
















































































































































































































































Architecture Philosophy is the journal of  the International Society for the Philosophy 
of  Architecture (ISPA). The society was founded in 2009 by Carolyn Fahey, and the 
journal was founded in 2014 by Tom Spector, Carolyn Fahey, Stefan Koller.

Architecture Philosophy (ISSN 2372-0883) is published semiannually. Two parts form 
a volume. The subscription is free for digital copies, and print copies are avilable to 
society members at ISPA events. Visit isparchitecture.com for digital access to the 
journal’s content. 

Copying
This journal is protected copyrighted by Oklahoma State University. For permission 
requests please contact the ISPA at isparchitecture@gmail.com.

© Oklahoma State University

Printed in the United States by Oklahoma State University.



Managing Editor
Tom Spector, Ph.D., University of  California - Berkeley

Editors
Carolyn Fahey, Ph.D., Newcastle University
Stefan Koller, B.Phil. (M.A.), University of  Oxford

Editorial Board
Philosophy
Rebecca Bensen-Cain, Ph.D., University of  California - Santa Barbara
Rafael de Clercq, Ph.D., Catholic University Leuven 
Paul Guyer, Ph.D., Harvard University
Christian Illies, Ph.D., University of  Oxford
Jeff  Malpas, Ph.D., Australian National University 

Architecture
Andrew Ballantyne, Ph.D., University of  Sheffield
David Leatherbarrow, Ph.D., University of  Essex 
Nicholas Ray, M.A., University of  Cambridge

Contact
Web isparchitecture.com
Email isparchitecture@gmail.com



CONTENTS

Paul Guyer 25Monism and Pluralism: The 
History of  Aesthetics and the 
Philosophy of  Architecture 

5Editorial

9David LeatherbarrowSharing Sense: or, how ethics 
might be the subject matter of  
architectural aesthetics

43Emmanuel PetitThe Architecture of  Ethics: 
Stanley Tigerman 

56Stanley Tigerman Responds

81Nathaniel ColemanIs Beauty Still Relevant? Is Art? 
Is Architecture?

61Rafael De ClercqBuilding Plans as Natural 
Symbols 

97Rick FoxA New Interpretive Taxonomy 
for Works of  Architecture 

119Interview: Andrew Ballantyne

125Review



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Architectural writing that engages philosophy 
has been around for decades. Philosophical writing 
with reference to architecture has been around 
for centuries. But almost none of  it has sustained 
a conversation. It is as though each outing 
might be the last. Nothing seems to build—one 
thought upon another. Too often, when those 
from the architectural side of  the fence reference 
philosophy in their work, it appears they are doing 
so ornamentally—to render the work with the 
appearance of  higher order wisdom derived from 
analytic or continental or environmental or Eastern 
philosophy, yet without enduring the painstaking 
work of  having done so. Too often, when those 
from the philosophical side of  the fence reference 
architecture, their stylistic or ideological prejudices 
are all too apparent, and their understanding of  the 
workings of  the world of  architectural production 
are too naïve to be persuasive. And yet—the 
built environment is too important a force in the 
world for philosophers to neglect in their work of  
questioning, criticizing and systematizing who we 
are, what we know, what is important, and all the rest 
of  the fields of  inquiry under their roof. And by the 
same token, philosophy is too important a practice 
for architects to ignore their efforts to understand 
the world they account for. The deficiencies have 
themselves created a need and desire for a field 
of  inquiry that incorporates the expertise of  both 
architecture and philosophy. Sustaining the inquiry 
and securing the field, is achieved with a journal. 

Until a budding discipline has a journal to call 
its own, it cannot mature because it has no regular 

The purpose 
of Architecture 

Philosophy is 
to provide the 

platform to 
allow the field’s 

self-identification 
process to begin, 

establish the 
field’s standards, 

and identify the 
most pertinent 

topics

“

”

WHY ARCHITECTURE PHILOSOPHY?

TOM SPECTOR, CAROLYN FAHEY, & STEFAN KOLLER



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home within which to find its center, explore its boundaries, quantify 
progress, and evaluate contributions. There is no way of  knowing whether 
an area of  inquiry has already been dealt with by others, whether it may 
prove fertile, and standards for inquiry are left entirely undefined. These 
criteria are currently lacking in writing at the junction of  architecture and 
philosophy. The purpose of  Architecture Philosophy, therefore, is to provide 
the platform to allow the field’s self-identification process to begin, 
establish the field’s standards, and identify the most pertinent topics. 

The initial issues will explore the boundaries of  writing on architecture 
philosophy and, in the process, begin to show what the key questions, 
positions, and disagreements amongst architecture philosophers are. 
Often times, this diversity is apparent in their formal disciplinary training, 
whether of  post-structuralist architecture or analytic philosophy or 
otherwise. As editors, we are not interested in homogenizing the thinking 
represented in the nascent field, but rather in engendering genuine debate. 
At times the voices will be disparate, resonating as a cacophony of  debate, 
but there are already apparent moments of  commonality. The prospect of  
meaningful agreement creates a worthwhile pursuit. 

The desired tone of  the essays is to aim for accessibility, but at a level 
that can presume familiarity with the basics of  philosophy and with the 
main currents in recent architectural thought. The method of  research 
sought is of  highly rationalized and evidenced arguments, in which 
poetics are inadequate, authoritarian claims indefensible, and ungrounded 
abstractions immobile. Most of  the writing presented in this inaugural 
issue is drawn from essays presented at the 2012 ISPA conference—
Ethics and Aesthetics in Architecture—held at Newcastle University.1 The 
original call for papers is here:

The subject of  aesthetics is often taken as dealing with questions of  mere beauty, 
where the word ‘aesthetic’ is colloquially interchangeable with beauty and liking. 
Someone might, for instance, explain their liking the look of  a particular 
object on the basis of  its ‘aesthetics’. Interestingly, even within the specialized 
architecture discourse, the aesthetic is largely discussed on the basis of  an object’s 
appearance. Yet, the aesthetic is not limited and should not be limited merely to 
the way things look. Any philosophically informed aesthetician will contest this 
limited view, saying something along the lines of  ‘the aesthetic is everything’. 
The aim of  this conference is therefore in part to address this discursive limitation 
in architecture and related subjects by broadening the aesthetic discourse beyond 
questions relating to purely visual phenomena in order to include those derived 
from all facets of  human experience. In taking on the aesthetic in a manner that 
pushes its considerations beyond the realm of  mere beauty, questions of  ethics 



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often arise. Indeed Wittgenstein famously asserted 
that, “ethics and aesthetics are one and the same”.2 
Questions as to why, for instance a building’s form takes 
the shape it does, not only raises the more conventional 
aesthetic questions but also questions about what 
purpose or meaning the building serves beyond purely 
visual stimulation. Does the form for instance relate 
somehow to a social ideal or economic ideal? And if  
so, is this ideal something that its inhabitants subscribe 
to or are even aware of ? In an effort to draw thinkers’ 
attention to the ethical role architecture plays as well 
as the ethical function architects play, the second part 
of  this conference call addresses this often overlooked 
dimension of  architecture.3

The intent in raising such questions is not merely 
to broaden architects’ discourse to meaningfully 
include ethical considerations, but also equally 
as much to broaden the philosophical discourse 
which has done little to investigate the very 
same philosophical questions architects do. The 
hope with bringing the two disciplines together 
is to propel the broader discourse beyond the 
limitations of  a purely visual understanding of  
architecture and its aesthetics. 

The essays in this inaugural issue move beyond 
those limitations by drawing on a diverse range 
of  approaches. David Leatherbarrow’s “Sharing 
Sense” employs aesthetic readings of  architecture to 
illuminate ethical problems. Paul Guyer’s “Pluralism 
and Monism” traces a strand in the philosophical 
genealogy from Kant to Ruskin, establishing 
what the cognitivist approach to understanding 
architecture is and how this position is situated firmly 
within both ethics and aesthetics. Emmanuel Petit’s 
essay “Architecture of  Ethics” looks at the ethical 
journey of  the architect Stanley Tigerman through 
his architectural practice in Chicago. Rafeal De 
Clercq’s essay “Building Plans as Natural Symbols” 
investigates how the architectural plan may be 
interpreted and understood in terms of  symbology. 
Nathaniel Coleman’s “Is Beauty Still Relevant?” is a 

As editors, 
we are not 

interested in 
homogenizing 

the thinking 
represented 

in the nascent 
field, but rather 

in engendering 
genuine debate

“

”



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fine-grained analysis of  an aspect of  ancient Greek aesthetics applied to 
contemporary artistic problems, which seeks to examine whether and how 
ethics and aesthetics can be understood in tandem. Rick Fox’s “A New 
Interpretative Taxonomy” is a textbook example of  epistemic inquiry, 
which delineates common positions within popular architecture discourse: 
the singularist, constructivist, and contextualist. 

To further explore the journal’s limits we include an interview with 
Andrew Ballantyne, who has made many of  first successful forays into 
the interdisciplinary territory of  architecture and philosophy, as well 
as an interview with Chicago-based architect Stanley Tigerman, and a 
book review. In later issues, we hope to encourage more dialogue with 
our readers in the form of  responses to published essays, book reviews, 
roundtables, etc. Occasional themed issues are also anticipated. The 
society’s international events will continue to supply the journal with 
papers, but we also maintain an open submission. Submission details and 
guidelines can be found at isparchitecture.com or in the back of  this issue. 

Endnotes
1. “Ethics and Aesthetics Conference Website.” International Society for the 
Philosophy of  Architecture, 13 Dec. 2010. Web. 30 May 2014. <ispaconference.
wordpress.com>.
2. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, §6.421.
3. Fahey, Carolyn. “2012 Conference: Call for Papers.” International Society 
for the Philosophy of  Architecture, 13 Dec. 2010. Web. 30 Jan. 2014. 
<isparchitecture.com>.



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Sharing Sense: or, how ethics 
might be the subject matter of 
architectural aesthetics
David Leatherbarrow

Posing a productive question about ethics 
and aesthetics in architecture is no easy matter, for 
these subjects raise whole clusters of  problems, 
not simple or single questions. That observation 
is not new; these complexities were apparent two 
millennia ago when the terms were first introduced. 
Aristotle wrote not one but three books on ethics; as 
for aesthetics, also three, if  you count the Poetics, the 
lost book on Comedy, and the Rhetoric. After centuries 
of  successive translations and interpretations, 
through semantic and conceptual innovations, 
as well as substitutions, alterations and forgeries, 
we have an exceedingly wide range of  issues and 
meanings from which we borrow and select, always 
partially, sometimes uncritically. In our search for 
non-trivial form-making in architecture we have 
been invited to suppose that ethical considerations 
will help us imagine aesthetic approaches that are 
not limited to purely visual concerns. In the terms 
of  a title frequently cited in discussions of  both 
ethics and aesthetics, this question would ask how 
the beautiful might be relevant.1 An implied corollary 
is that ethical understanding in architecture can be 
made tangible through aesthetic creativity.

Although these premises are suggestive, 
I believe that progress along these lines will not 
be straightforward. The realities of  professional 
practice in our time present a serious challenge 
to any aesthetics-substantiated-by-ethics thesis. Like 
it or not, architectural work today is largely a 
matter of  business, in which project making is 
hurried and abbreviated by cost-cutting measures: 
mostly we ‘fast-track’ design development, reuse 



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details that worked well in previous projects, specify familiar products, 
have specialists take responsibility for fragments of  designs rather than 
allow single individuals to develop projects in full, and so on. These 
measures are meant to save time and assure outcomes. There have been 
business-minded changes in the ways architects work with builders, too. 
Building construction, a practice that traditionally involved both skill and 
innovation is now seen as the sort of  labor that requires regulation by 
the various instruments of  managerial science. Today’s design business 
also constrains the sorts of  collaborations that have historically enriched 
projects—collaborations among architects, builders, clients, critics, and 
members of  the public. Today we govern collaboration through contract 
administration. Design as planning and construction as management not 
only save money but allow confident investment. 

These comments are not meant as a complaint, only an observation 
that conditions are no longer what they once were; that the sense of  the 
discipline possessed by academics and critics is often out of  step with the 
realities of  practice. If  reflection is to illuminate action, if  the word is to 
render a service to the work—something I believe—then the divergence I 
have described must be taken into account.2

As in most types of  business, moral issues rarely obtrude 
themselves into contemporary design practice; except, of  course, in the 
sorts of  arguments that lead to legal proceedings. Architects tend to think 
that ethics is an academic subject, which indeed it is, with linkages to other 
scholarly pursuits: philology, hermeneutics, decision theory, and so on. 
The bearing of  these on the architecture trade is far from obvious. The 
old idea that theory is unrelated to practice provides a historical context 
for the incompatibilities we sense. More significantly, architecture has 
been absorbed into a broader framework of  technological thought and 
production, a kind of  thought that emancipates design from place and 
functional purpose. Why? Because technical knowledge allows one to 
do again what has been done before, regardless of  context. Nothing in 
work that is essentially technical acknowledges territorial obligations.3 
This is one of  the reasons why technological objects enjoy world-wide 
distribution. Ethical action is just the reverse; its deliberations and decisions 
are always bound to concrete circumstances and ways of  living, without 
which they lose their sense of  urgency, difficulty, and criteria of  relevance. 
Less positively, calls for ethical behavior sometimes lead to localism and 
insularity. In these cases the agreements that structure communities are 
buttressed by practices of  exclusion.4

Faced with this dichotomy, one might think that reciprocal 
support is the answer, that techniques could give concrete form to 



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ethical understanding and that judgments about 
what is right in given circumstances could give 
instrumentality a sense of  what should—not only 
could—be done. This possibility is implied in a 
wonderful aphorism from Georg Simmel: “The 
richness of  form is that it can adopt an infinity 
of  contents—the richness of  content is that it 
can enter into an infinity of  forms. Where both 
infinities meet, the finite construct emerges. . .”5

Unfortunately, when today’s designers seek 
alternatives to technical reason they generally turn 
to purely formal operations—sometimes called 
“aesthetic” practices—and focus on geometric 
experimentation and innovation. We see a lot of  
it today. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with 
form; one cannot imagine a design without it. But, 
as with technical approaches, working with shape 
or geometry alone runs against the grain of  ethical 
understanding because modern aestheticizing 
accents not so much what is shared in society and 
culture, but what is unique to a designer’s personal 
technique and vision, an architect’s brand. Critics 
reinforce aestheticizing by praising experimentation 
in architecture in the ways they would less practical 
forms of  expression and authorship. We commonly 
identify architectural works with the name of  their 
designer: a Nouvel, Gehry, or Ando building, as 
if  an accommodation were nothing more than a 

We commonly 
identify 

architectural 
works with the 

name of their 
designer: a Nouvel, 

Gehry, or Ando 
building, as if an 
accommodation 

were nothing 
more than a 

representation, 
a paper menu the 

meal

“

”

Schreiner House: View towards garden



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representation, a paper menu the meal.
Despite these tendencies, one occasionally senses that there 

may still be some shared background for judgments about what makes a 
building good, even beautiful. This background is not so much what each 
of  us might state as our values, but a historically constituted and forceful 
ethos that shows itself  now and again in both the settings of  everyday life 
and works of  art. Obviously, the key question concerns the relationship 
between these two. 

How and when might this ethics-made-apparent-by-aesthetics come 
into being? I will begin my answer by citing an early modern architect, 
Adolf  Loos. Personalizing his avant garde polemic, he wistfully reminisced 
as follows:

I did not grow up, thank God, in a stylish home. At that time no one knew what 
it was yet. ... Here was the table, a totally crazy and intricate piece of  furniture 
...[with] a shocking bit of  work as a lock. But it was our table, ours! Can you 
understand what that means? Evenings, when I was a young boy and the lamp 
was burning, I was never able to tear myself  away from it. And there was the 
writing table. There was an ink stain on it, my sister Hermine had knocked over 
the inkwell when she was a little baby. And there was the picture of  my parents 
...[with] a hideous frame ... a wedding gift from the workers at my father’s shop. 
And that old-fashioned chair, a leftover from my grandmother’s household. Every 
piece of  furniture, everything, every object had a story to tell, a family history. The 
house was never finished; it grew along with us and we grew within it. Of  course 
it did not have any style to it. That means there was no strangeness, no age. But 
there was one style that our home did have—the style of  its occupants, the style 
of  our family.6

My opening suggestion is that the style Loos describes embodies an ethos. 
It was not a personal matter, such as the manner of  Henry van de Velde 
or Charles Renee Mackintosh, nor a set of  rules or objective values. Loos 
describes a framework that was formed out of  habits and shared practices, 
also conflicts, accidents and bad decisions. He does not say, but it would 
not be wrong to suppose, that some measure of  design intention was part 
of  it too, even if  non-professional. Such an ethos attains concreteness in the 
desired and recurring situations of  prosaic life, in the house of  course, but 
elsewhere too, in all manner of  situations, each with its own decorum and 
typical configuration. Ethical knowledge comes not just from the intimate 
but also from the public. It is acquired through encounter, meetings that 
are alternately familiar and challenging, assuring and conflictual. One 
title from Loos, Trotzdem, makes the difficulty of  ethical action apparent. 
Shared sense is key, for it is what distinguishes ethical understanding from 



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the various kinds of  technical knowledge possessed 
by individuals. Because it is teachable, technical 
knowledge individuates: a person taught to bake 
bread has a different contribution to a meal than a 
person who knows how to grow vegetables or play 
music. Architects know how to design, carpenters 
to construct. The living ethos Loos described is 
something different, neither taught nor possessed 
individually, but inherited in a given culture, 
modified slowly, and often taken for granted. Thus, 
there is a tension between the comparatively stable 
and shared ground of  ethical sense and productive 
and relatively autonomous character of  technical 
production. Negotiating this tension is the real 
work of  design (neither experimentation nor 
affirmation). 

