For much of the half-century after World War II, the philosophy of art in English took music, the visual art of painting, and the verbal arts of fiction and poetry as its focal topics. The prominence of these foci is plausibly construed as part of the inheritance of the so-called ‘system of the fine arts’, a construction influentially characterized by the history Paul O. Kristeller as emergent in Europe at the end of the 18th century which divided the arts into the ‘fine’ and the ‘mechanical’ or ‘applied’, with poetry, sculpture, music, painting among the former, and embroidery, ceramics, landscape gardening and much else among the latter. With the emergence of ballet in the early 19th century, dance was included among the fine arts. What made an form of art into a fine art was never clear, and historically successive attempts at clarification were unsuccessful. Architecture was problematic; in some formulations it was a fine art, in others a mechanical art because it constitutively included reference to particular functions and uses, such as providing shelter or housing a bank. The system of the fine arts is fortunately a thing of the past, and recent writing is dominated by accounts of such things as street art, computer art, comics, etc; but the shadow of the concept of fine art lingers in seemingly intractable difficulties in conceptualizing the relationship between artistic practices and the needs, interests, desires, uses, and functions to which they answer.
The one recent monument in the philosophy of architecture in English is surely Roger Scruton’s The Aesthetics of Architecture, and there have been significant contributions from a few other authors including Karsten Harries, Edward Winters, and Gordon Graham. The new publication of a book by Winters offers a chance to consider the state of philosophical reflection upon architecture as an art form.
Winters’s short book ranges widely, and includes historical material, some polemics against the work and thought of the architect Peter Eisenman, and an account of some time spent drinking beer in a bar in Paris. Nonetheless, the core argument is not difficult to state, as it consists of a short series of interconnected claims. Winters claims the following: 1. Architecture is a fine art. 1a. Although most fine arts exhibit what Kant calls ‘pure beauty’ (a beauty undetermined by concepts), architecture exhibits ‘dependent beauty’ (a beauty determined and constrained by at least one concept, in the case of architecture the concept of function or use). 2. A fine art is a practice that regularly produces works that merit aesthetic appreciation. 3. A fine art is a practice that possesses what Winters, following Dominic Lopes, calls a ‘medium-profile’. 3a. A ‘medium-profile’ consists of procedures for technically transforming materials so that the resultant artifact communicates a distinctive kind of meaningfulness, namely what Kant called ‘aesthetic ideas’ (characterized by Winters as “a presentation that cannot be formulated using concepts of cognition, or else we could exhaustively spell out the meaning of a work and its beauty would evaporate” (pp. 117-18)).
Evidently Winters’s account is markedly traditional, as a great deal of it agrees with and indeed simply re-states Kant’s undeveloped points scattered about the first half of the Critique of Judgment. His use of Lopes’s so-called ‘buck passing’ account of art (wherewith Lopes claims that philosophical attention to the concept of art per se is fruitless, and that philosophical attention is more appropriately directed to the individual arts and their distinctive media-profiles) only reinforces Kant’s prior characterization of architecture as a fine art of adherent beauty without offering any further conceptual materials relevant to analyzing and understanding individual art forms. So as far as I can tell, Winters in effect attempts to up-date Kant’s views in only two aspects: (a) he claims that the materials which are transformed in the artistic practice of architecture are fundamentally of a piece with those of ‘dwelling’ in Heidegger’s sense; (b) Winters claims that the way in which artistic works of architecture acquire aesthetic ideas, and so artistic meaning, can be understood on analogy with the way in which on Richard Wollheim’s account artistic paintings acquire meaning. I’ll comment on these two points, and then offer a couple of concluding thoughts:
Dwelling: A number of architectural theorists, including penetrating writers of recent decades like Karsten Harries and Christian Norberg-Schulz, have looked to the conception of dwelling in the later work of Martin Heidegger as a guide to thinking about the fundamental needs, norms, and kinds of meaningfulness native to architecture. Winters makes no reference to these earlier discussions, and contents himself with some brief indications. First, in the essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ Heidegger raised two questions with regard to dwelling: what is it, and what is the relationship between dwelling and building. Winters then paraphrases Heidegger as claiming that ‘to dwell’ means “‘to live well’ or ‘to flourish’ or ‘to be’. And this ‘being’ is connected to building.” (p. 18) Oddly, Winters fails to note the Aristotelean resonances of this formulation, and moves immediately to the thought that “building belongs to dwelling by way of our habitation of the world, more specifically our world.” (ibid) He summarizes Heidegger’s account with the single sentence “Dwelling relates us to the world in such a way as to operate within it as participants.” Then, as if continuing the explication of Heidegger’s account, Winters offers a lengthy quote from Heidegger’s slightly later essay ‘The Thing’ that attempts to read off the significance of a clay jug, otherwise unspecified, as exhibiting ‘the four-fold’, a prominent bit of later Heideggerian poetry (or hokum, depending upon one’s taste) that urges the thought that certain ways of making, building, and living embody distinctive conceptions of the relationship both between the earth and the sky and between human beings and gods or immortals. Unsurprisingly, the concept of the four-fold has elicited a great deal of interpretation; surprisingly, Winters leaves it unexplicated and abandons it as soon as he has introduced it.
From very brief indications scattered later in the book, it seems that what Winters wants from this scamper through the later fields of Heidegger is the thought that there are ‘needs’ bound to the practice of building, and that architecture is a cultural elaboration of (the need for) dwelling: “We might say that ‘dwelling’ has developed into a cultural practice. The art of architecture has arisen out of our fastening critical aesthetic projections onto the ‘lived world’ in which we (naturally?) [Winters’s parenthesis and italics] accommodate ourselves.” (p. 30) Later Winters hints that something like Carl Jung’s conception of archetypes might offer a way of specifying the need for architecture in that positing archetypes helps make sense of “the view that we are pre-dispositionally given to mythical accounts of those aspects of experience we cannot understand” (p. 76) and “that there are anthropological convergences which are to be accounted for by our condition as pre-disposed persons.” (p. 78) Winters’s discussion is fragmentary and allusive in the extreme, but I take it (perhaps wrongly) that he means that our need for dwelling, and hence for architecture, is psychologically and culturally expressed in and through our ‘pre-disposition’ to make sense of ourselves as people who inhabit a place through building. Into this Heideggerian-Jungian conception Winters folds Gottfried Semper’s account of the four elements of architecture. In the mid-19th century Semper argued that all architecture stems from and articulates four ‘elements’: the hearth around which people gather; the enclosure or walls that separate inside from outside; the roof that protects from sun and rain; and the mound upon which structures are built. Winters urges that Semper’s “elements are to be seen as our responses to pre-dispositional needs . . . [t]hey provide suitable response to a more general motive [i.e. the need for dwelling.” (p. 155)
Architectural Meaning: As noted above, for Winters the kind of meaningfulness distinctive of works of art is that of ‘aesthetic ideas’ in Kant’s sense. How does artistic meaning, that is, the possession of aesthetic ideas, arise in the case of architecture? Winters approaches it by analogy with Richard Wollheim’s account of how artistic paintings acquire meaning (see p. 159). According to Winters, Wollheim claims that “[t]he medium of painting is such that the materials of the painter are mobilized toward representational ends” (p. 115); and Winters later re-states this point without elaboration as “the application of paint to a flat surface in order to develop representational content explains the medium through its exploitation of properties of the paint-as-applied” (p. 199), where the properties of ‘paint-as-applied’ are that a viewer of such paint is aware both of the material properties of the paint and of what the paint represents (p. 96, with reference to Wollheim (1987)). Since Winters accepts without qualification the Kantian conception of artistic meaning across the individual arts as consisting of works’ embodying aesthetic ideas, he must be identifying the representational content of artistic paintings as a type of aesthetic idea. But Winters offers not a single word of explication on this point, and instead turns to asserting and re-asserting that a work of architecture’s having some function in no way blocks its status as a work of fine art, since architecture as an art form is an instance of adherent beauty.
