Architecture, aesthetics of

« accounts of the geometrical discoveries of Plato and Pythagoras.

He cites the latter's famous triangle theorem andadds, 'When Pythagoras discovered this fact, he had no doubt that the Muses had guided him… and it is said thathe very gratefully offered sacrifice' ( 1914: 253 ).

AlthoughVitruvius is concerned with the practical applications of the theorem, mention of Pythagoras and the occult nature of his discovery expressed the common view thatperceptible forms are underwritten by an abstract, numerically expressible, transcendental order.

Thus when,Vitruvius, Alberti, Palladio, Wotton and others write of the importance of proportion they are drawing upon ametaphysical theory of regularity.

On this account beauty is obtained by designing compositions in which symmetry(symmetria ) and due proportion ( eurythmia ) are realized, these being determined by relevant units or modules, and various operations ('modulations') performed upon them.

The central Pythagorean idea (see Pythagoreanism §2) , refashioned by Plato and subsequent Neoplatonists, is that empirical order results from the imposition or expressionof abstract principles upon or through a medium, in this case matter.

In some accounts the units and modes ofcombination are few and underlie all compositions; in others the modules differ according to the nature of the thingin question.

Thus, one might hold that human anatomy expresses the same basic order as the relative positions andmovements of the planets, or that each system is based upon its own units and modulations.

Such differences,however, are less important than the extent and duration of the consensus that beauty attends correctcomposition and that correct composition is a matter of cosmically legitimated proportion.

Although Vitruvius wasnot printed until the fifteenth century, many manuscript versions survive from the medieval period, and it is clearfrom this and other evidence that the Graeco-Roman metaphysics of architecture informed the theory and practiceof design throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages.

This raises the question of what philosophical difference, if any,underlay the development of European architecture from Greek to Romanesque and later to 'Gothic'.

At thephilosophical level the difference was one of addition and interpretation rather than of replacement.

For medievalbuilders, Platonism was maintained in a Christianized version that included the ideas of divinely ordained symmetryand proportion.

Additionally these notions came to be associated with elements from scripture, and architecturecame to be seen as an enduring medium for the symbolic representation of a transcendent reality.

As before, theapplication of geometry to part and whole dominated the practice of design but a growing interest in natural formsand their variety led to an enrichment of architectural forms.

In Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951), Erwin Panofsky proposed an interesting, though contestable, general parallelism between High Gothic cathedrals and HighScholastic philosophical and theological treatises (such as Aquinas' Summa Theologiae ), arguing that each aspires to 'totality', 'articulation' and 'coherence'.

As far as architecture is concerned, this involves an integration oftheology, morality, nature and history in the plan, elevation and furnishings of the great cathedral churches; inconsequence their interpretation and appreciation calls for more than (but not less than) an ability to discern andenjoy geometrical proportion.

Given their shared assumptions about the proper sources of architectural form it isunsurprising that people of the ancient and medieval worlds thought of its beauty as objective, and of aestheticexperience as an encounter with properties whose nature is independent of our experience of them.

Aquinas'definition of beauty ( Summa Theologiae , Ia.39.8.), involving integrity ( integritas ), proper proportion ( proportio sive consonantia ) and clarity ( claritas ) is an important post-Platonist statement of this idea, though its last condition introduces an element of relativity inasmuch as being 'clearly manifest' is a relational property requiring a possibleknower.

Once introduced, this relational element was bound to give rise to a question of the degree to which thenature of the knower conditions the experience of beauty - and indeed of the extent to which the grounds ofbeauty are themselves relative.

In the seventeenth century a famous dispute concerning just these matters tookplace between two French classical architects:Claude Perrault and François Blondel.

Beginning with his edition ofVitruvius (published in 1673), Perrault ( 1674 ) contested the standard view that the object of aesthetic experience is harmonious unity established by true order and proportion.

Instead he distinguished 'convincing' ( convaincantes ) and 'arbitrary' ( arbitraires ) types of beauty, the first being universally pleasing, the second depending on subjective factors such as convention, familiarity and contingent associations.

On this basis he reasoned that proportion andits beauty are arbitrary, that is, not fixed by an independent reality but determined by intersubjective agreement.

Inreply, Blondel ( 1675 ) argued for the importance of architecture as a bridging art between painting and sculpture, and upheld the objectivity of the harmonious unity of proportionate orders.

In this latter he was subsequently andemphatically supported by Boullée who insisted upon the certainty that proportion derives from natural symmetry:'The basic rule and the one that governs the principles of architecture, originates in regularity' ( Boullée 1790 ).

To some extent the debate was misconceived since, like Aquinas, Blondel acknowledged human relational elements inthe analysis of beauty (as did Boullée and Perrault conceded the objectivity of certain kinds of aesthetic properties.None the less, it marked the beginning of a period in which philosophers and others turned towards nonobjectivistaesthetic theories.

In his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), for example, Edmund Burke gives various psychological explanations of architectural features and of our approval of them, including the claim that Stonehenge is judged 'grand' because of the idea it induces of the difficulty of itscreation ( II, §12 ) 3 Post-Kantian perspectives Like all such generalizations, the claim that philosophical aesthetics began with Kant is open to contention.

It is undisputed, however, that his Critique of Judgment (1790), like his other major works, represents one of the points of definition of modern philosophy (see Kant, I.

§12 ).

In aesthetics, as in theoretical and moral thought, Kant's principal innovation was to convert the relationship betweensubject and object, and to argue that sceptical doubts were answered by the consideration that since thestructure of the human mind conditions the realm of its experience and understanding there is no general possibilitythat facts should elude the power of the mind to grasp them.

The conditions of something being the case include itsbeing a possible object of experience.

In the realm of aesthetics Kant's aim was to show how judgments of beautycould be subjective and yet assessable as correct or incorrect.

When I say, 'This arched gateway is beautiful', I amnot simply saying that I like it, but rather that my liking it arises from my judgment of its quality.

For Kant anexplanation of this involves the free play of the imagination engaged by something possessing form.

Since form inthis sense is a function of the mind's organizing tendency, and this tendency and the imagination are powerscommon to all rational subjects, if I regard the gateway as a formal object and view it apart from any practical or. »