I have used the English words ethics and ethos 
interchangeably. To explain my usage I need to take 
a detour into word origins. Two terms interest me, 
ethics and ecology. I will say why shortly.

Of  the word ecology’s two-parts I will discuss 
only the first. Despite the fact that this compound 
was introduced in the nineteenth-century, the 
two-parts are ancient. The eco of  ecology derives 
from the Greek word oikos, meaning household 
or estate—something larger and more inclusive 
than a single building. A faint echo of  this origin 
survives in the grade-school subject ‘home 
economics,’ but that term is essentially redundant. 
Our modern sense of  economics narrows the 
ancient meaning, which embraced all the tasks 
and understandings of  domestic stewardship. 
Xenophon’s famous Oeconomicus described a well-
run house, farm, or extended family domain. 
As a treatise on estate management, it addresses 
topics such as the arrangement and storage of  
furnishings and supplies, the hiring of  slaves, 
the cultivation of  soils, and the management of  
one’s family. His architectural topics included the 
building’s placement and orientation, with respect 
to times, seasons, weather patterns, and natural 

In our search 
for non-trivial 
form-making in 

architecture 
we have 

been invited 
to suppose 

that ethical 
considerations 

will help 
us imagine 
aesthetic 

approaches 
that are not 

limited to 
purely visual 

concerns

“

”



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resources, as well as existing buildings and settlements. Further, his 
account presents a play of  analogies between the building, body, and 
world, as well as practical advice on forms of  cooperation, achieving 
health, undertaking simple and teachable forms of  work, and living an 
honorable life. Here the ethical is linked to the ecological. Discussions 
of  ethics addressed what is required for a good life, as the opening pages 
of  Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics make clear. Local interests were at issue, 
but also involvements with outsiders. What involvement was to Aristotle 
orientation was to Xenophon. With respect to buildings, the latter’s basic 
premise—one I think we should restore to current thinking—is that the 
sources of  architectural order are partly external to the work itself. For my 
part, I call this architecture oriented otherwise.7 One way of  making the work’s 
involvements clear is to repeat the fact that Xenophon describes an estate 
not a house. Much later, in sixteenth-century usage—Palladian theory and 
practice—this meant attention to the form and life of  the entire villa, 
not only the casa. Pre-modern economics, then, was the discipline that 
allowed a person or family to keep a well-ordered residence, given limited 
means, energy, and time. Because oikos also pertained to an individual’s 
relationships with others, ethical considerations were key to ideas about 
the house. Economics involved good housekeeping for one’s family and 
for others as both groups existed together in the natural world. This style 
of  thinking joins together two terms and two sciences—economics and 
ethics.

Can we equate this early sense of ethos with our current sense of  
ethics? Yes and no. No, especially if  we assume the original term meant 
something like morals or a code of  conduct meant to guide everyone’s 
behavior. Conduct was signified by the ancient word, but it meant a more 
particular and less objectified sense of  behavior than our sense of  ethics 
typically implies. A good comparison is with health, for the knowledge one 
has of  one’s own heath can be distinguished from the account presented 
in scientific description. That’s why good doctors always ask patients how 
they themselves feel, regardless of  what the thermometer says.8 Ethos was 
also constituted culturally and apparent in patterns of  behavior that were, 
in turn, subtended by the belief  that they were good. The best translation 
of  ethos I can propose is habit of  dwelling. This usage accords with ancient 
usage and can work in modern understanding. Accordingly, habits are not 
only behaviors performed repeatedly but those that are right in specific 
instances. Dwelling habits can be seen as ethical if  they embody the ways 
of  life individuals and others desire in particular circumstances. Decisions 
about what makes a setting good are the ethical aspects of  design.

Here, then, is a definition of  architecture that acknowledges these 



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terms and builds on the premises they establish: 
built works give durable dimension and legible 
expression to the habits of  residing that are 
commonly understood to be good. In ancient 
thought a single principle governed the design 
and construction of  works of  this kind: decorum in 
Latin, prepon in Greek.9 For Vitruvius décor was the 
principle that allowed one to judge that the form 
of  a building was appropriate for its cultural value, 
use, and location. In rhetoric the term indicated the 
style suitable for the subject; gravity for funerals, for 
example. In everyday life anything or any act could 
be considered with respect to its appropriateness or 
fit: celebration is an appropriate response to victory, 
repayment to debt; likewise, fabric is a fitting choice 
for shirts, leather for shoes, and so on. The key is 
this: decisions of  suitability were made concretely, 
in view of  existing circumstances, seen as variations 
on a norm; in architecture, a cultural norm. Today, 
the word decorum sounds a bit stuffy or dusty. 
Our equivalents are character and atmosphere: a 
spatial setting has the right atmosphere when its 
dimensions, forms, and materials are appropriate for 
and express a given event or situation. Indefinite but 
unmistakable, the many types of  spatial character 
or atmosphere allow a range of  embodiments and 
encourage interpretation.

I have said that decisions about suitability 
are partly determined by conditions external to 
the work, but only partly. Good arrangements also 
depend on relationships among elements internal 
to the work. Since antiquity the term that named 
the right relationships between a work’s component 
parts has been proportion. Our English word derives 
from Latin, which translated the Greek word for 
symmetry. That coupling sounds puzzling when the 
bilateral sense of  the latter term comes to mind. For 
the Greeks symmetry resulted from commensurate 
relationships, as indicated etymologically: sym-metron 
meant ‘of  like measure.’ One way to distinguish the 
Greek and Latin words is to see symmetry as norm-

The best 
translation 

of ethos I can 
propose is habit 

of dwelling

“
”



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definition and proportion as norm-realization, the first quantitative, the 
second qualitative. Unfortunately, this simple distinction was complicated 
by Vitruvius’ introduction of  a third term, analogy. Symmetry arises from 
proportion and the Greeks called this analogia.10 This last word was not 
explained by Vitruvius but the authors on whom he relied, Varro and 
Cicero, did provide definitions. Varro, in Lingua Latina, introduced both 
terms in his discussion of  regularity, relation, and ratio in the inflection 
of  terms. For relation or ratio Varro read pro portione, by proportionate 
likeness, which was in his opinion the same thing as the Greek analogia, 
that is, according to logos.11 

The word symmetria also appeared in the famous Canon of  
Polyclitus, a treatise on sculpture. The Canon’s importance is attested 
by many sources, most clear and instructive for us is a passage from 
the medical writer Galen: “beauty, says Polyclitus, resides not in the 
commensurability of  the [the elements of  the human body], but in the 
commensurability of  [its members], finger to finger ... these to the forearm 
… [and finally] everything to everything.”12 Galen’s distinction between 
elements and members defines the former as the “hot, cold, dry and wet” 
parts of  the body and the latter as fingers, hands, arms, and so on. The 
commensurability of  elements leads to health, that of  members to beauty. 

Thus for the doctor, proportionality could be discovered among 
the body’s warm and wet aspects; the balanced co-ordination—symmetry 
and proportionality—of  the four elements defined good health, an 
ethos of  suitable, known relationships. Widening the horizon, but 
earlier, the philosopher Empedocles argued that the qualities that enter 
into combination in the body are akin to those that make up the wider 
environment: the air we breathe is the air of  the heavens, at the supper table 
our bodies incorporate the yield of  the land.13 Again we see a connection 
between ethos and oikos, ethics and what would come to be called ecology. 
Earlier, still, in the Hippocratic texts, the connections between character 
and place demonstrated the same set of  interconnections or continuities. 
The symmetry of  elements, in both the body and the world, structures 
action and life. The key point is that these actions may appear to be 
beautiful in a metric or formal sense. When they do, in a well-proportioned 
plan, for example, the work is both suitable and beautiful; which is to say 
ethical and aesthetic.

 When the balance between the body’s elements has been 
disturbed by disease the ancient doctor’s task was to devise a regime 
that would restore the correct proportion of  the hot, cold, dry, and moist 
elements. A synonym for healthy is well-tempered, for sick, ill-tempered. 
The intemperate among us are characterized by asymmetry. This is what 



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Aristotle’s successor, Theophrastus, described 
in his famous book on character, which was the 
ancient source of  later architectural theories 
about a building’s character (Boffrand, Blondel, 
Boullee, Quatremere, and Loos). Again, while this 
symmetry of  qualities defines good health, it is not 
always apparent; Cosmetic arts—lip painting, hair 
coloring—fabricate attractive appearances that can 
cover disease and sickness. Yet symmetry is not 
only a matter of  appearances. Cicero wrote that 
while the beauty of  the body is attractive to the 
eyes because of  the fit composure, proportion and 
harmony of  its members, the order, consistency 
and regularity of  words and actions, the proportions 
of  conduct can also be judged beautiful.14 There is 
a similitude between physicality and attitude. Can 
the same be true of  a building, or must architects 
make a choice between the measures that define the 
building’s physical body and the patterns of  life the 
work is meant to accommodate. If  not, what might 
illustrate their conjunction?

A common event—a shared meal—may 
provide an answer. Defined prosaically, a meal is a 
division and sharing of  consumables. Often, though 
not always, one person is charged with the task of  
dividing the whole into the portions or shares that 
will be distributed to the group. As if  the plate of  
food were akin to the plan of  a building, two acts are 
essential in the work of  apportioning: division and 
distribution (or disposition, dispositio, L., or diathesis, 
Gk.). Each act assumes a good sense of  measure, 
of  the dish and the desires of  the diners. Here is 
how table-top proportioning works: obviously, no 
one is given a piece that’s too big or too small, but a 
fair share is not necessarily an equal one, a person’s 
rank or status—a house guest, for example—may 
entitle them to a larger or preferred portion, also a 
person’s hunger or size. Inequality is not only fair 
in dining but required. When the meal unfolds as 
it should, when the child and adult, family member 
and guest are given their due, the event can be said 

The key point is 
that these actions 

may appear to be 
beautiful in a metric 

or formal sense.  
When they do, in a 

well-proportioned 
plan, for example, 

the work is both 
suitable and 

beautiful; which is 
to say ethical and 

aesthetic

“

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to be properly portioned or well-proportioned. Our current sense of  a 
balanced diet derives from but abbreviates this idea, neglecting issues 
of  social rank and expressions of  generosity. Nevertheless, table-top 
economy presents a fairly good portrait of  a group’s social structure and 
internal relationships and ethics. By portrait I mean legible appearance, 
which sometimes can be beautiful.

Edward Hopper’s Table for Ladies shows a man and a woman at a 
restaurant table, sharing some beverage, white wine is what I would like to 
think. His desire for a drink seems to have been interrupted by something 
she has said. They are not alone, or will not be for long, additional tables 
have been prepared for others; there is also a woman in black behind a 
countertop and register; and a waitress or cook dressed in white, grasping a 
basket placed among other items on display—I can’t tell if  she is removing 
or returning it to where it belongs. With respect to the setting’s economy, 
emblems of  excess and restraint have their place in the scene. On the one 
hand a principle of  tacit serviceability governs many of  the elements we 
see: the expanse of  glass we are looking through, the chalkboard of  prices, 
the plain wooden cladding, the mirrors, and black and white floor tiles all 
express modest and purposeful urbanity. Restraint seems to be the theme 
of  the figure in black: looking down, curled into her work, concentrated 
and concentric, she is fully absorbed in collecting and counting, also limited 
by her work station, which is itself  equipped with containers of  various 
sorts—the cash register, toothpick dispenser, and vitrine. The figure in 
white shows something completely different, not limitation but outward 
reach, suggesting a range of  involvements, or spread of  interests: clearly 
she’s more concerned about something on the street than the basket of  
fruit—if  only for the precise moment Hopper brings before us—but her 
apron links her back to the kitchen; her shadow in the first mirror gives 
her a place among the diners, and her reach ties her to the consumables on 
show. The line-up of  fruit, meat, and greens says no one—at least the two 
at the table—will go hungry, or even thirsty for that matter, as the bottles 
below the server’s right elbow are clearly within reach. 

This little scene, like any other, has its own internal coherence. 
The objects make the room all-of-a-piece. All that’s required for public 
dining is there, nothing missing, nothing unnecessary. The room’s 
geometries argue the same point, unbroken patterns, clear horizons, and 
repetitions bring all of  the parts into coherence. But to say that the room 
is well-defined, that its parts are commensurate, does not mean it is insular. 
Topographically, the setting and events reach back to the kitchen, forward 
to the street, and upward. The diner’s hats and coat recall the weather and 
the town, the latter is also the server’s focus. More abstractly, or formally 



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the prominent diagonals (her back and its shadow 
line, the row of  grapefruits, the window frame, 
and the hand rail) open the enclosure to settings 
beyond its ostensible limits. Just as the renaissance 
villa coordinated the internal structures of  the casa 
with the external opportunities of  the location—
according to the principle of  orientation and the rule 
of  “ecology”—this setting’s character, temperature, 
or ethos result from the interplay between interior 
and exterior orders. The proportionality Hopper 
has constructed, the similitude of  ratios that stages 
a possible meal, not only accommodates a way of  
life but also paints a portrait; in this case one of  
considerable beauty.

To end I would like to describe something 
similar in the works of  the great Norwegian architect 
Sverre Fehn. Fehn lectured often but wrote little, 

to say that the 
room is well-
defined, that 

its parts are 
commensurate, 

does not mean it 
is insular

“

”

Schreiner House: fireplace



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just one essay, which is really a gloss on his visits to Moroccan villages.15 His 
account begins ecologically and ends ethically: furthest out from the village 
center, at the threshold of  the desert, he found covered stalls that protected 
the livestock. Closer in were small storerooms for animal fodder, which were 
necessary because grazing was impossible in the parched environment. Still 
closer to the heart of  the village were the dwellings, ringing its center. The 
center itself, however, shifted in dimension and configuration, by virtue of  
changes in the perimeter rings, as if  by some reversal of  the laws of  physics 
ripples of  land and building form converged on the center in order to shape 
it. About this central space Fehn had little to say, his description abruptly 
turned at this point to the dwelling itself, seen in section.  

He began with a workplace, observing that the cool temperature and 
deep shade that result from its lower position are congenial to housework 
when the summer heat and light are too fierce for work of  any other kind. 
Just as the sectional position of  these rooms reduces heat gain, so does the 
thickness of  the house’s walls. Above the ground level is the floor for food 
preparation, above that the level for sleeping and living. Little furniture gives 
a trace of  these activities, but there seems to be no uncertainty about uses 
to which these rooms are put, for their long history makes these practices 
strikingly stable, contrasting domestic topography with the shifting sands 
outdoors. And these uses are not only the kind we might call functional, the 
ethos they express is also symbolic: the instance Fehn gives of  the latter is the 
removal of  shoes before a meal. Enabling the meal also is a mat or carpet on 
which one sits, and the table around which people gather. While Fehn does 
not elaborate the analogy, he implies that a ratio or symmetry governs the use 
and meaning of  these architectural elements: what the mat is to the dwelling 
floor the table is to the village center, both serving as gathering places 
that give orientation to a “round dance” that ties together the settings that 
make up the perimeter, the very same ones that accommodate the dance’s 
functional patterns. As if  they were capable of  performing this dance, the 
several pieces of  furniture in the house are “mobile.” This movement of  
people and their accommodations, Fehn explains, is a remnant of  nomadic 
culture, the steps and shoes of  which still carry ancient sands into the house, 
challenging the distinction between inside and outside just observed. With 
this entire structure in mind—from livestock stalls to the central carpet—
Fehn’s approach can be called cultural ecology, or an aesthetics of  ethical life.

There are two aspects of  this account I want to hold onto: the 
rings of  distance that encircle the house, giving its settings and events their 
orientation and limits, and the coupling of  the practical and representational 
aspects of  architectural elements, as if  ways of  living and of  showing, ethics 
and aesthetics can, indeed, be linked together.



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Schreiner House: Plan

Schreiner House: Dining space



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In the Schreiner House, finished several years ago, Fehn indicates 
just this coupling, this double proportionality: forms to functions and 
house to environment. The corner of  the dining space, where the window 
and side walls meet will be my point of  focus. Reportedly, Fehn himself  
rather liked this position, especially during wintertime meals, when the brick 
bench on which the leather cushions sit radiated heat from the fireplace 
behind. I sat there just once, in summer, but could easily imagine the spot’s 
thermal sense. The social dimension of  a meal there benefited from the 
spatial dimension of  the situation, between the warm surround and the 
open prospect. Tectonically, this corner joins together the building’s two 
basic types of  enclosure, timber cladding and window walls. Using the 
term ‘wall’ for both the glazing and the cladding is perhaps incorrect for 
each is really a ‘partition,’ which is to say a non-load-bearing element that 
structures space, modulates natural forces, and confers character. When 
seated at the dining table, the view into the garden is unimpeded; the 
glazing extends from the floor to the ceiling and from one side to the 
other. An adjustable blind hangs from the top frame, ready to block any 
glare that might arrive from the late afternoon sun. The right hand edge 
of  the glass panel also operates in the milieu: a narrow louver that edges 
the glazing screens the interior against insects and admits fresh air through 
a full-height hinged panel. Turning to the timber cladding to the right 
of  the dining table, we find another well-proportioned ensemble: at eye 
height a cantilevered book case sets one level, the horizontal boarding 
extending the enclosure establishes another, and the clear story glazing that 
admits direct light to the depth of  the room defines still another horizon. 
Through these means the changing conditions outside the house—the 
environment’s constructive and corrosive forces—are modified to suit 
the interests and needs of  the interiors, preserving its quiet stability and 
warm intimacy, which is to say its character, atmosphere, or ethos. The 
atmosphere Fehn has made is both tangible and legible. Is it also beautiful? 
My answer is yes because its aesthetic shows nothing less than how we 
might share the sense of  the world it accommodates and expresses.

