for the first time and at that with recourse to a pendulum analogy that is not simply one among others. Voiced or not, the pendulum has been present and in operation from the moment theory and practice appeared as dichotomies, albeit in the theoretical discourse of architecture, and at that inevitably in search of an elusive “middle ground.” From the outset, theory’s perception of its task has been not to advance the cause of theory per se but to reach a balance between theory and practice through the practice of theory! Theory has been, in other words, a perpetual check on itself. It has been perpetually mindful and fearful of too little or too much of itself!

Reasonable and prudent as the search for balance or the middle ground is and commonplace as the distinction between theory and practice, thinking and making and all related dichotomies are in Western architecture—to the point of being synonymous with it—they are rarely if ever resurrected or resorted to for reasons other than the deprecation and exclusion of an entrenched architecture, which is invariably purported to speak with the voice of excess—be that theoretically or practically. The irony is, of course, that every entrenched architecture in this history itself had been put forth and justified in the name and the cause of a balanced armor or middle ground in response to the purported theoretical or practical excesses of the architecture preceding it. The imbalance has not been, in other words, so much an actuality as a critical and exclusionary strategy deployed to a portended end. Considering the plurality of the theoretical pronouncements made across time, as well as the considerable contextual differences between them, it is remarkable that this portended end has been a virtual constant.

It was Vitruvius, the Roman architect and theoretician, who laid the foundation in the first century bce when he proclaimed that all buildings “must be built with due reference to durability, convenience, and beauty” (Vitruvius 17). Virtually every influential Western author on architecture since has upheld these principles, with various degrees of emphasis on each, as the fundamental objectives/principles of the art of building. Leon Battista Alberti reiterated them in 1452 when he m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents Page
• 1 In Retrospect
• 2 Leone Battista Alberti or The Ten Books on Architecture: From the Beautiful to the Ornamental
• 3 Marc-Antoine Laugier or An Essay on Architecture: From the True to the Supplemental
• 4 John Ruskin or The Seven Lamps of Architecture: From Incorporation to Dissolution
• 5 The In/Terminable Return
• Index