Responses on dwelling and artistic meaning: As is evident from my summaries, on both points Winters’s accounts are so brief and unelaborated that first of all one just wants fuller statements and elucidations. Further, I have no sense at all of how Winters might respond to criticisms, in particular of any involving a rejection of the Kantian framework. Another major discontent with Winters’s account is perhaps pedantic, but inevitable: his explicit statements of both Heidegger’s account of dwelling and the fourfold and of Wollheim’s account of the artistic medium of painting are highly idiosyncratic and at best misleading in their very partial character. For example, what Heidegger actually writes about dwelling in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ is: “To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free sphere that cares-for each thing in its own nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this caring-for.” (I give the translation from Julian Young (2002), a book that gives a careful, documented account of Heidegger’s conception of dwelling and its internal connection with the doctrine of the fourfold). Nothing of this ‘caring-for’ shows up in Winters’s account. With regard to Wollheim, Winters writes as if unaware that for Wollheim artistic painting possesses not just representational content, but also expression as kinds of what Wollheim called ‘primary’ meaning, as well as an indeterminately large class of kinds of ‘secondary’ meaning arising from the ways in which artistic painters elaborate primary meaning.
General responses: Abstracting from problems that arise from exceptionally brief and fragmentary statement of his claims and failure to provide explications, one might still raise a number of significant objections that point to ways in which the philosophy of architecture might be pursued differently. First of all, one might object to the untroubled adherence to the conception of the fine arts and of Kantian aesthetics as the most fruitful way of thinking about architecture as an art form. The modern system of the fine arts was, as famously diagnosed by Kristeller, an artifact of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and has been widely criticized and mostly rejected, in practice, in institutions, and in philosophical aesthetics, for over half a century. Winters’s quasi-Kantian conception of the arts as having ‘beauty’ for their goal is quaint, to say the least.
Secondly, one might raise a host of questions about Winters’s conception of use or function. He writes as if unaware of a large and heterogeneous body of philosophical writing that puts pressure on the simple understanding of artifacts as things made to have a single function or use, a corpus that includes works by Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Barry Allen, and Beth Preston. Moreover, in following Kant on adherent beauty, he writes that the centrality of function to architecture necessarily introduces conceptual constraints upon artistic building, but he misses the point that in art constraints characteristically play a role in the creation of a range of kinds of artistic meaningfulness (on this see, for example, Elster (1983)).
On account of these massive problems with Winters’s book—the fragmentary argumentation, undefended and seemingly obsolete framework, idiosyncrasy without illumination, failure to consider a great deal of obviously relevant literature—there is little to recommend. The good news perhaps is that there’s a great deal of work to be done in the philosophy of architecture.
References:
Barry Allen, Artifice and Design (2008)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980)
Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (1983)
Gordon Graham, The Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion (2007)
Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (1997)
-----Review of Winters (2007) in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2008)
Martin Heidegger, The Turning’ (1950), in The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays (1977)
-----‘The Thing’ (1951) and ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ (1954), in Poetry, Language, Thought (1971)
Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (2013)
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790)
Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)
Paul O. Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts” (1951-2) in Renaissance Thought and the Arts (1980)
Dominic Lopes, Beyond Art (2014)
Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling: On the Way to Figurative Architecture (1985)
Beth Preston, A Philosophy of Material Culture: Action, Function, and Mind (2013)
Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (2002)
Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture (1851)
Gilbert Simondon, Imagination and Invention (2022, originally 1965-66)
Edward Winters, Aesthetics and Architecture (2007)
-----Architectural Aesthetics: Appreciating Architecture as an Art (2023)
Richard Wollheim, “Are the Criteria for Works of Art Aesthetically Relevant?” in Art and its Objects (1980)
-----Painting as an Art (1987)
Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy (2002)