Endnotes
1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of  the Beautiful (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1987) “Relevance” translates Gadamer’s Aktualität.
2. I borrow this phrase, “the word rendering service to the work,” from Paul 
Ricoeur; see: “Work and Word,” History and Truth (Evanston: Northwestern 
University Press, 1965), 197-222
3. The argument is developed in the concluding chapter to David Leatherbarrow 
and Mohsen Mostafavi, Surface Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.,: MIT, 2002), 215-



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242.
4. On this point see: Helmuth Plessner, Limits of  Community: a critique of  social radicalism 
(New York: Humanity Books, 1999).
5. Georg Simmel,”Life and Form,” in Rembrandt [1916] (London: Routledge, 2005). 
6. Adolf  Loos, “Interiors in the Rotunda,” [1898], in Spoken into the Void (Cambridge, 
Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 22-27.
7. David Leatherbarrow, Architecture Oriented Otherwise (New York: Princeton 
Architectural Press, 2009).
8. This point is made clearly in Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Treatment and Dialogue,” 
The Enigma of  Health (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 125-140.
9. Although somewhat old, the best study of  this term in architecture remains Alste 
Horn-Oncken, Über das Sichliche (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967)
10. Vitruvius, On Architecture, 3.1.1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 
1970), 159.
11. Varro, On the Latin Language, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 
10, 36-38.
12. Galen, On the Doctrines of  Hippocrates and Plato, 5.3.15 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 
1981)
13. See the unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation by Esra Sahin, Exchange of  Forces: 
environmental definition of  materials in the works of  Vitruvius, Alberti, Le Corbusier, and 
Peter Zumthor, University of  Pennsylvania, 2009: http://repository.upenn.edu/
edissertations/76
14. Cicero, On Duties, ch. 18 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1913)
15. Sverre Fehn, “Moroccan Primitive Architecture,” [1952] in The Poetry of  the Straight 
Line (Helsinki: Museum of  Finnish Architecture, 1992), 38-41





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Monism and Pluralism: The History 
of Aesthetics and the Philosophy 
of Architecture - Part I
Paul Guyer

I. Monism and Pluralism in the Early History of 
Aesthetics

One way to think about the history of  
aesthetics since its inception as a properly named 
subdiscipline of  philosophy in the early eighteenth 
century is to think of  it as a debate about the 
right way to understand the relations among the 
terms of  the Neo-Platonist triad comprised by 
the true, the good, and the beautiful: do these 
terms designate three separate domains of  human 
interest, the theoretical, the practical and moral, 
and the aesthetic, the boundaries between which 
must be sharply defined and maintained, or do they 
designate three aspects of  human experience that 
can and should be fused in practice, indeed do they 
suggest that the distinctive function of  art among 
human activities is precisely to fuse our natural love 
of  beauty with our theoretical and moral concerns, 
to provide a kind of  unity in human experience that 
we otherwise do not find?1 Immanuel Kant might be 
thought to be the foremost of  separatists rather than 
synthesizers in the modern history of  aesthetics: his 
definition in the “Analytic of  the Beautiful” in the 
Critique of  the Power of  Judgment of  the “judgment 
of  taste” as “aesthetic,” where that means that it 
is neither cognitive nor practical, that on the one 
hand “In order to decide whether or not something 
is beautiful, we do not relate the representation 
by means of  understanding to the object for 
cognition”2 and that on the other hand “The 
agreeable, the beautiful, and the good...designate 
three different relations of  representations to the 
feeling of  pleasure and displeasure,” that “One can 



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say that among all these three kinds of  satisfaction only that of  the taste 
for the beautiful is a disinterested and free satisfaction; for no interest, 
neither that of  the senses nor that of  reason, extorts approval,”3 seems 
to assert that the experience of  beauty has nothing to do with knowledge 
of  truth or with practical interest of  any kind, whether merely prudential 
interest in the gratification of  the senses or a more elevated moral interest 
of  some kind. By contrast, an author like Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 
third Earl of  Shaftesbury, seems to assert an underlying identity or at 
least continuity among the true, the good, and the beautiful when he says 
things like “the most natural Beauty in the world is Honesty, and Moral 
Truth. For all Beauty is TRUTH,”4 and “since for our parts, we have already 
decreed that ‘Beauty and Good are still the same’”;5  in fact, we do not 
even have to add these two statements together to get a threefold equation 
of  truth, goodness, and beauty, for although Shaftesbury continues the 
first of  these statements by saying that “True Features make the Beauty of  
a Face; and true Proportions, the beauty of  Architecture; as true Measures 
that of  Harmony and Musick. In Poetry, which is all Fable, Truth still is 
the Perfection,”6 which might suggest that Shaftesbury has in mind some 
formalist conception of  truth, perhaps as coherence in the case of  faces, 
architecture, and music, and correspondence in the case of  poetry, his 
opening statement had made it clear that he also considers honesty as 
a kind of  truth, and thus does seem to think of  all truth as having a 
moral dimension, thus of  the true, the good, and the beautiful as truly 
coextensive or unified.

Kant’s position in aesthetics is actually more complicated than these 
opening remarks suggest: they are part of  an initial analysis of  the simplest 
experience of  beauty, but by no means a complete statement of  his 
account of  art, a fortiori of  architecture. But before I say anything more 
about Kant, I want to announce the thesis of  this paper, which is that the 
history of  modern thought about architecture is marked by the same kind 
of  tension between separatist approaches on the one hand, which locate 
the value of  architecture or even define it by a single aesthetic possibility, 
and synthesizing approaches on the other, which find in architecture the 
possibility of  satisfying in a unified way a variety of  human interests. And 
my further claim will be that even though there seems to be a powerful 
human tendency to prefer simplicity to complexity, not just in academic 
philosophy but in thought in general, there is rarely a good argument to be 
made for a separatist or reductionist approach as opposed to a synthesizing 
one: to put it simply, why should we ever prefer an impoverished to an 
enriched form of  experience, at least as long as the latter does not simply 
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My plan for this paper, which will appear in two 
parts, is as follows. In the remainder of  this section, 
drawing on my recently published A History of  
Modern Aesthetics,7 I will show how three different 
conceptions of  the source of  aesthetic value were 
introduced in the eighteenth century that were 
only partially synthesized by Kant, although they 
were more fully synthesized by several others, but 
separated again, in favor of  a purely cognitivist 
approach to aesthetics, in the hands of  German 
Idealists such as Hegel and Schopenhauer (only to 
be fully synthesized again by a few figures at the 
end of  the nineteenth century, such as George 
Santayana, and then again by a number of  the 
most interesting aestheticians of  the twentieth 
century, such as Richard Wollheim, although I will 
not have room to discuss either of  these figures 
here). In the second section, I will show how the 
separatist tendency of  Idealists such as Hegel and 
Schopenhauer manifested itself  in their thought 
about the specific case of  architecture. In the final 
section of  the paper, which will appear as Part Two, 
I will consider the synthesizing rather than separatist 
approach to architecture of  John Ruskin in The Seven 
Lamps of  Architecture (1849), although to be sure to 
be of  continued use to thought about architecture 
today Ruskin’s views must be modernized in certain 
ways, some of  which he himself  at least grudgingly 
foresaw.

My general claim about the history of  modern 
aesthetics goes like this. Although the field was only 
named by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in his 
1735 master’s thesis Philosophical Meditations on some 
Matters pertaining to Poetry,8 and the new name was 
not received into English until the early nineteenth 
century,9 this was an adult baptism: in some ways 
at least the field is as old as philosophy itself, 
beginning with Aristotle’s response in the Poetics to 
Plato’s attack upon the arts in the Republic, or even 
with Plato’s own, perhaps anticipatory response in 
the Symposium to the argument of  the Republic. In 

the history 
of modern 

thought about 
architecture is 
marked by the 

same kind of 
tension between 

separatist 
approaches ....

and synthesizing 
approaches

“

”



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the Republic, Plato argued, in the name of  Socrates but no doubt going 
well beyond anything the historical Socrates had held, that the arts 
should be largely (although not entirely) excluded from the education of  
the future rulers of  the well-ordered states, because they are cognitively 
worthless, being at three removes from the truth, and morally deleterious, 
because without a sound cognitive content they do nothing but exacerbate 
emotional tendencies that the guardians instead need to learn to control.10  
In the Symposium, by contrast, whether or not hewing more faithfully to the 
thought of  the historical Socrates, Plato had argued that the appreciation 
of  beauty in earthly things is the first step toward knowledge of  the form 
of  the beautiful itself,11 and in the Poetics Aristotle famously defended 
the cognitive import of  art by stating that “poetry is something more 
philosophic and of  greater import than history, since its statements are of  
the nature rather of  universals, whereas those of  history are singulars.”12  
My thought is that this cognitivist justification of  the value of  art, the 
thought that the experience of  beauty is actually the experience of  
something of  the greatest cognitive import, perhaps the experience of  a 
kind of  truth that is not given to us otherwise than through the experience 
of  beauty or is at least not given to us in such a palpable and moving form 
by anything other than the experience of  beauty, remained the central 
idea of  aesthetics throughout subsequent antiquity, the Middle Ages, and 
the Renaissance, and continued to be a powerful presence throughout the 
eighteenth, nineteenth, and even twentieth centuries, where it remained 
the foundation of  the very different aesthetic theories of, for example, 
Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno.

The cognitivist approach to aesthetics manifested itself  in the 
eighteenth century in several forms. One form was the view that the 
essential function of  art is imitation, with the underlying assumption that 
the function of  imitation is information. That all fine art could be reduced 
to the single principle of  imitation was of  course the thesis of  Charles 
Batteux, who argued in his work of  1746 whose very title promised the 
reduction of  fine art to a single principle that “it can be shown from the 
inner nature of  the human understanding that the imitation of  nature is 
the common object” of  all the arts “and that they are not distinguished 
from one another by anything except the means they apply toward the 
execution of  this imitation,”13 and who explicitly opposed Plato’s worry 
that imitation could have a deleterious effect on morals with the argument 
(appealing to the authority of  Horace) that from imitations the best 
manners and morals can also be learned.14  But before Batteux, the German 
Christian Wolff  had illustrated his idea that pleasure arises from the 
sensory perception of  perfection with the case of  painting, the perfection 



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or function of  which consists in imitation: “If  I 
see a painting that is similar to the object that it 
is to represent, and contemplate its similarity, then 
I take pleasure in it. The perfection of  a painting 
consists in its similarity” to its object. “For since 
a painting is nothing other than a representation 
of  a certain object on a tablet or plane surface, so 
is everything in it harmonious if  nothing can be 
distinguished in it that one does not also perceive 
in the object itself.”15  Wolff ’s follower Baumgarten 
might also be thought to have taken an essentially 
cognitivist approach to aesthetics, in spite of  his 
subtle transformation of  Wolff ’s formula “sensory 
perception of  perfection” into the formula 
“perfection of  sensory cognition as such,”16 which 
might seem to foreground the representation 
or medium of  a work of  art over its object or 
content, when he begins his great unfinished work 
the Aesthetica, the first philosophical treatise to 
be so entitled, with the topic of  the “beauty of  
cognition,” and lists as the first of  the beauties of  
cognition the wealth of  material or content in a 
work of  art, ubertas aesthetica.17  It is this aspect of  
art that is reflected in Baumgarten’s conception of  
a poem or other work of  art as a cognitively dense 
representation, one that is “extensively clear”18 or 
packs a great deal of  content into a pregnant image 
rather than separating content into its constituents 
as scientific analysis does. 

A fuller reading of  the Aesthetica, however, 
shows that Baumgarten was not just even a subtle 
follower of  Wolff, but that he had integrated into 
his outlook a second major approach to aesthetics, 
one that overtly rejected Plato’s suspicion of  the 
arousal of  emotions through the arts and instead 
saw the arousal of  emotion as the essential aim of  
art. An early but influential advocate of  this new 
approach was the French Abbé Jean-Baptiste Du 
Bos, who in his widely read Critical Reflections on 
Poetry, Painting, and Music of  1719 asserted that “The 
soul hath its wants no less than the body; and one 



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of  the greatest wants of  man is to have his mind incessantly occupied,”19 
or to avoid ennui, and then argued the arousal of  our passions by affecting 
works of  art, such as tragedy, is so to speak the most cost-effective way to 
avoid boredom, because art, unlike say gambling, as a result of  which we 
usually end up losing our money, excites only “artificial passions, sufficient 
to occupy us while we are actually affected by them, and incapable of  
giving us afterwards any real pain or affliction.” “Painters and poets,” Du 
Bos says, “raise...artificial passions within us, by presenting us with the 
imitations of  objects capable of  exciting real passions,”20 and indeed the 
only difference between “artificial” and real passions is that the former 
do not have the same after-effects and costs as the latter. Baumgarten 
then quickly took this idea up by arguing that since what really moves 
us to pleasure or displeasure is passions, poems or other works of  art 
are most effective when they offer not just cognitively dense images but 
dense images of  affecting objects: “Since affects are noticeable degrees 
of  displeasure and pleasure, so are their sentiments those that represent 
something as good and bad,” although in the “confused manner” of  the 
cognitively dense rather than analytically separated. “Hence it is poetic,” 
he continues, “to arouse affects.”21  From the age of  twenty-one, then, 
Baumgarten’s approach to art was actually to synthesize the idea that art 
is a vehicle for a pleasing form of  cognition with the idea that art is also a 
vehicle for a pleasing arousal of  our emotions.

Yet a third approach to aesthetic experience in the eighteenth century 
is the one that we typically associate with Kant but which was actually 
introduced in Scotland, especially by Alexander Gerard in his prize-winning 
1759 Essay on Taste, the idea, namely that aesthetic experience is a pleasing 
form of  the free play of  our mental powers with our representations, 
even ones with cognitive and emotional significance, where however the 
primary source of  our enjoyment is the mind’s play with those ideas and 
not their contents. Gerard shares Du Bos’s idea that the mind must be 
occupied, but begins from the idea that it can be pleasingly occupied by its 
own activity and does not need either emotional arousal or cognitive pay-
off  to enjoy its activity. Thus the first of  the “simple principles” of  taste 
that he enumerates is our enjoyment “Of  the sense or taste of  novelty,” 
the “pleasant sensation” we have “whenever the mind is in a lively and 
elevated temper,” to be had especially when it overcomes “moderate 
difficulty, such as exercises the mind, without fatiguing it” and thus gives 
“play to our faculties.”22  This was the idea that was then taken up by Kant 
in the argument of  the “Analytic of  the Beautiful” that the state of  mind 
that could satisfy the dual constraints inherent in the idea of  a judgment 
of  taste, that it be based on a subjective experience of  pleasure on the 



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one hand yet speak with a “universal voice” on the 
other, that is, postulate or even demand consent 
from all, is not the state of  actual cognition but the 
state of  the free play of  our cognitive powers of  
understanding and imagination, a state in which “no 
determinate concept restricts them to a particular 
rule of  cognition” but which is nevertheless a 
state of  the “animation of  both faculties...to an 
activity that is indeterminate but yet, through the 
stimulus of  the given representation, in unison” or 
“harmonious” (einhellig).23 

But the “Analytic of  the Beautiful” is only 
Kant’s analysis of  the logic of  the judgment of  
taste and the experience of  beauty that makes such 
judgment possible, not his theory of  fine art. That 
comes later, presented (following Baumgarten) 
in the form of  a theory of  the artist, that is, the 
genius, and when it comes it actually represents a 
synthesis of  the new theory of  free play with the 
traditional cognitive approach to art: Kant’s idea 
is that the “spirit” of  a work of  art, whatever its 
medium, comes from “the presentation of  aesthetic 
ideas,” representations that “one the one hand...
strive toward something lying beyond the bounds 
of  experience, and thus seek to approximate a 
presentation of  concepts of  reason (of  intellectual 
ideas),” to which, “on the other hand...because no 
concept can be fully adequate to them,” can only be 
intimated by “a representation of  the imagination 
that...by itself  stimulates so much thinking that it 
can never be grasped in a determinate concept, 
hence which aesthetically enlarges the concept 
itself  in an unbounded way,”24 a representation, 
in other words, that stimulates a free play of  our 
cognitive powers.

Thus Kant’s theory of  fine art represents 
a synthesis of  the traditional idea of  beauty as a 
form of  cognition of  the highest things with the 
new theory of  beauty as that which occasions a 
free play of  our mental powers. Indeed, one might 



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suggest that because Kant assumes that the ideas presented by works of  
art are morally fraught ideas such as “rational ideas of  invisible beings, the 
kingdom of  the blessed, the kingdom of  hell, eternity, creation, etc., as well 
as...death, envy, and all sorts of  vices, as well as love, fame, etc.,”25 ideas that 
are ordinarily accompanied with great emotional impact, he must be on 
his way toward a synthesis of  all three approaches, the traditional cognitive 
approach to art, the new theory of  free play, and the idea of  the emotional 
impact of  art, which Baumgarten had synthesized only with the first but 
not the second of  these approaches. However, since Kant is throughout 
at such pains to argue that any genuinely aesthetic experience is disinterested 
and produces only a simple feeling of  pleasure but not any more particular 
emotion, I count him as someone who was willing to countenance only a 
twofold synthesis of  approaches to aesthetics, not a threefold synthesis: 
he was willing to combine the traditional theory of  cognition through art 
with the new theory of  mere play with our cognitive powers, but always 
strove to keep the emotional impact of  art at arm’s length.

