HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES – KANT

The philosopher Immanuel Kant argues that beauty exists in judgements of taste and is fundamentally subjective:
beauty is what we feel; it is not a quality of objects in themselves. In the 'Analytic of the Beautiful', he gives four
conditions that are required if we are to be sure that our judgement is aesthetic, as opposed to an act of reason or
realization of morality.

 The first moment of this analytic isthat we must have no interest in the actual that we must have no interest
in the actual existence of the object, only noting the pleasure it gives us.
 Kant distinguishes this pure pleasure from 'agreeableness', where a desireis satisfied, and from the pleasure
we have in the good, which we ought to have.
 The second stricture is that when we make the judgement that a tree is beautiful, we imagine that no person
should disagree.
 The judgement of beauty is thus universal, but it is so without a concept.
 The third definition says that in beauty we admire the form of the purposiveness of an object, but not its
purpose.
 To admire the beauty of a tulip is to admire the form of its completeness and is distinct from the
botanist's admirationof the flower as a mechanism of reproduction.
 The fourth point is related to the second, supposing not only that none should disagree with our
judgement but also that all will necessarily agree with us – a 'common sense' that is a
commonality of the relation of sensation to feeling, which means that beauty is necessarily
intersubjective.

Fine art is the result of genius, where an artist goes beyond imitating the established rules of art and
thinks newly created aesthetic ideas such as new conceptual knowledge but Fine art for Kant is a
kind of human productivity that imitates God's creativity, yet at the same time we know that this is
not natural. Within his rigorous subjectivism, he makes a 'division of the fine arts' and a
'comparative estimate of the worth of the fine arts'.

Architecture is the art of presenting concepts of things which are possible only through art, and the
form of whose form is not nature but an arbitrary end – and of presenting them both with a view to
this purpose and yet, at the same time, with aesthetic finality.

If architecture necessarily implied utility, it would not be a fine art at all - and this would be a
judgement of reason, not an aesthetic one.
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES – THE
TWENTIETH CENTUR

For most of its history, in most cultures, architecture has been concerned with meaning, authority,
and propriety, and with the limits and failures of meaning. The modern aesthetics of architecture
became a reactionary field, most often practised by non-architects, and largely pitched against
theoretical developments published in progressive architectural journals.

The best-known treatment of the subject is that of Roger Scruton's Aesthetics of Architecture
(1979), which claims aesthetical justification for a particular strand of Western architecture:
classicism.
For most of the 20th century, aesthetics meant a kind of sociological surveys of popular and
professional preferences for one building over another, or between two and ten buildings in the
same building, as well as between different architectural cultures. Similarly, texts such as those of
Rudolf Arnheim describe some of the basic techniques of architects as having a direct and certain
description in human psychology, and in view of which various architectural cultures merely
cloudour understanding (1977).

Given the perceived dangers of essentialism, progressive discourse has tended to avoid the word
aesthetic when addressing subjects such as pleasure and desire. The older, dowdy aesthetics, then,
focused on the concept of beauty and hence the claims to innate value that architectural theory has
been impatient with. We will return to this issue at the end of this introduction, in a discussion of
the current 'post-critical' moment and its implications for aesthetics.

The theories of Sigfried Giedion, Heinrich Wölfflin, August Schmarsow, Geoffrey Scott, and other
mid-century thinkers are no longer seen as programmes to be enacted, but as dilemmas that drove
architectural history.

Jorge Otero-Pailos's architectural phenomenology of the mid- to late-twentieth century is an

example of an architectural aesthetics properly said, and one of the three lines of inquiry that can
describe the field of architectural aesthetics. The idea that architecture can be made better through
understanding our perception of space and spatial archetypes begins in the 17th century and takes
its modern form in empathy theory and empirical psychology.

OteroPailos' history of architectural phenomenology reveals it as a strange concoction of pop-

psychology, evolutionary psychology, and old-fashioned humanism. Phenomenology remains the
strongest case we have of architectural thinking claiming the authority of a fundamental outside to
art and architecture.