Perhaps a better model for a thoroughly synthetic rather than 
separatist approach to art in the eighteenth century is the 1762 work by 
another Scot, Henry Home, Lord Kames, modestly entitled Elements of  
Criticism, not “The Elements of  Criticism,” to signal that the arts offer us 
numerous possibilities of  pleasure, which cannot be reduced to a single 
avenue or even exhaustively enumerated.26  Kames begins with what 
seems like an emphasis on the free play and emotional impact aspects 
of  aesthetic experience: his first chapter concerns “Perceptions and Ideas 
in a Train,” and argues that “we are framed by nature to relish order and 
connection”27 even when perceived without overt regard to truth, while 
his second, very large chapter concerns “what power the fine arts have to 
raise emotions and passions,” and argues that “The principles of  the fine 
arts, appear in this view to open a direct avenue to the heart of  man.”28  
But there is a cognitive dimension to both of  these as well: in the first 
chapter Kames argues that “Every work of  art that is conformable to the 
natural course of  our ideas, is so far agreeable; and every work of  art that 
reverses that course, is so far disagreeable,”29 which suggests that we enjoy 
not just the orderly play of  our ideas but correspondence between those 
suggested by art and by nature, or between representation and object, 
which is the essence of  cognition; and Kames continues our quotation 
from the second chapter by stating that “The inquisitive mind beginning 
with criticism, the most agreeable of  all amusements, and finding no 
obstruction in its progress, advances far into the sensitive part of  our 
nature; and gains imperceptibly a thorough knowledge of  the human 
heart, of  its desires, and of  every motive to action,”30 thus implying 



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that the arousal of  emotions by works of  art is 
enjoyable not just in its own right but as a source of  
self-knowledge. Kames goes on to enumerate many 
more “principles” or sources of  pleasure from art: 
beauty, grandeur and sublimity, motion and force, 
novelty, resemblance and similitude, uniformity and 
variety, congruity and propriety, dignity and grace, 
and more, a list that suggests that art offers us the 
possibility of  free play with formal aspects of  its 
objects, e.g., uniformity and variety; of  emotional 
and moral response, for example to propriety and 
dignity; of  cognitive discovery, e.g. of  novelty, and 
so on. There is no suggestion that these need be 
separated from each other, let alone that any one is 
more important to the other; on the contrary, the 
suggestion is always that the more “elements of  
criticism” a work of  art affords us, the fuller and 
more pleasurable our experience may be -- though 
at the same time, Kames never makes an argument 
that the pleasures in these different dimensions 
of  art are strictly additive, that a work of  art that 
exploits more of  these dimensions is always more 
pleasurable than one that exploits fewer. The list of  
elements of  criticism is not intended as a rule of  
addition. Yet this qualification being noted, it seems 
safe to say that Kames offers a richer model of  the 
possibilities of  aesthetic experience than Kant’s 
merely twofold synthesis does.

Both Kames and Kant raise the question of  
how architecture, with its inescapable concern for 
the intended function of  its products, is to be fitted 
into an account of  art that stresses any combination 
of  cognition, free play, and emotional impact, none 
of  which are overtly connected to functionality. 
They both remain within the Vitruvian tradition of  
combining utilitas and venustas (in my opinion, two 
ends to be supported by an underlying foundation of  
firmitas as a means) by seeing the intended function 
of  a structure as providing constraints within which 
the other aesthetic goals identified by their theories 
for all arts can also be pursued: as Kant famously 

Kant was 
willing to 

combine the 
traditional 

theory of 
cognition 

through art 
with the new 

theory of mere 
play with 

our cognitive 
powers, but 

always strove 
to keep the 

emotional 
impact of art 

at arm’s length

“

”



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says in his account of  “adherent beauty,” “One would be able to add much 
to a building that would be pleasing for the intuition of  it if  only it were 
not supposed to be a church”;31 but that also implies that there is much 
that can be added to a building -- on Kant’s theory, the expression of  an 
aesthetic idea -- that is consistent with its intended function as a church. 
But I am not going to expand on this point here,32 for what I now want 
to argue is that what followed the period of  Kames and Kant was not 
a continuation of  their synthesizing strategies, but a return to a single-
minded cognitivism in the aesthetics of  German Idealism that took the 
better part of  the nineteenth century to recover from within philosophical 
aesthetics, and, in a very general way, with however one major exception, 
perhaps even longer within architectural theory and practice.

 

II. A Monistic Approach to Aesthetics and Architecture: German Idealism

One might have thought that, particularly with the example of  the 
syncretic or even eclectic approach to aesthetics of  Kames before them, 
the response of  Kant’s successors to the twofold synthesis of  cognitivist 
aesthetics and the aesthetics of  free play represented by his theory of  
“aesthetic ideas” would have been to lift his ban on the emotional impact 
of  art and give that its proper due. Indeed, it might even be argued that 
the Germans had a domestic model for that in the versions of  Kantian 
aesthetics developed by Friedrich Schiller and the lesser known Karl 
Heinrich Heydenreich,33 the latter in his own System of  Aesthetics34 published 
in 1790, the same year as Kant’s third Critique, and Schiller in his unpublished 
“Kallias letters” of  1793 as well as the Letters on Aesthetic Education of  1795.35  
However, the German Idealists instead rejected Kant’s theory of  the free 
play in order to focus exclusively on the intellectual content of  art: in 
other words, they largely removed from Kant’s concept of  aesthetic ideas 
the element that he thought was distinctively aesthetic and returned to the 
cognitivism of  Aristotle’s response to Plato, or perhaps better, given the 
pronouncedly metaphysical character of  their conception of  the content 
of  art, to the response of  Plato’s Symposium to his own Republic. This turn 
also had pronounced results for their treatments of  architecture.

I will illustrate this development with the cases of  Hegel and 
Schopenhauer who make the Platonic and therefore cognitivist affinity 
of  their thought explicit. Hegel asserted that “the beautiful is...the pure 
appearance of  the Idea to sense”36 without accepting the idea that the 
mind of  the subject of  aesthetic experience can play freely with the form 
of  the sensory appearance of  the Idea or with the indeterminate relation 



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between the form of  appearance and its content. 
For this reason Hegel can say that “fine art [is] 
truly art, and...only fulfils its supreme task when 
it has placed itself  in the same sphere as religion 
and philosophy, and when it is simply one way of  
bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine, 
the deepest interests of  mankind, and the most 
comprehensive truths of  the spirit.”37  This might 
sound like a ringing endorsement of  the enduring 
importance of  all forms of  art, but in fact it is the 
premise that leads directly to Hegel’s notorious 
thesis of  the “end of  art,” the thesis that “art, 
considered in its highest vocation, is and remains 
for us a thing of  the past,”38 because Hegel’s view 
is that art is actually competing with religion and 
philosophy to express the same content, but is 
doomed by the indeterminacy of  its means of  
expressing this content: art is essentially cognitive 
but essentially inadequate as cognition. Thus for a 
philosophical enlightened age such as Hegel’s own, 
art is doomed to irrelevance, doomed to serving 
as a reminder of  our more primitive past but as 
nothing more.

And architecture is Hegel’s poster-boy for 
this argument. Hegel is actually responding to a 
fact that has been emphasized in some of  the best 
recent writing on architectural theory, namely that 
the existence of  determinate sets of  forms within 
some architectural styles, such as the existence of  
the columnar orders in classical and neo-classical 
architecture, cannot justify the interpretation of  
architecture as a language, because without any 
determinate semantics for reference to ideas 
outside of  itself, the use of  such forms to organize 
the design of  structures cannot really count as a 
linguistic syntax;39 for Hegel, architecture is the 
paradigmatic art of  the earliest phase of  art, 
the “symbolic” phase, in which the Idea that “in 
itself...is still abstract and indeterminate”40 seeks 
expression in forms that, as symbols, would in any 
case be too indeterminate to express even a more 

Both Kames 
and Kant raise 

the question 
of how 

architecture, 
with its 

inescapable 
concern for 
the intended 

function of its 
products, is to 

be fitted into 
an account 
of art that 

stresses any 
combination 
of cognition, 

free play, and 
emotional 

impact, none 
of which 

are overtly 
connected to 
functionality

“

”



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determinate content, the more fully developed understanding of  the 
spiritual nature of  reality that Hegel means by “the Idea.” Hegel’s view is 
that it is the essence of  a symbol that it “should not be wholly inadequate 
to its meaning” but that “still conversely, in order to remain a symbol it 
must not be made entirely adequate to that meaning”; in symbolic art “the 
content remains also indifferent to the shape which portrays it, and the 
abstract determinacy which it constitutes can equally well be present in 
infinitely many other existents and configurations,”41 and conversely “the 
look of  a symbol as such raises at once the doubt whether a shape is to 
be taken as a symbol or not, even if  we set aside the further ambiguity 
in respect of  the specific meanings which a shape is supposed to signify 
amongst the several meanings for which it can often be used as a symbol 
through associations of  a more remote kind.”42  Hegel then illustrates this 
thesis with such examples as the pyramids43 and labyrinths44 of  Egyptian 
architecture, which are forms too abstract to express any very definite 
ideas about divinity, or the attempt of  Indian architecture to represent 
the “procreative force” of  the Absolute through buildings in the shape 
of  “generative organs” with numerous “solid phallic columns.”45 And 
what we might have thought would count as one of  the pinnacles of  
architectural accomplishment, the Greek temple, is in fact nothing more 
than the form of  an ordinary house46 writ large as a house for the statue 
of  a god: it is only in the statue that it houses and not in the structure 
that houses it that art can make manifest “the free spirit” as “spiritual 
individuality equally determinate and inherently independent,” only the 
representation of  a god in human form that “constitutes the centre and 
content of  true beauty and art”47 —although on Hegel’s account the 
classical representation of  divinity in strictly human form will also turn 
out to be inadequate. Thus architecture plays a strictly supporting role in 
housing a form of  the representation of  the spirit that will itself  turn out 
to be inadequate and that needs to be superseded by a purely philosophical 
rather than artistic understanding of  reality. That there might be other 
values in housing as such, independent of  the function of  housing a god, 
plays no role in Hegel’s assessment of  architecture. Architecture therefore 
enjoys a very lowly place in Hegel’s strictly cognitivist hierarchy of  the arts, 
which themselves enjoy only a lowly place in the hierarchy of  forms of  
cognition more generally.

Schopenhauer’s cognitivism takes a different form than Hegel’s, 
but results in an equally lowly status for architecture. Schopenhauer’s 
aesthetics might be thought to be a development from Kant’s conception 
of  the disinterestedness of  aesthetic experience and the judgment of  
taste, but Schopenhauer has no more room for the idea of  free play than 



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does Hegel,48 and looks to the experience of  art 
only for a momentary release from the frustration 
of  the ordinary life of  the will, comprised as it 
is either by desires that go unsatisfied or that, 
even if  satisfied, soon lead to more unsatisfied 
desires. For Schopenhauer, aesthetic experience 
is an intuition in which the individual “has lost 
himself ” and become “the pure, will-less, painless, 
timeless subject of  cognition,” and this state is 
induced by the contemplation of  an object, or the 
artistic representation of  one, that has lost its own 
individuality and manifold connections to the world 
of  will and use, and become only “the Idea of  its 
species.”49  By contemplating the essences of  the 
species of  things — in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, 
the characteristic forms of  the different degrees of  
the “objectification of  the will” that underlies all 
reality — or what he calls “Platonic Ideas,” notice, 
not “aesthetic ideas,” the human subject becomes 
detached from her own individuality and its woes, 
and enjoys if  not positive pleasure then at least 
momentary respite from pain. “In this state, pure 
cognition draws towards us, as it were, to deliver 
us from willing and the stress of  willing...but only 
for a moment: we are always torn back again from 
peaceful contemplation by willing, by the memory 
of  our personal aims,”50 and ultimately need to 
turn from art to ethics to achieve a more enduring 
transcendence of  our own painful individuality. 
Thus in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, as in Hegel’s, 
the value of  art and aesthetic experience as a whole 
is subordinate to that of  a form of  philosophy, 
although in this case to ethics rather than 
metaphysics.

And even within the sphere of  the arts, 
the value of  architecture is minimal, because 
within Schopenhauer’s cognitivist aesthetics what 
architecture represents is the most elementary 
forces of  nature, but nothing about the human will, 
which is our only real clue to the ultimate character 
of  reality. “The only intention we can attribute to” 

Architecture is 
Hegel’s poster-

boy for the 
argument that 

art is doomed 
to irrelevance, 

doomed to 
serving as a 

reminder of our 
more primitive 

past but as 
nothing more

“

”



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architecture, Schopenhauer argues, “is that of  bringing some of  the Ideas 
at the lowest levels of  the objecthood of  the will more clearly into intuition, 
namely: gravity, cohesion, rigidity, hardness, these universal qualities of  
stone, those first, simplest, and dullest visibilities of  the will, the sounds 
of  the ground bass of  nature; and then, alongside these, light, which is in 
many respects their opposite.” 51 For Schopenhauer, architecture does not 
attempt, as a symbol, to give us knowledge of  the Spirit, but fail at that; 
rather, through its structure, its solids and voids, through light and dark, 
it offers us Platonic Ideas of  natural forces, but these forces are only the 
“ground bass” of  nature, and do not seem very important. In particular, 
while no contemplation of  Platonic Ideas can release us from pain for 
very long, architecture is decidedly inferior to music, where, paradoxically, 
we get the greatest release from the painful demands of  our individual 
wills by contemplating as directly as we can the essential forms of  willing 
as such.52  On Schopenhauer’s account, architecture does give us some 
genuine knowledge, but not very important knowledge; and if  knowledge 
is the only source of  value in art, then architecture is not very important 
—“the objective significance of  what architecture reveals to us is relatively 
small.”53 

Indeed, Schopenhauer does not merely ignore other sources of  
potential value in architecture, its value for housing a variety of  human 
functions, as does Hegel, but specifically rejects such “other, practical 
purposes” of  architecture as “foreign to art itself.” The “great merit of  
the architect consists in carrying through the purely aesthetic goals” of  
architecture, the exhibition of  Platonic Ideas of  gravity, rigidity, and so on, 
“in spite of their subordination to foreign ones.”54  Schopenhauer must argue 
this, because on his theory of  human willing in general, the attempt to 
fulfill specific practical purposes through architecture, as in any other way, 
is doomed to lead to failure and frustration in either the short or long run: 
either the work will fail to achieve its intended purpose, and thus frustrate 
anyone involved with it, whether directly or even only sympathetically, 
or even if  it does fulfill its intended purpose, that will either just lead to 
satiety and boredom or else to other, frustrated desires. Functionality can 
never be an enduring source of  pleasure in Schopenhauer’s pessimistic 
view of  human existence, so whatever value architecture might have has 
to be in spite of  its functionality, not in addition to or in conjunction with 
its functionality.

We now have some examples of  how the one-sided cognitivism of  
German Idealist aesthetics led to reductionist conceptions of  architecture 
and in turn to negative assessments of  the value of  architecture. I think 



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it could readily be shown that many twentieth-
century conceptions of  architecture, particularly 
the linguistic models of  architecture so effectively 
attacked by Richard Hill and Edward Winters but 
also forms of  structuralist rather than programmatic 
functionalism, to borrow a distinction from Viollet-
le-Duc,55 are versions of  this one-sided cognitivism; 
and even if  they have not led to overtly negative 
evaluations of  architecture of  the sort we have 
found in Hegel and Schopenhauer, they have at 
least sometimes led not only to simplified theories 
but to unsatisfying architecture. But rather than 
pursuing that argument, I will, in Part Two, turn to 
one nineteenth-century treatment of  architecture 
that is pluralistic rather than monistic and thus in 
at least some ways points to the possibility of  a 
more satisfying aesthetics of  architecture. I refer 
to the theory of  architecture adumbrated by John 
Ruskin in The Seven Lamps of  Architecture, which even 
though it must be shorn of  some of  the Romantic 
assumptions long ago pointed out by Geoffrey 
Scott,56 nevertheless offers at least a model for a 
synthetizing rather than separatist approach to 
architecture.

Part II of  this essay will appear in Vol. 1, No. 2 of  
Architecture Philosophy.

Endnotes
1. Frederick C. Beiser stresses the importance of  the 

Neo-Platonic triad, what he calls the “classical 
trinity,” to what he considers the rationalist tradition 
in eighteenth-century aesthetics in Diotima’s Children: 
German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 41-44. 

 2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of  the Power of  Judgment, 
edited by Paul Guyer, translated by Paul Guyer and 
Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2000), §1, 5:203 (p. 89).

 3. Kant, Critique of  the Power of  Judgment, §5, 5:209-10 
(p. 95).

Within 
Schopenhauer’s 

cognitivist 
aesthetics what 

architecture 
represents is the 
most elementary 
forces of nature, 

but nothing 
about the human 
will, which is our 

only real clue 
to the ultimate 

character of 
reality

“

”



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 4. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of  Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, an Essay 

on the Freedom of  Wit and Humour, Part IV, section III, in Characteristicks of  Men, 
Manners, Opinions, Times, edited by Philip Ayres (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 
1999), vol. I, p. 77.

 5. Shaftesbury, The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody, Part III, section II, in 
Characteristicks, vol. II, p. 112.

6. Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, Part IV, section III, in Charackeristicks, vol. I, p. 77.
7.Paul Guyer, A History of  Modern Aesthetics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 2014).
8. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema 

pertinentibus/Philosophische Betrachtungen über einige Bedingungen des Gedichtes, 
edited and translated by Heinz Paetzold (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 
1983); Reflections on poetry: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Meditationes philosphicae 
de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, translated, with the original text, by Karl 
Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University 
of  California Press, 1954). The discipline of  aesthetics is defined in §CXVI 
of  this work as episteme aisthetikē, the logic of  aisthetá or the objects of  the 
senses.  

9. The earliest occurrence of  the word “aesthetics” recorded in the Oxford 
English Dictionary is in an 1830 entry in the Penny Cyclopedia (I.156), where 
it was defined as “the designation given by German writers to a branch of  
philosophical inquiry, the object of  which is a philosophical theory of  the 
beautiful.” 

10. The argument for the cognitive worthlessness of  art is made above all in 
Book X of  the Republic, where it provides a foundation for the exclusion 
of  most poetry from the education of  the guardians previously developed 
in Books II and III (376d-403c). Alexander Nehamas has discussed the 
connection between Plato’s argument in Book X, which is overtly concerned 
with painting, with the case of  poetry in “Plato on Imitation and Poetry in 
Republic X,” in his Virtues of  Authenticity (Princeton: Princeton University 
Press, 1998), pp. 251-78, and Stephen Halliwell has demonstrated that Plato’s 
argument in Books II and III is really directed against allowing the young 
guardians to perform roles that exemplify the kind of  emotional abandon 
that they will have to learn to control; see The Aesthetics of  Mimesis: Ancient 
Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 

11. See Socrates’s recounting of  what he was told by Diotima at Symposium 
201d-212c.

12. Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 9, 1451b5-7; translation by Ingram Bywater in The 
Complete Works of  Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton 
University Press, 1984), vol. II, p. 2323.

13. My translation from Charles Batteux, Einschränkung der schönen Künste auf  einen 
einzigen Grundsatz, translated by Johann Adolf  Schlegel (Leipzig: Weidmanns 
Erben und Reich, 1770), p. 8. 

14. Batteux, Einschränkung, pp. 34-5.



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15. Christian Wolff, Vernüftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt, und der Seele des Menschen 
(1719), fourth edition (Halle: Renger, 1751), §404.

16. My translation from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Ästhetik (1750-58), 
translated into German with facing Latin text by Dagmar Mirbach, 2 vols. 
(Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007), §14, vol. I, pp. 20-1. 

17. Baumgarten, Ästhetik, §115, vol. I, pp. 92-3.
18. Baumgarten, Meditationes, §XVII.
19. Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music, translated by 

Thomas Nugent, 3 vols. (London: John Nourse, 1984), Part I, chapter I, vol. I, 
p. 5. 

20. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, Part I, chapter III, p. 22.
21. Baumgarten, Meditationes, §XXV, pp. 24-5.
22. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (London: A. Millar, and Edinburgh: A. 

Kincaid and J. Bell, 1759), Part I, section I, pp. 3, 7.
23. Kant, Critique of  the Power of  Judgment, §9, 5:217, 219, pp. 102, 104.
24. Kant, Critique of  the Power of  Judgment, §49, 5:314-15, pp. 192-3.
25. Kant, loc. cit.
26. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of  Criticism, sixth edition (1785), edited by 

Peter Jones, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), Original Introduction, 
vol. I, p. 19. 

27. Kames, Elements of  Criticism, chapter I, vol. I, p. 26.
28. Kames, Elements of  Criticism, chapter II, vol. I, p. 32.
29. Kames, Elements of  Criticism, chapter I, vol. I, p. 27.
30. Kames, Elements of  Criticism, chapter II, vol. I, p. 32.
31. Kant, Critique of  the Power of  Judgment, §16, 5:230; p. 115.
32. I have discussed this issue in “Kant and the Philosophy of  Architecture,” Journal 

of  Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69 (2011): 7-19. For a more general discussion of  
Kant’s concept of  “adherent beauty,” see “Free and Adherent Beauty: A Modest 
Proposal,” British Journal of  Aesthetics 42 (October, 2002) 357-66, reprinted in my 
Values of  Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2005), pp. 129-40. For another recent discussion of  the implication for 
Kant’s aesthetics to the theory of  architecture, see Edward Winters, Aesthetics 
and Architecture (London: Continuum, 2007), especially Chapter 2, “Modernism,” 
pp. 25-37.

33. On Schiller, see my Kant and the Experience of  Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1993), chapter 3, pp. 116-30, and “The Ideal of  Beauty and 
the Necessity of  Grace: Kant and Schiller on Ethics and Aesthetics,” in Walter 
Hinderer, editor, Schiller und die Weg in die Moderne (Würzburg: Königshausen & 
Neuman, 2006), pp. 187-204. On Heydenreich, see “The Perfections of  Art: 
Mendelssohn, Moritz, and Kant,” in Kant and the Experience of  Freedom, pp. 131-
60, at pp. 144-7, and “Heydenreich, Karl Heinrich,” in Michael Kelly, editor, The 
Encyclopedia of  Aesthetics, 4 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 
2, pp. 400-1.



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34. Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, System der Ästhetik (Leipzig: Göschen, 1790), 

facsimile edition with an afterward by Volker Deubel (Hildesheim: 
Gerstenberg Verlag, 1978).

35. See Friedrich Schiller, “Kallias or Concerning Beauty: Letters to Gottfried 
Körner,” in J.M. Bernstein, editor, Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 145-83, and On the 
Aesthetic Education of  Man in a Series of  Letters, edited and translated by Elizabeth 
M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).

36. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated 
by T.M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) (based on the 
posthumous edition of  1835 by H. Hotho), vol. I, p. 111. 

37. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 7. 
38. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 11.
39. See Richard Hill, Designs and their Consequences (New Haven and London: 

Yale University Press, 1999), chapter 5, “Meaning,” especially pp. 109-116, 
and Winters, Aesthetics and Architecture, chapters 5-7, especially chapter 7, 
“Architecture and Semantics,” pp. 84-91.

40. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 300.
41. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 305.
42. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 306.
43. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, pp. 354-6.
44. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. II, p. 647.
45. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. II, p. 641.
46. See Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. II, pp. 662-3.
47. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 432.
48. For documentation of  this, see my “Back to Truth: Knowledge and Pleasure 

in the Aesthetics of  Schopenhauer,” in Alex Neill and Christopher Janaway, 
editors, Better Consciousness: Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of  Value (Chichester: 
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 11-25.

49. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, translated 
and edited by Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Third Book, §34, pp. 201-2. 

50. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Third Book, §51, p. 277.
51. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Third Book, §43, p. 239.
52. See Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Third Book, §52, pp. 

282-95.
53. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Third Book, §43, p. 241,
54. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Third Book, §43, p. 242.
55. See Winters, Aesthetics and Architecture, pp. 40-1.
56. Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of  Humanism, first edition 1914, second edition 

1924 (New York: Scribner’s, n.d.), especially Chapter V, “The Ethical Fallacy.”



The Architecture of Ethics:
Stanley Tigerman

Emmanuel Petit

Chicago-born Jewish architect Stanley 
Tigerman wouldn’t mind to be portrayed as a sort 
of  freethinker and even libertine of  the architectural 
discipline while, paradoxically, constructing himself  
as the defender of  ethics in architecture. He is 
somebody who insists that what architects do with 
physical architecture is important but that ultimately 
the architecture of  the ‘here and now’ is a mere 
scaffold to support ideas that exceed the sphere of  
art and that lie beyond the expressive possibilities 
of  architecture. 

Philosophy has institutionalized a series of  
major figures—the positive philosophers—who 
constitute the foundation of  the field as we have 
come to define it: Plato, Kant, Hegel, and the like; 
but it also draws its vitality from their dialectic 
counter-parts: the anti-philosophers—Socrates, 
Kierkegaard, Bataille—i.e. those thinkers, who don’t 
play by the rules, and who (some would claim) have 
no business being counted as a part of  the discipline 
of  philosophy. These anti-philosophers, however, 
are indispensable to making philosophy move. If  
given the choice, Tigerman would certainly side 
with the anti-philosophers ... constructing himself  
as a sort of  anti-architect, who cannot leave the 
discipline because it is what fuels his resistance—
the resistance to all these fantasies of  perfection, 
synthesis and performance—of  “do-good-ism” 
in the world. He insists that he wanted to become 
an architect when he read Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. 
It made him furious! If  your hope is to save the 
world, build the largest shelter for homeless people, 
like Stanley did with his Pacific Garden Mission in 

He Wanted 
to become an 

architect when he 
read Ayn rand’s 
fountainhead. it 

made him furious!

“

”



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Chicago, or found a school for socially responsible and environmentally 
conscious design (like he did with Eva Maddox when they founded 
Archeworks in Chicago in 1994). But do not expect an invitation into the 
architectural Hall of  Fame for it. For that, you need other techniques: You 
need a theory of  anti-architecture. 

Tigerman provides something of  that sort. He has all the credentials 
to master the subject of  architecture; but in spite of  that, his real “subject” 
never ceased to be the human being, while architecture was, for him, a sort 
of  stage or dramatic space within which to choreograph the dialogues and 
encounters between humans. His long-lasting friendship with the late dean 
of  the Cooper Union School of  Architecture, John Hejduk, was largely 
based on this common interest: Didn’t Hejduk also fathom architecture as 
an arena for the poetic and ineffable meeting between humans, as well as 
for the empathy between human subjects and the subject of  architecture? 
While Hejduk designed cities “populated” with architectural characters 
on their journeys from Venice to Berlin and to Prague, and from Riga to 
Vladivostok, Tigerman liked to draw his own autobiographical dream cities 
set against the backdrop of  non-realist environments in the spirit of  Joan 
Miró’s “Carnival of  Harlequin” (1924-25) and the “Garden of  Earthly 
Delights” by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, which was filled with 
literal renditions of  certain proverbs of  the day. The so-called Architoons 
were always colonized with the fragments and anecdotes of  Tigerman’s 
personal, eclectic architectural memory—from Greek caryatids, to Mies 
van der Rohe’s buildings, to tectonic details of  the Chicago balloon frame, 
concentration camp barracks and their steaming chimneys, the temple 
of  Solomon, the Chicago street grid, and Tigerman’s own buildings and 
paper projects. This imaginary cosmos was animated by little frogmen 
or cherubim in the tradition of  François Rabelais’s grotesque carnival 
characters in Gargantua and Pantagruel—which the literary theorist Mikhail 
Bakhtin had rediscovered as the epitome of  an “open” or “polyglossic” 
text in his Rabelais and His World: Carnival and Grotesque from the mid-
1960s.1 Tigerman’s cartoon figures seemed to protect his personal and 
plural Oikos of  memories as much as they guarded the disciplinary book 
of  architecture—which was at risk of  turning abstract, inert, and static in 
the hands of  the second and third generation modernists under whom 
Tigerman was trained (i.e. the generation of  Paul Rudolph). One of  the 
Architoons portrays one such cherub (a.k.a. an architect), who is torn in a 
Janus-faced reality between the “archaeological” gravity of  the discipline 
and his spirited need to escape into another world of  personal, idiosyncratic 
creativity: He is stepping on top of  an architectural column which breaks 
underneath his feet while at the same time he stretches and reaches up to 



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hold on to the umbilical cord of  one of  his creative 
offsprings, the phallus-shaped Daisy House (Porter 
Beach, Indiana, 1975-78), which took flight on top 
of  a cloud.

His interest in the exchange between “subjects” 
is the reason Tigerman kept being drawn to ethical 
philosophy and the theories of  dialogism, from 
Aristotle to Emmanuel Lévinas—Lévinas, the 
philosopher and Talmud-scholar who was also 
formative for Jacques Derrida’s attentiveness to 
the alterity of  writing, and who was close friends 
with the anecdotalist of  the unknowable, Maurice 
Blanchot; and then to Martin Buber, who published 

his book Ich und Du (I and Thou) in 1923, in 
which he cogitated about the nature of  the true 
encounter with the Other. Buber maintained that 
the genuine meeting between I and Thou could 
not be premeditated (or “composed”), but that it 
was utterly serendipitous and, hence, revelatory. In 
a sense, the sublime spontaneity and transience of  
the principle of  “dialogue” as described by Buber 
has been at odds with the tradition of  architectural 
production where thorough planning, notation, and 
representation preceded the actualization of  the 
project. In Buber’s terminology, such a “structured” 
confrontation with the world treats that world as a 

The Daisy House



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collection of  objects. When the subject “plans” the world in this way, 
however, he can no longer encounter subjects, but all his relationships are 
reflections of  his own ideas: Ich-Du turns into Ich-Es (I-It). As one of  
the ills of  modernity, dialogue is turned into a monologue, and alterity is 
suppressed. 

In Tigerman’s view, by the 1960s, architectural modernism had turned 
into a monologue only accessible to the narrow circle of  architectural 
cognoscenti. He hoped, nevertheless, that his career as an architect could be 
a journey to discover otherness in architecture, and, as the title of  his 1982 
book Versus: An American Architect’s Alternatives suggested, to track down 
“other” stylistic and ideological attitudes in architecture. To this end, he 
made a point of  remaining a sort of  outsider to the orthodox teachings of  
the discipline.2 Like Buber, Lévinas, and Derrida, Tigerman’s Jewishness has 
played a determining role for this desire for alterity. He was introduced to 
the study of  the Torah by his grandfather, a self-taught Talmudic reader, and 
has subsequently always affirmed his Jewishness. With it, he has cultivated 
a compassion for the oppressed and the persecuted. In architecture, this 
empathy translated into a skepticism towards establishment doctrine, from 
which he liked to distance himself. His book Architecture of  Exile from 
1988 thematized the “exilic” relationship the Hebraic culture entertained 
with the hegemonic, Greek or “Hellenic” tradition of  architecture as 
manifested in the candid structure of  the Parthenon. The book also made 
a case for the liaison and convoluted dialogue between the (visible) realm 
of  architectural aesthetic with the more ethereal spheres of  ethics and 
the sacred—between presence and absence. As a Jew, Tigerman continues 
to relish the existential “drift” between the contrasting sentiments of  
alienation and belonging to the city of  Chicago—a predicament Saul 
Bellow had so captivatingly described in his Adventures of  Augie March; 
the bildungsroman begins with the famous sentence “I am an American, 
Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have 
taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to 
knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so 
innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus... .”3 

At the time Tigerman tried to launch his architectural career in 
Chicago, he felt that a certain strand of  modernism had besieged 
architectural discourse while the experimentalism of  younger architects 
was pushed aside. In order for the discipline to stay energetic and lively, 
however, the “minimal palette” of  the modernist canon had to open 
up and accept certain “contaminants” into its stern aesthetic, stringent 
utopianism, and ideological catechism. Tigerman challenged all claims 



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that architectural study was “ontological” in nature, 
i.e. that the discipline had to devote itself  to some 
stable conceptual “synthesis” or inner “being,” 
which theory was called to uncover. Instead, he 
alleged that architecture had an “inability to define 
itself  inherently”4 and that, therefore, it needed 
to transgress its cherished myths of  purity and 
perpetuity (e.g. the clarity of  tectonic and functional 
principles, the permanence of  proportional 
systems, the synthetic nature of  typological partis, 
a.s.o.). Instead of  propagating the modern myths 
of  stability, Tigerman fathomed architecture as 
the rift or space, which inserts itself  in-between 
incongruous temporalities: “The gestalt of  art 
lies in that intersection of  one’s own epoch and 
eternity.”5 One of  his missions became to disclose 
the heterogeneity of  Chicago’s architectural heritage 
and reveal alternative directions to the legacy of  the 
“heroes” of  modernist Chicago—of  Louis Sullivan, 
Daniel Burnham, Frank Lloyd Wright, and, most of  
all, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Mies had come to Chicago following the 
close of  the Bauhaus by the Nazis, as part of  
what Tigerman called the “German invasion”6 
of  Chicago modernism. Appearing as a sort of  
European aesthetic arbiter and ideologue, Mies was 
able to give something to the United States that 
none of  the other modernist forefathers could: 
Unlike Le Corbusier, who was perceived as too 
intellectual to fill this role, Tigerman argued, or 
Walter Gropius, whose theories lacked paradigmatic 
clarity, Mies’s architecture, “was not unnecessarily 
demanding on the functional or intellectual 
levels,”7 and was thus able to convey a sense of  Ur-
European taste, permanence and democracy. While 
Tigerman praised Mies’s early role in America, he 
rejected the subsequent pervasive dissemination 
and banalization of  his architecture by his many 
followers, particularly C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, 
Owings and Merrill, who adjusted Mies’s ideas to 
the corporate context and made of  his architecture 

Like Buber, 
Lévinas, 

and Derrida, 
Tigerman’s 

Jewishness 
has played a 

determining role 
for this desire for 

alterity

“

”



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the official canon.

Tigerman’s relationship with Mies and Miesianism has been complex 
to say the least; he invokes Mies in most of  his texts, where he makes 
of  him a kind of  straw figure or vodoo doll of  modernism. While the 
acolytes had turned Mies into their “object” of  contemplation, study, 
and imitation, Tigerman fathomed a more subjective (Buber’s Ich-Du) 
encounter with Mies — Mies as an imaginary father figure and mentor. 
Nine years after Mies’s death, in 1978, Tigerman addressed an open letter 
to him in which he reported that, “here in Chicago everything appears to 
have remained much the same as it was ten years ago”8; he then wrote a 
postscript to that letter in 1986, in which he deplores “that Americans, by 
and large, still consider you [Mies] as a commercial paradigm rather than 
as a philosophic role model.”9 Tigerman did see in Mies’s abstractionism 
a philosophical stance: Because the German emigré had inaugurated a 
radically “other” vision in architecture, he could figure as the epitome of  
the liberal freethinker. In Tigerman’s mind, to imitate Mies did not imply 
that one had to repeat his abstract aesthetic, it meant to make oneself  
different from anyone else so far ... including Mies. In architecture, Mies 
could function as the model for the individualist.10 Much of  Tigerman’s 
own architecture can be read as a dialogue with Mies’s “matrix,” 
which nevertheless is traversed and warped by another, more “supple” 
geometrical logic: The composition of  Tigerman’s Oakbrook Residence 
from 1976-77, for example, seemed to emulate the paradoxical meeting of  
the Miesian grid with a more fluid, flexible, and lyrical geometry. Similarly, 
some of  Tigerman’s early oil paintings, which directly borrowed from 
another German-born artist, Josef  Albers, also evidenced an interest in 
the close alliance between rational line geometries and the quasi-figural 
presence a slight disturbance of  geometry can engender.

Tigerman’s part real, part imaginary exchange with the German 
expatriate was intentionally concocted as a psychoanalytically charged 
relationship, which culminated with Tigerman’s creation of  an ambivalent 
collage in 1979, entitled “The Titanic”; the work showed Mies’s Crown Hall 
at the Illinois Institute of  Technology precariously floating (or possibly 
sinking) in the ocean against the backdrop of  a clouded sky. “The Titanic” 
illustrated the nachleben of  the ambivalent encounter between Tigerman 
and Mies—immersed in an oneiric and unstable milieu of  the clouds and 
the deep water. With it, Tigerman demanded that the baton be passed to 
a (then) young generation of  architects in Chicago, who felt a Bloomian 
anxiety of  influence from their modern antecedents.11 

In 1976, Tigerman turned his personal discontent with the architecture 



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scene into a more collective disagreement when he 
co-founded a group of  self-declared “individualists” 
and “freethinkers”: The Chicago Seven included 
Tom Beeby, Larry Booth, Stuart Cohen, James 
Ingo Freed, James Nagle, Ben Weese; in 1977, the 
group expanded to eight to include Helmut Jahn, 
the “Baron von High-Tech.”12 The first formal 
event of  the Seven was an exhibition the group 
organized for The Cooper Union in New York, 
and later took to Illinois. The participants of  the 
exhibition conceived of  “Chicago Architects” as a 
sort of  salon des refusés, which was scheduled to be on 
display at the Richard Gray Gallery simultaneously 
with the “official” and “canonical” retrospective 
of  Chicago architecture at Chicago’s Museum of  
Contemporary Art, entitled “A Hundred Years of  
Chicago Architecture: Continuity of  Form and 
Structure.”13 The New York opening of  the show 
was to give it legitimacy before it would go back 
“home” to Chicago. In order to communicate 
their insurrectionist intent, facing up to the official 
tenet of  Chicago modernism, this group of  
architects was named after its political homologue 
in Chicago, also called the Chicago Seven around 
social right activists Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, 
David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John 
Froines, Lee Weiner and Bobby Seale, all of  whom 
had been arrested and put to trial for conspiracy 
and for instigating to riot at massive protests against 
the Vietnam War at the 1968 Democratic National 
Convention.14 Seale had to appear again at hearings 
in 1970 as one of  the New Haven Nine during 
the New Haven Black Panther trials. During these 
trials, the architecture school of  Tigerman’s alma 
mater, Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building 
at Yale, fell prey to a mysterious fire, although no 
arson was revealed. Both the Chicago Seven and the 
New Haven Nine were all finally found not guilty 
of  conspiracy, yet Tigerman was well aware of  the 
cultural stir these conspirators had provoked—not 
least because Tigerman knew Weiner. Beyond the 



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name of  the political precedent, some of  its street-fighter terminology 
was also adopted by the architectural Seven; one of  its members explained 
that “what Mies did is that he thought of  it as a war for saving our souls 
or the battle for the saving of  architecture. Late in his life he once said, 
“I’ve showed them how to do it. I am winning the war for architecture.”15 
The Seven rose up against becoming the foot soldiers of  a war they did 
not endorse.

The Seven also positioned themselves in rivalry with two groups of  
architects on the East Coast, one of  which had declared a shared interest 
in the autonomy of  the discipline of  architecture in the context of  the 
CASE study groups in the late sixties.16 As an outcome of  one of  these 
meetings held at the Museum of  Modern Art in 1969, five of  its members 
published a series of  house projects in a book entitled Five Architects in 
1972; the projects were intellectually strung together by a critical essay by 
historian Colin Rowe.17 Because of  his aptitude to provide a connective 
theory for their ideas, Rowe emerged as the eminence grise of  the “New 
York Five,” or “Whites,” which included Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, 
Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier. It did not take long 
until the Whites’ interest in Le Corbusier and the autonomous, abstract 
syntax of  form was challenged by the so-called “Grays,” who were mostly 
associated with Yale and Pennsylvania universities, and included Vincent 
Scully, Robert Venturi, Robert A.M. Stern, and Romaldo Giurgola, among 
others. The Grays promoted the semantic dimension of  architectural 
form, and its ability to “communicate” by connecting to the history and 
the architectural motives of  the Western humanist traditions.18 The staged 
rivalry between the Chicago and the New York groups was based on a 
significant conceptual difference, in that the Seven abstained from defining 
a shared set of  aesthetic and theoretical principles, so that every one of  
its members would preserve his individuality and singularity. Tigerman 
described the Seven’s liberal agenda as follows:

The New York Five thought they had something in common, and they presented 
themselves as Whites: exclusivist, autonomous beings ...they had a certain 
collective belief  in “autonomy.” The Grays, which was [Romaldo] Giurgola, 
[Robert A. M.] Stern, and all those people, saw themselves as inclusivists. The 
guys in L. A., the Silvers, saw themselves as studies in extrusion, because of  the 
speed of  the automobile. 
The Chicago Seven have nothing to do with each other—formally, and now, 
personally. I don’t even see them. ...It was the only way we could get seven 
desperate people who had nothing in common, including respect for the other; but 
one thing we had in common: we needed to penetrate a city that was monolithic, 
that was Miesian.19 



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The Seven stayed away from delineating a 
shared aesthetic-formalist code; instead, they were 
mostly defined negatively, by stating that they did not 
participate in the established architectural culture of  
Chicago. This strategy of  affirming identity through 
negation and distance was entirely consistent with 
Tigerman’s ironic weltanschauung, which hinged 
on the possible co-existence of  contradictions and 
unresolved dualities. The Seven made this ironic 
self-understanding into an ideological model for 
urban cohabitation when, in 1978, they organized 
the “Chicago Townhouse” competition at The 
Graham Foundation. This event came in defense 
of  a pluralist discipline, and became one of  the 
forerunners of  the strada novissima installation at 
the showcase event for postmodern architecture 
two years later at the Venice Biennale, called “The 
Presence of  the Past.”

Tigerman’s advocacy of  the creative and 
independent freethinker has to be seen against 
the background of  a determining and officially 
sanctioned conflict the United States engaged in at 
the time he developed his project in architecture: 
the Vietnam War. The senseless loss of  human 
life in the worsening war after 1965, and well into 
the 1970s, presented the American society with 
an existential puzzle, which destroyed the former 
confidence in the ability to master and control every 
aspect of  life; moreover, it stirred up suspicions 
about the ethical value underlying the positivism of  
the modern and secular lifestyle. When the United 
States’s official campaign against Communism 
turned into a national disaster, Tigerman started 
to question the relative gain of  abstract and 
universalizing heroism in the face of  the individual 
suffering of  the people of  both war nations. He 
was well aware that the emerging existential angst 
around Vietnam did not only affect the collective 
conscience, as the media in the socially oriented 
sixties kept suggesting, but it resulted in fears on a 
very personal level: The national calamity made him 



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aware of  his own finitude and mortality. Together with this realization of  
finitude, Tigerman’s simultaneous midlife crisis, only added to his individual 
disquietude at the time.20 He wrote in 1982 that towards the second half  
of  the 1970s, “I felt the need to reassess the way I wished to live the rest 
of  my life. I became fascinated with the idea that the notions of  humor 
and irony could be regarded as perverse responses to the acknowledgment 
of  death.”21 Here, he announced his primordial reason as well as the 
rhetorical modes of  expression of  his form of  architectural liberalism; 
the introduction of  humor and irony into architecture was to open a space 
within the discipline’s dense matrix of  foundational assumptions, and re-
conquer within it a territory for individual freedom of  expression. In spirit, 
the double, tragic/comic rhetoric of  his architectural writing and design is 
very close to Roberto Benigni’s in his 1997 comedy La vita è bella—a daring 
aesthetic-ethical tour de force about the life in the concentration camps in 
Auschwitz.

In view of  the Western world’s apparent lack of  self-doubt and self-
criticism manifested in the U.S. government’s bad judgment around the 
Vietnam war and the war protests, Tigerman challenged the “modern” 
notion of  an overarching and synthetic ideology (i.e. the zeitgeist) which 
was considered to epitomize all aspirations of  a people at a particular 
moment in time. He criticized the collective delusion of  endless progress 
which, more than engrained in the very project of  modernity, was also 
endemic to the post-Emersonian, American pioneer ethics and found 
itself  boosted by the economic upswing and the consumer euphoria in the 
postwar decades. Ultimately, he considered the United States’ one-sided 
confidence in an uninterrupted cultural, social and economic renewal in 
the 1950s and early 60s immature: “There is something perverse about 
the reenactment of  the desire to remain collectively ‘young.’ It is as if  
an entire culture rejects its own coming of  age because it may ruin that 
culture’s optimism.”22 The heroic and positivist devotion to this shared 
belief  seemed like a naive conceit of  a nation, which failed to understand 
the true meaning of  individual “existence.” Vietnam shuttered the illusion 
that a nation like the United States would or could speak with one voice, 
and that any attitude of  dissent and disagreement should dissolve in the 
positive spirit of  an allegedly unified ideological will of  the American 
society.

In the context of  these questions raised in the socio-cultural 
sphere, Tigerman was drawn magnetically to the intellectual tradition of  
existentialism, from Socrates to Søren Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, from 
Dostoevsky to Kafka, and finally, to Mark C. Taylor’s (a-)theological 



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speculations—themselves based on Kierkegaard.23 
Tigerman liked to think of  his own position in 
architecture as analogous to the place Kierkegaard 
occupied in philosophy: What Kierkegaard was to 
Hegel, Tigerman thought he could represent in 
relation to Mies. In a sense, Hegel and Mies both 
attempted to “systematize” existence through their 
respective sterile metaphysics, which was in the 
service of  a universal welt- or zeitgeist. Kierkegaard 
and Tigerman, by contrast, insisted on the 
importance of  the subjective perspective as well 
as the freedom associated with it. They maintained 
that singular, contingent acts and reflections were 
not dictated by any universal will, but instead, 
belonged to the free initiative of  every discrete 
human being–the sphere of  “That Individual.”24 
Along with his disapproval of  abstract systemdenken, 
Kierkegaard had expressed his criticism against a 
fixed, dehumanized, and “spatialized” view of  
time, and suggested to replace it with the more 
individualized and transient notion of  “life-time.”25 
Tigerman similarly insisted that space and time were 
contingent on the mortal existence of  a person’s 
lifecycle; many of  his sketches make thematic the 
idea of  the irrecuperable passage of  individualized 
time, as does, for example, the drawing entitled 
“Hinge.” About his phallus-shaped Daisy House, 
Tigerman wrote: “The necessity to communicate 
the finite condition of  man in all its ironic nobility 
was an obvious requirement of  [this building].”26 
The house’s patron truly epitomized the Janus-
faced relationship between the very human 
sentiments of  tragedy and comedy: The client was 
the owner of  burlesque show venues in Chicago, 
and was diagnosed with terminal cancer when he 
approached Tigerman to design the house. After 
turning down the client several times, Tigerman 
finally accepted to design a house for him under the 
condition that the project would make his patron 
laugh: “I drew an erect phallus with semen coming 
out at the end, directed at him, and he laughed. He 

What 
Kierkegaard 

was to Hegel, 
Tigerman 

thought he could 
represent in 

relation to Mies

“

”



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liked it, and we built it, and he died three months later; that’s the truth.”27 
This thoroughly humanized, tragic/comic liaison with other subjects 
through the medium of  architecture has been at the core of  Tigerman’s 
critique of  modernism, and was, at the same time, fundamental to his own 
version of  “postmodernism.” 

Endnotes

1. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: 
MIT Press, 1968).

2. Refer to Tigerman’s autobiography Building Bridges to Burn, forew. by Emmanuel 
Petit (ORO, 2011).

3. Saul Bellow, The Adventures of  Augie March: A Novel (New York: Viking Press, 
1953).

4. Tigerman, “The Ten Contaminants” (1991), Schlepping Through Ambivalence: 
Writings on an Ambivalent Architectural Condition, ed. Emmanuel Petit (New 
Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 54.

5. Tigerman, “Juxtaposition vs. Judgment, 1965,” Versus: An American Architect’s 
Alternatives (New York: Rizzoli, 1982), 56.

6. Tigerman used the expression “German invasion” to designate Mies van der 
Rohe’s arrival in Chicago in an interview with Barbaralee Diamonstein. 
Diamonstein-Spielvogel, “American Architecture Now: Stanley Tigerman,” 
Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive, Duke University Libraries, 1984.

7. Stanley Tigerman, “Mies van der Rohe: A Moral Model”; “Paradigms in 
Architecture,” Perspecta 22, The Journal of  the Yale School of  Architecture, Rizzoli, 
New York (1986), 118.

8. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, quoted in Tigerman, Versus, 30.

9. Refer to Tigerman’s “P.P.S. to Mies,” Schlepping Through Ambivalence, 153.

10. I borrow the idea of  the meaning of  imitating an individualist from Alexander 
Nehamas’s view of  Socrates, in Art of  Living, where Nehamas claims: “To 
imitate Socrates is therefore to create oneself, as Socrates did; but it is also 
to make oneself  different from anyone else so far, and since that includes 
Socrates himself, it is to make oneself  different from Socrates as well. That is 
why he can function as the model for the individualist” Art of  Living: Socratic 
Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of  
California Press, Sather Classical Lectures, 1998), 11.

11. In 1973, Harold Bloom published Anxiety of  Influence: A Theory of  Poetry, in 
which he argued that because a poet must look for an original poetic vision 
in order to guarantee his survival into posterity, the overwhelming influence 
of  his precedents provokes a sense of  anxiety in living poets.

12. Tigerman designates Jahn as the “Baron von High-Tech” in Versus, 30.

13. Oswald W. Grube, Peter C. Pran and Franz Schulze, 100 Years of  Architecture in 



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Chicago: Continuity of  Structure and Form (Chicago: J. Philip O’Hara, 1976).

14. The Chicago Seven were originally eight, but one of  their member’s trial (Bobby 
Seale’s) was separated from the trial of  the other seven because of  his blatant 
disrespect of  the court proceedings and the judge. 

On the Chicago Seven protests and trials, refer to: J. Anthony Lukas, “Judge 
Hoffman Is Taunted at Trial of  the Chicago 7 After Silencing Defense Counsel”, 
New York Times, February 6, 1970; David Dellinger, From Yale to Jail: the Life 
Story of  a Moral Dissenter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993); Abbie Hoffman 
& al., Conspiracy, introduction by Noam Chomsky, edited by Peter and Deborah 
Babcox and Bob Abel (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1969).

15. James Ingo Freed, Chicago Architects Oral History Project (Chicago, Illinois: The Art 
Institute of  Chicago, 2000).

16. On the CASE study group meetings (Conference of  Architects for the Study of  
the Environment), refer to Harry Francis Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory: 
A Historical Survey, 1673-1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

17. Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier (New York: Wittenborn, 
1972).

18. For a discussion of  the “White/Gray” debates, refer to Joan Ockman, 
“Resurrecting the Avant-Garde: The History and Program of  Oppositions,” in 
Beatriz Colomina (ed), Architecture Production (New York: Princeton Architectural 
Press, 1988).

19. Conversation Stanley Tigerman with Emmanuel Petit, Princeton, NJ, December 
2001; in Emmanuel Petit, “Irony in Metaphysics’s Gravity: Imagination and 
Iconoclasm in Architecture 1960s-80s,” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 
January 2006, Annex B.

20. Ibid., 115.

21. Ibid.

22. Tigerman, The Architecture of  Exile (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), 155.

23. Tigerman extracts most of  his references to existentialist thinkers from William 
Hubben, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kafka: Four Prophets of  Our Destiny 
(London and New York: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1952 & 1962). Later, 
Tigerman refers a lot to Mark C. Taylor’s Erring: A Postmodern A/theology 
(Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1984).

24. The epitaph on Kierkegaard’s grave referred to the philosopher as “That 
Individual.”

25. Paul Bové, “The Penitentiary of  Reflection: Søren Kierkegaard and Critical 
Activity,” boundary 2, vol. 9, no. 1, A Supplement on Irony (Autumn, 1980), 
233-58, p. 237.

26. Tigerman, Versus, 116.

27. Conversation Tigerman with Petit; “Irony in Metaphysics’s Gravity... .”



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Stanley Tigerman responds

Question: The essay by Emmanuel Petit is talking about 
your ethics. And in the essay one of  the things he says is that 
your temperament or approach would have more in common 
with the anti-philosophers like Socrates and Kierkegaard 
and Bataille rather than the system builders like Kant and 
Hegel. Is that something that you would agree with or be in 
sympathy with?

Answer: I don’t have any feeling about it at all. 
Emmanuel writes what he sees and thinks is correct, 
and I am, with respect to him, simply an other. So 
I don’t have any feelings that he’s right or wrong or 
whatever.

Q: Then he does get in to the struggles that went on in 
the 1970s and 1980s with postmodernism and your central 
role there, and at the time, a lot of  times it was relegated to 
being about style, and he brings out the idea that there was 
a strong ethical incentive or underpinning to your work and 
your positions at that time, and I was hoping that you might 
have something to say about that.

A: Yeah actually I do. Architecture is an elitist 
one.  We are the hired guns for the wealthy. Or those 
in power, or kings or princes, or princes of  industry, 
or princes of  the art world. We were never about 
ethical considerations. But its provable in the last 
fifty years at least, when you could actually explore 
the phrase “follow the money and you will find 
architects” So when kings had to build in apartheid 
South Africa, we did. When the kings had to build 
for the Shah of  Iran we did. When it came time to 
build for OPEC money we did. And so today you 
find major corporate firms stampeding to the ticket 
counter of  overseas airlines to work on projects in 
countries whose human rights history doesn’t exist. 
So it still is the same. But in the 1970s on the heels 
of  Venturi’s book Complexity and Contradiction in 



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Architecture, architects took a second look at their 
origins. And so there was an attempt, feeble there’s 
no question of  it, stylistic, yes, to get in touch with 
their predecessors. To find roots as it were—of  a 
rootless people. I wrote a book twenty-five to thirty 
years ago entitled the Architecture of  Exile, which 
stipulates that Americans are in exile. This is not 
our land. It belonged to the American Indians etc. 
It was promised by the bible. Ashes to ashes, dust 
to dust but this is not our soil and we are exploitive 
even as I speak to you, so yes I for a very long time, 
not that I hold it as a badge of  honor, I have been 
a person who has been involved with ethics, who 
writes about it, who tries to build about it, etc. Yes 
that’s true.

Q: What specifically in postmodernism as it was playing 
out at the time seemed to you to have an ethical imperative?

A: Well, among other things, you have to 
remember that you are talking to someone who 
may be native to Chicago, but ultimately it is not my 
home. I was born here but it is not my home. This 
is a Baptist fundamentalist city. And also was a city 
that took great care to patronize Mies van der Rohe. 
And so it was very difficult in the sixties to come 
back from graduate school and to find a place in this 
place which was no place for me. And so we formed 
something called the Chicago Seven, with a group 
who was were antagonistic to an establishment 
condition, and we tried to make a place for us at 
the table. Around that time, a little bit later, I did 
that infamous piece about the titanic, about Crown 
Hall sinking into Lake Michigan and it struck a note 
at the time and it drew great discussion in the then 
emerging architectural culture in Chicago which 
was really nothing more than two sides battling it 
out between the traditional, canonical structural 
constructivist tradition and another group that had 
nothing in common—the Chicago Seven—but 
who felt that a more open, multi-valent condition 
might be better for all concerned in Chicago, and so 



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we battled our way to the table, and there were any number of  events—
mosh pits or whatever—where we invited others to argue it out with us 
and they came and we did. That condition no longer exists today. Basically, 
there is no Chicago architectural culture.

Q: What you had in common was an attitude towards multivalence?

A: What we had in common was we wanted a place at the table. Make 
no mistake about it. We were all different, one from the other and to find 
that place took a long time but it did transpire at some point. So yes, you 
could call it multivalent, you could call it philosophically inclined, but it 
was really very self- oriented and selfish. We wanted respect without the 
credential of  having studied with Mies. And it ultimately transpired. In the 
process, Chicago opened itself  up to every stripe of  ambulance chaser 
who came to Chicago to build. 

Q: I do have one other question I would like to run by you. One of  the things 
Emmanuel brings out in the article is about spontaneity. He thinks that cultivating 
spontaneity with another person through design rather than sort of  presenting them with 
a design—he thinks that spontaneity is something that characterized what you do. Do 
you agree with that?

A: Again, I don’t know about that. I do know that we in the West fear, 
as Emmanuel Levinas put it, the other–The other that stalks the street. We 
are terrified of  looking this person in the eye. We’re terrified of  terrorists, 
forgetting that the tradition of  terrorism is rampant in all the countries 
of  the West. Think of  the French Revolution, think about the American 
Revolution—it was filled with terrorists. The British didn’t know if  they 
were going to have a bomb in their pocket. Suicide bombers are just 
an advanced version of  the terrorists we were—American, that is. So I 
think—I’m reading a book right now that is very interesting, called On the 
Muslim Question which years ago could have been called “On the Jewish 
Question” the Jews in America and everywhere else, were never respected, 
they had to fight for the place and ultimately they had no place even in 
America. Only if  you fell into the melting pot and declared yourself  an 
American first—so we don’t take kindly to veiled Muslim women or 
trance-talking Muslim males. We could—this country is supposed to be 
made up of  diversified people that are not the same to each other. It’s 
the only country on Earth that has that distinction. We could embrace 
an other, a foreign person, a person that doesn’t speak like us and who 
has values other than ours—meaning values established by the Koran—as 
opposed to the Judeo-Christian bible. But we could, so I’m of  the type 
who believes in that, who doesn’t scare. You know, you go through life 
with only two ways, with fear or with love. And those who go in fear die 



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in fear, and those who go in love die in love. And 
that’s really all I have to say about it. I mean, I am an 
architect. I trade, I also read and I write and I draw. 
I do other things other than making buildings. And 
I like to think and hope that the buildings I make, 
make sense. We [Tigerman McCurry] don’t market, 
we don’t brand, we don’t have a marketing director. 
I’m not interested in branding, I’m not interested in 
any way in the diminishment of  the discipline. But 
it is being diminished all the time—right now, as we 
speak. In other words, I’m glad I’m eighty-three and 
I’m not going to live to see the disaster that’s about 
to come to architecture.

Stanley tigerman





Building Plans as Natural 
Symbols

Rafael De Clercq

At present, there are no hotly debated topics 
in the philosophy of  architecture. One could 
take this as evidence of  the dreariness of  the 
discipline, but one could equally see it as a sign that 
the discipline has not been caught up in its own 
internal dialectic and thereby lost touch with issues 
that matter outside of  philosophy. After all, when a 
(philosophical) discipline lacks a compelling internal 
dialectic, there is every reason for researchers in 
the field to look beyond its boundaries, to other, 
neighboring fields. In the case of  the philosophy of  
architecture, these neighbors include architectural 
history, architectural theory, architectural criticism, 
and, last but not least, the practice of  architecture 
itself. It should come as no surprise, then, that the 
topic of  my paper is an entirely self-selected one 
from the field of  architectural history and theory. 
More specifically, I will focus on a claim about 
building plans that can be found in the work of  
architectural historian Carroll William Westfall. The 
claim has received little attention, perhaps because 
it is considered implausible, or because it is made 
by someone whose taste in philosophy (Aristotle) 
and architecture (Jefferson) seems all too classical. 
Whatever the case may be, in what follows I will 
try to argue that the claim is not implausible. I will, 
however, give my own interpretation to it, one that 
may not match entirely what Westfall had in mind.1 
Still, the claim is supposed to remain sufficiently 
strong under the proposed interpretation to make 
it far from trivially true.

there are 
buildings 

belonging to 
disparate 

functional kinds 
(e.g., ‘temple’, 

‘dwelling’, ‘shop’) 
whose plans are 
natural symbols 

of the activities 
accommodated 

by those 
buildings 

“

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I.

Westfall advanced his thesis about building plans in Architectural 
Principles in the Age of  Historicism, a book co-authored with Robert Jan van 
Pelt in 1991.2 Here are some relevant quotations from Westfall’s chapter 
on building types:3 

Here it is argued that a building imitates a type which is timeless. The type 
provides a symbol of  the purpose which the building embodies… The particular 
building is a conventional sign within which is embedded the natural symbolism 
of  the type (van Pelt & Westfall 1991, p. 156). 

In this sense, [the type] is a natural symbol of  the political purpose it 
accommodates. In both the most simple and most complex way, then, the type’s 
character is embodied in its plan diagram, and that plan diagram is about a 
purpose… (Ibid., p. 160)

Each purpose has a corresponding building type with a characteristic plan 
diagram. The type embodies the continuity between the present and the past. It is 
that which endures because it is true. Because it is true, it exists outside the time 
marked by history, and it has symbolic value—it symbolizes some particular 
political purpose (Ibid., p. 166).

The claim I wish to extract from the above quotations can be stated 
as follows: there are buildings belonging to disparate functional kinds 
(e.g., ‘temple’, ‘dwelling’, ‘shop’) whose plans are natural symbols of  the 
activities accommodated by those buildings. It may not be immediately 
clear why this claim is extracted from the quotations. First of  all, in the 
quoted passages, Westfall is not saying that activities are symbolized; he 
says that purposes are symbolized. However, activities and purposes are 
not clearly distinguished in van Pelt & Westfall 1991 (e.g., on pp. 156, 161-
2). Moreover, as we will see in section III, the explanation of  the symbolic 
relation may be roughly the same regardless of  whether purposes or 
activities are symbolized. In other words, the plausibility of  the central 
claim does not depend on which of  the two interpretations is preferred.4 

Another interpretative issue arises from the fact that Westfall does not 
say that building plans are symbols; he tends to say that building types are 
symbols. However, since, according to the second quotation, “the type’s 
character is embodied in its plan diagram” it does not seem too extravagant 
to take him as claiming that building plans are symbols or, if  one prefers, 
that buildings symbolize by virtue of  their plan. Indeed, more recently, 
Westfall writes that (particular) buildings “based on” building types are 



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natural symbols (unpublished, p. 14).

In any case, my interpretation of  the claim 
will henceforth focus on two expressions: ‘plan’ 
and ‘natural symbol’. My discussion of  the 
claim’s significance—in particular, how it differs 
from similar claims—will have to wait until the 
conclusion, when a clear interpretation has been 
provided.

II.

The plans that are supposed to serve as natural 
symbols are not diagrammatic representations of  
horizontal sections (these are “conventional signs”), 
but the horizontal sections themselves. Moreover, 
they are the horizontal sections of  particular 
buildings, for example, a horizontal section of  
the ground floor of  the Houses of  Parliament in 
London. However, if  we follow Westfall, these plans 
or sections are able to serve as natural symbols only 
because they exemplify a certain abstract shape; in 
other words, because they are tokens of  a certain 
type. Westfall identifies six basic types: the tholos, 
the temple, the theatre, the regia, the dwelling, and 
the shop. (For our purposes, we can regard a basic 
type as one whose symbolic significance does not 
derive entirely from its being an instance of  another, 
more general type.) The activities symbolized by the 
tokens of  these types are, respectively, venerating, 
celebrating, imagining (or “aspiring”), governing 
(or “exercising authority”), dwelling, and sustaining 
(or “trading”). The diagrams in figure 1 represent 
the abstract shapes the tokens have in common in 
virtue of  being tokens of  the same type.

When introduced in this way, the list may strike 
one as somewhat arbitrary, and indeed Westfall does 
not explain in detail how he arrived at it. He says little 
more than the list is based on, “[e]xperience with 
historical building and reflection about the historic 
within that experience as well as the knowledge 
available to us through our life in the present” (p. 

What 
distinguishes 

natural from 
non-natural 

symbols is 
the way the 
connection is 
established 

between the 
symbol and what 

it stands for

“

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156). Nonetheless, it seems to me that the list cannot be rejected out of  
hand as based on someone’s parochial (say, Western) experience. This may 
be evident in the case of  the dwelling and the shop, but even the peculiar-
looking tholos is exemplified by religious structures around the world such 
as mosques and Chinese altars and pagodas. The apparent universality 
of  the types is of  course due to the fact that they are very general and 
leave many features undetermined, for example, dimensions of  rooms, the 
placing of  windows and doors, etcetera.6 However, such indeterminacy 
does not empty Westfall’s list of  significance as long as the shapes, and the 
corresponding activities, are recognizable and recognizably different from 
one another.7 That is enough for Westfall’s list to be refutable. Moreover, 
Westfall leaves open the possibility that a different (and presumably, equally 
correct) list can be produced on the basis of  a “different understanding 
of  the way political life is given conventional form in constitutions and a 
different interpretation of  the activities that constitute political life” (p. 
157). However, in what follows, I do not want to defend even the thesis 
that Westfall’s list is a correct enumeration of  basic types. All I want to 
argue is that some such list (perhaps a much longer one) may be correct. 
That is enough for the claim under investigation to be plausible or at least 
worthy of  further investigation.

The claim extracted from Westfall’s chapter makes reference only to 
horizontal sections. In principle, one could also take vertical sections into 
account. The word ‘plans’ in my formulation of  the main thesis would 
then have to be replaced by something like ‘horizontal and/or vertical 
sections’. This should not affect (what I take to be) the substance of  the 
claim, although it may make it more plausible. In what follows, however, 
I will largely ignore vertical sections; in part to remain as close as possible 
to Westfall’s text, in part to keep things as simple as possible.8 For the 
same reasons, I will ignore complexities arising from the fact that part of  
a building may exemplify a type without the building itself  exemplifying 
that type.

III.

The expression that is bound to cause most puzzlement is ‘natural 
symbol’. In the sense that is relevant here, a symbol is an object (or an 
action or an event) that stands for something valued within a community 
such as a deity or the nation.9 Two additional clarifications may make 
this definition a bit more helpful. Firstly, an object stands for something 
valued only if  it (i) has the capacity to call it to mind and (ii) in virtue 
of  that capacity, is the object of  attitudes normally directed towards the 



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valued thing (for example, reverence and respect). 
Secondly, what a symbol stands for usually is not 
itself  an object or at least not an object of  sensory 
experience: it can be a past event, a supernatural 
being, a non-perceptual property, a disposition, 
and so on. In the present case, it is (the purpose 
served by) an activity of  a very general kind such 
as venerating, celebrating and dwelling. What 
distinguishes natural from non-natural symbols 
is the way the connection is established between 
the symbol and what it stands for. In the case of  a 
non-natural symbol, the connection is established 
by a convention such as the convention that x 
is a monument for y or that x is the flag of  y. In 
such cases, the connection is arbitrary in the sense 
that a different convention would have resulted 
in a different connection. In the case of  a natural 
symbol such as an icon or a relic, the connection is 
not the result of  a convention, but of  something 

Figure 1: Westfall’s alphabet of building (p. 160): (1) regia (2) 
tholos (3) temple (4) dwelling (5) theatre (6) shop. Hatched 
areas represent solid forms. 5



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outside our will such as striking resemblance and/or spatiotemporal 
contiguity (contact). Note that the difference lies in how the connection is 
established – by convention or not – not in how it is maintained. Even if  
the connection between a symbol and what it symbolizes was established 
by convention, a change of  convention may not result in a change of  
connection. For example, a country may adopt a new flag without the old 
flag thereby losing its symbolic significance. 

Evidently, this raises the question how the ‘natural’ connection is 
established between building plans of  a given type on the one hand and 
kinds of  activities on the other hand. Westfall does not explicitly address 
this question, but, as we will see, there is an answer that is compatible with 
what he says and which seems defensible. 

One may think that spatiotemporal contiguity can explain the symbolic 
connection between building plans and activities. After all, the symbolized 
activities (for example, dwelling) may take place in close proximity to the 
horizontal sections of  buildings. However, on the face of  it, this cannot be 
the whole explanation. The reason is that spatial contiguity can establish 
a connection only between items that have a location in space and time, 
for example, between a particular – locatable – building and a particular 
– dateable – activity that has taken place within it. But the connection 
that Westfall needs is one between building plans of  a given type and 
certain kinds of  activities. Because types and kinds are abstract objects, 
which do not have a location in space, they cannot stand in a relation of  
spatiotemporal contiguity to one another.

One might think that it is enough to have spatiotemporal contiguity 
between tokens and instances in order to have a connection between the 
corresponding types and kinds. In other words, if  activities of  a certain 
kind always take place in buildings of  a certain type, or vice versa, if  
buildings of  a certain type always accommodate activities of  a certain 
kind, then will this not be enough to establish a symbolic connection 
between the two? To be sure, this seems closer to the truth. It certainly 
is true that the actual use of  a plan may enhance its symbolic value. By 
having a certain history of  use, a plan may be better able to call to mind 
what is symbolized, for example, through recollection. However, it does 
not follow that such constant association can create symbolic value or that 
it creates it in every case. At least in our present case, it seems that other 
factors may be involved. In fact, in order to find out whether there are 
other factors, it may be worth investigating why certain types of  plan have 
come to be associated with certain kinds of  activity. For example, it may 
be worth asking why veneration often takes place in tholos-like forms. 



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An obvious answer is that this type is experienced 
as suitable or appropriate. This then suggests the 
following answer to our initial question: a building 
plan of  type x can be a natural symbol of  a kind 
of  activity y because x is (especially) appropriate 
for the accommodation of  y. Or, if  one prefers the 
interpretation under which purposes rather than 
activities are symbolized: a building plan of  type x 
can be a natural symbol of  purpose y because x is 
especially appropriate for the accommodation of  
an activity that serves y.

One may ask what is more important, whether 
a building plan is experienced as appropriate or 
whether it really is appropriate? I think the latter 
relation is more fundamental, and in any case, in 
greater need of  clarification (to be provided soon). 
Nonetheless, it is obvious that appropriateness alone 
does not suffice to confer symbolic significance 
on a building plan. The appropriateness has to be 
recognized if  it is to make the building plan stand for 
a particular purpose or a particular kind of  activity. 
In other words, only manifest appropriateness 
explains symbolic significance. Similarly, a piece 
of  clothing cannot function as a relic unless it is 
believed to have belonged to a particular person.

The idea that certain types of  plan are 
appropriate for certain kinds of  activity is one that 
occasionally shows up in the literature, for example, 
when it is said that variations on a plan and/or 
section occur in the history of  building types until 
the ‘appropriate’ form has been found. To quote 
just two examples:

In a healthy building culture, tradition and innovation 
are not contradictory but complementary concepts. In 
both cases, [a] building type is allowed to take on the 
most appropriate form (Davis 2006, p. 153; italics 
omitted).

A type represents the organizational structure of  a 
building in plan and section. A type evolves until it 



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achieves its basic (i.e. its rational and logical) form… [T]he fact that airport 
terminals are everywhere in a state of  permanent reconstruction demonstrates the 
fact that shelter and function have not yet found a suitable type. (Krier 2007, 
p. 42) 

Although ‘suitable’ and ‘appropriate’ seem to be used here in their everyday 
meaning (of  ‘right’), it may be useful to spell out the idea a little bit more.

Echoing Nelson Goodman’s theory of  rightness (see, for example, 
Goodman & Elgin 1988, p. 158), one might say that a type of  plan is 
appropriate for an activity if  and only if  using it for the accommodation 
of  that activity works; in other words, if  using the type for that purpose 
helps to create a successful building, where ‘helps to create’ can be 
understood as designating a causal relation. Nothing much hinges here on 
a particular view of  what a successful building is, but it seems reasonable 
to demand – in addition to the Vitruvian criteria of  firmness, commodity, 
and delight – that a building be adaptable and in harmony with the existing 
environment.10 

If  using a type for the accommodation of  a particular activity works, 
then at least part of  the explanation must be that the use of  the type 
fits into a larger building culture which itself  works.11 As Goodman and 
Elgin say, “working tests fitting” (Ibid., p. 159). For example, architects 
and building users unfamiliar with a type of  plan may have no clue as to 
how a building based on it can accommodate the activity it is supposed 
to accommodate, and they may find it difficult to fit it into an existing 
context. In the building culture to which they belong, using the type may 
not work.12 When confronted with such a case, one should not jump to 
the conclusion that there is something wrong with either the type or the 
culture. One may just be confronted with a lack of  fit between the two. 
Nonetheless, the possibility of  a deficient building culture should be 
borne in mind, especially when criticisms of  the culture are widespread 
and persistent. This seems to be the case with our present building 
culture, whose shortcomings have been foregrounded by an ever-growing 
number of  critics, including architects (e.g., Bruce Allsop, Léon Krier, 
Paul Rudolph), engineers (e.g., Malcolm Millais), architectural critics (e.g., 
Peter Blake), architectural theorists (e.g., Brent C. Brolin, Howard Davis), 
architectural historians (e.g., David Watkin), philosophers (e.g., Roger 
Scruton), sociologists (e.g., Nathan Glazer), writers (e.g., Jane Jacobs, Tom 
Wolfe), and the Prince of  Wales (Charles).13 According to these critics, our 
present building culture is not very good at producing successful buildings 
in the sense that has just been made half-precise; in other words, it does 
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The notion of  a successful building, then, 
turns out to be essential to spelling out the relation 
of  appropriateness between building plan and 
activity (which relation is essential to explaining the 
symbolic significance of  certain types of  building 
plan). Of  course, this makes the relation partly 
normative. From a hermeneutic point of  view, this 
is a desirable consequence, since Westfall often 
calls his types ‘normative’. However, Westfall’s 
types are normative in a stronger sense: they are 
not just appropriate forms, they “provide the basic 
character of  what the plan of  the finished building 
must be if  it is to serve its purpose” (p. 161; my 
italics). Moreover, it seems that, in Westfall’s view, 
the only condition that can get one exempted from 
the requirement of  using the form for a particular 
activity is one in which it is (practically) impossible 
to use the form for that activity: “while the building 
types suggest how certain purposes ought to be 
accommodated by a building, circumstances do not 
always allow it to be so” (p. 161; italics in original). 
This may be overly strict. Nonetheless, it is worth 
noting that, according to Westfall, the requirement 
to use a certain building plan applies only to certain 
kinds of  building. For example, he claims that 
it does not apply to farms and libraries, and for 
reasons to be given soon, one may suppose that it 
does not apply to factories either. Moreover, the 
issue of  whether the types are normative in a strong 
or in a weak sense (i.e., whether they are mandatory 
or merely appropriate) has little bearing on the 
main issue, that is, how building plans can function 
as natural symbols of  certain purposes or activities. 
After all, if  a building plan is required in a given 
context – if  one “must” use it – then, a fortiori, it is 
appropriate to use it in that context.

The normativity imparted by the notion of  a 
successful building may seem to be incompatible 
with the claim that building plans are ‘natural’ 
symbols. However, the distinction between natural 
and non-natural symbols is not supposed to be an 



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instance of  the metaphysically puzzling distinction between the descriptive 
and evaluative, causes and reasons, and so on. Rather, the distinction 
was supposed to be a metaphysically innocent one between items whose 
symbolic significance is based on a convention and items whose symbolic 
significance has a different basis. (By ‘symbolic significance’ I mean 
an item’s standing for something valued.) In sum, ‘natural’ has to be 
understood as ‘non-conventional’.

Even if  an item’s symbolic significance is not the result of  a 
convention, there is still a potential for cultural variability. To see this, 
consider that, according to the explanation given above, appropriateness 
is a matter of  working, and that working is a matter of  fitting within a 
culture of  building. As a result, instances of  the same type of  building 
plan may not stand for the same thing, or even anything, in every culture. 
It does not follow (from the fact that working is a matter of  “fitting within 
a culture of  building”) that there is no fact of  the matter as to what is 
a working building plan or even a working building culture. Compare: 
from the fact that different types of  medicine work for different kinds 
of  people, it does not follow that there are no absolute standards for 
therapeutic effectiveness. Moreover, although I have again departed from 
what Westfall suggests – like Jungian archetypes, his basic building types 
seem to have universal symbolic significance – our disagreement (again) 
has no implications for the main thesis.

As said, there is room for variability across cultures with respect to 
what a building plan stands for. However, within a culture, a building plan 
cannot stand for a completely heterogeneous collection of  activities, even 
if  those activities happen to be all instances of  the same kind of  action. 
In other words, there have to be constancies in the form the activities 
take (p. 158). Otherwise there cannot be a type of  plan that suits them 
all, and which can therefore serve as a symbol of  the kind. If  this line of  
reasoning is correct, it may explain why the activities of  production and 
transportation do not seem to have associated types of  building plan: there 
is just too much variation in the form that such activities can take. In other 
words, even if  there is a type suitable to railway stations (cf. Krier 2007, p. 
51), there is no type suitable to all of  the following: railway stations, bus 
stations, ferry piers, airports, rocket launchers, and so on. 

Of  course, this raises the question of  when certain activities are too 
heterogeneous to be appropriately accommodated and hence symbolized 
by a particular building type.14 It seems to me that this question is best 
answered a posteriori, by examining the building types that have actually 
been developed. To be sure, certain expectations are reasonable on a 



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priori grounds. For example, it seems reasonable 
to expect that activities which are defined in 
highly general terms and which, at the same time, 
are highly reliant on technology (for example, 
transportation, production, and research) will not 
find appropriate accommodation in a single type 
or even in a plurality of  types. In such cases, the 
appropriate form of  accommodation is likely to 
depend on the nature of  the technology and the 
stage of  its development. However, it seems that 
such a priori reflection on the relationship between 
building types and activities can easily lead one into 
paradoxes. Consider, for example, the apparently 
contradictory statements which the prominent art 
historian James S. Ackerman issued about the villa 
(on what seem to be a priori grounds). One the one 
hand, Ackerman writes:

This makes the villa unique: other architectural 
types—the palace, the place of  worship, the factory—
have changed in form and purpose as the role of  
the ruler, the character of  the liturgy, the nature 
of  manufacture have changed, frequently and often 
radically. But the villa has remained substantially the 
same because it fills a need that never alters, a need 
which, because it is not material but psychological and 
ideological, is not subject to the influences of  evolving 
societies and technologies. The villa accommodates a 
fantasy which is impervious to reality (Ackerman 
1990, p. 9). 

On the other hand, he writes:

There is hardly a moment in the history of  architecture 
when villas were less innovative than other architectural 
types… The villa is less fixed in form than most other 
architectural types because the requirements of  leisure 
lack clear definition (Ibid., p. 18). 

On the face of  it, this seems inconsistent. How can 
the villa, and the activity or “need” it is supposed to 
serve, simultaneously be more stable and less fixed 
compared to other building types?15 One may try to 
resolve this apparent contradiction by saying that 

In the case of a 
natural symbol 

such as an icon 
or a relic, the 

connection is not 
the result of a 
convention, but 

of something 
outside our will 
such as striking 

resemblance 
and/or 

spatiotemporal 
contiguity 

“

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certain elements of  the villa remain unchanged while others are subject 
to change. But how could the villa be “unique” in this respect? Unless 
reference is made to particular elements, the statement that some of  the 
villa’s elements change, while others do not, borders on triviality. Of  
course, the only way one could reasonably make reference to particular 
elements is by investigating the matter empirically (that is, a posteriori). 
Eventually, this is what Ackerman does by distinguishing two types of  
villa that have survived from ancient times: the ‘compact-cubic’ type, 
which is regular (cubical) in shape, and the ‘open-extended’ type, which 
is irregularly shaped and more integrated with the natural environment 
(Ibid., pp. 18-26).

IV.

The hypothesis put forward in the previous section is that a building 
plan of  type x can be a natural symbol of  a kind of  activity y because x 
is (especially) appropriate for the accommodation of  y. Alternatively, a 
building plan of  type x can be a natural symbol of  purpose y because x 
is (especially) appropriate for the accommodation of  an activity serving 
y. In brief, appropriateness explains symbolic significance. However, it 
seems that the two factors can be regarded as mutually reinforcing, since 
the reverse—symbolic significance explains appropriateness—is also true. 
When a building plan comes to stand for a certain activity, it becomes all 
the more appropriate to use it for the accommodation of  that activity. This 
is of  course most clear in the case of  buildings accommodating ‘serious’ 
activities such as monuments, government buildings and churches. In such 
cases, it may be found awkward and even desecrating if  the building plan 
calls to mind another, less serious activity; similarly, an ordinary dwelling 
or shop may be found pompous or pretentious if  its plan calls to mind a 
more serious activity. Furthermore, a configuration of  buildings wearing 
their purposes ‘on their sleeves’ is more likely to constitute a meaningful 
whole. After all, we do not experience a configuration of  buildings as an 
abstract configuration of  shapes and colors any more than we experience 
an individual building in such a way. Our knowledge of  the actual purpose 
of  a building inevitably informs our perception of  it. If  that purpose does 
not correspond to its apparent purpose, then this can be easily picked up 
as an oddity in an individual case, which may even enhance the significance 
of  the whole. However, if  such incongruence occurs on a larger scale, 
then our attention will tend to drift away from the whole to the individual 
buildings making up the whole. What we are left with, then, is no longer an 
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significance is to be deciphered.

Finally, if  a building plan’s symbolic significance 
is somehow local—a possibility mentioned in 
previous section—then that may make it again 
more appropriate because it may create the ‘sense 
of  place’ that is so much desired nowadays.16 

V.

This paper took its starting point in a claim 
attributed to Carroll William Westfall, namely: there 
are buildings belonging to disparate functional kinds 
whose plans are natural symbols of  the (purposes 
served by the) activities accommodated by those 
buildings. My aim was to give an interpretation to 
this claim that makes it plausible and yet not trivial. 
Moreover, the interpretation was supposed to 
remain close enough to Westfall’s text to be able to 
count as an interpretation. In order to demonstrate 
the plausibility of  the claim under the proposed 
interpretation, I explored the idea that certain types 
of  building plan are appropriate for certain kinds of  
activities. My claim was that such appropriateness can 
explain the natural (i.e. non-conventional) symbolism 
of  building plans, and can also be reinforced by it.

Now that an interpretation of  Westfall’s claim 
has been provided, it is possible to say something 
about its significance. To be sure, Westfall is not the 
first to ascribe symbolic value to building plans. For 
example, Rudolf  Wittkower (1998[1949]) already 
argued that the circular plan of  certain Renaissance 
churches symbolized divine attributes and even God 
himself. In Eastern traditions of  architecture, such 
symbolism seems more entrenched. For example, 
Indian temple and palace plans were often based on 
cosmological diagrams called ‘mandalas’. Similarly, 
in the Temple of  Heaven Complex in Beijing, 
circular and square plans were used to allow for the 
worship of  (a round) Heaven and (a square) Earth 
respectively (Steinhardt 2002). To some extent, 
Westfall’s is a generalization of  such claims, since it 

On the face of 
it, this seems 
inconsistent. 
How can the 

villa, and the 
activity or “need” 

it is supposed 
to serve, 

simultaneously 
be more stable 
and less fixed 

compared to 
other building 

types?

“

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ascribes symbolic value to the plans of  buildings belonging to disparate 
functional kinds: religious structures, but also, for example, houses 
and shops. Moreover, under the interpretation given in this paper, the 
significance of  Westfall’s claim extends beyond the art-historical. After all, 
on this interpretation, the symbolic significance of  building plans does not 
depend on anything contentious. In particular, it can be reasonably doubted 
that the circle resembles God or Heaven, but it seems much harder to doubt 
that certain forms are appropriate for certain activities, let alone that such 
activities exist. In other words, the circular plan symbolized something for 
Renaissance architects (if  Wittkower’s interpretation is correct) and for 15th 
century Chinese people, but the plans Westfall has in mind can symbolize 
something for everyone capable of  recognizing their appropriateness, which 
basically means… everyone. In short, Westfall’s claim is not so much an 
interpretation of  a particular (historical or regional) architectural practice, as 
an interpretation of  architectural practice tout court. Whether it is a correct 
interpretation of  that practice has not been decided in this paper, but, 
hopefully, it now looks a little bit more credible. 

The previous paragraph may, however, invite an objection. In particular, 
Westfall’s claim may seem to be not just a generalization of  earlier claims 
about the symbolic significance of  floor plans; it may seem to be an over-
generalization. To understand why, it may be worth recalling two necessary 
conditions for being a symbol: (i) having the capacity to call to mind 
something valued (ii) in virtue of  that capacity, being the object of  attitudes 
(e.g., reverence, respect) normally directed towards the valued thing. Now 
it may be obvious how these two conditions can be met when what is 
symbolized is God or one of  his attributes. If  we are believers, such ‘things’ 
automatically command our respect. But what if  the thing symbolized is, 
as in (one interpretation of) Westfall’s theory, something banal like trading 
or dwelling? My inclination is to say that these, too, command our respect, 
although it may be less obvious precisely because they are so commonplace. 
Nonetheless, there are times when the importance we attach to them 
becomes manifest. Mircea Eliade, for example, reminds us of  the rites that 
accompany “the passing of  the domestic threshold” (Eliade 1959, p. 25) 
and the settling in a new house (Ibid., p. 57). In a similar vein, John Ruskin 
points to the “sanctity in a good man’s house which cannot be renewed in 
every tenement that rises on its ruin” (Ruskin 1990[1880], p. 179). Such 
remarks are difficult to understand if  dwelling is considered trivial and 
devoid of  intrinsic value. 

Acknowledgments



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Thanks to Paisley Livingston, Yu-Ping Luk, 
and especially Caroll William Westfall for helpful 
comments and suggestions.

References

Ackerman, J. S. (1990) The Villa: Form and Ideology of  
Country Houses. London: Thames & Hudson. 

Allsopp, B. (1974) Towards a Humane Architecture. 
London: Frederick Muller.

Blake, P. (1977) Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern 
Architecture Hasn’t Worked. Boston: Little, Brown. 

Brolin, B. C. (1976) The Failure of  Modern Architecture. 
New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company.

Charles, Prince of  Wales (1989) A Vision of  Britain: 
A Personal View of  Architecture. New York: 
Doubleday. 

Davis, H. (2006) The Culture of  Building. Oxford: 
Oxford University Press.

De Clercq, R. (2011) ‘Modern Architecture and the 
Concept of  Harmony’, British Journal of  Aesthetics 
51, pp. 69-79.

Eliade, M. (1959) The Sacred and the Profane: The 
Nature of  Religion. Translated by W. L. Trask. New 
York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

Glazer, N. (2007) From a Cause to a Style: Modernist 
Architecture’s Encounter with the American City. 
Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Goodman, N. & C. Z. Elgin (1988) Reconceptions in 
Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences. Indianapolis, 
Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company. 

Hamlin, T., ed. (1952) Forms and Functions of  Twentieth-
Century Architecture. Volumes III & IV. New York: 
Columbia University Press. 

Jacobs, J. (1992) The Death and Life of  Great American 
Cities. New York: Vintage Books. 

Krier, L. (2007) Architecture: Choice or Fate? London: 
Papadakis Publishers.

the plans 
Westfall has 

in mind can 
symbolize 
something 

for everyone 
capable of 

recognizing their 
appropriateness, 

which basically 
means… 

everyone

“

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Millais, M. (2009) Exploding the Myths of  Modern Architecture. London: 
Frances Lincoln.

Pevsner, N. (1976) A History of  Building Types. Princeton, New Jersey: 
Princeton University Press.

Rudolph, P. (2008) Writings on Architecture. New Haven, CT: Yale University 
Press. 

Quincy, Quatremère de (1999) The True, The Fictive, and The Real: The 
Historical Dictionary of  Architecture of  Quatremere de Quincy. Translated by 
Samir Younès. London: Papadakis. 

Rossi, A. (1982) The Architecture of  the City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Ruskin, J. (1990[1880]) The Seven Lamps of  Architecture. New York: Dover 
Publications.

Scruton, R. (1994) The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age 
of  Nihilism. New York: St Martin’s Press.

Steinhardt, N., ed. (2002) Chinese Architecture. New Haven: Yale University 
Press.

Thadani, D. A. (2010) The Language of  Towns and Cities: A Visual Dictionary. 
New York: Rizzoli. 

van Pelt, R. J. & C. W. Westfall (1991) Architectural Principles in the Age of  
Historicism. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Watkin, D. (2001) Morality and Architecture Revisited. London: John Murray.

Westfall, C. W. (unpublished) ‘The formal leg’, chapter 20 of  The Architecture 
of  American Liberty.

Wolfe, T. (2009[1981]) From Bauhaus to Our House. New York: Picador.

Wittkower, R. (1998[1949]) Architectural Principles in the Age of  Humanism. 
London: Academy Editions.

Endnotes

1. At least occasionally, I will allow myself  to deviate from Westfall’s 
terminology and metaphysics. For example, I will not always heed his 
fine distinction between ‘functions’ and ‘purposes’, and I will remain 
neutral on the ontological status of  types.

2. Henceforth, all references will be to this book (van Pelt & Westfall 
1991) unless indicated otherwise.

3. The term ‘building type’ is used ambiguously in the literature, as 
Quatremère de Quincy’s historical dictionary (de Quincy 1999) already 
makes clear. Although de Quincy did not make the different senses 



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much clearer (pace Rossi 1982, p. 40, who claims that de Quincy “gave a 
masterly definition of  type”), it seems possible to distinguish at least the 
following two senses in the current literature. On the one hand (see, for 
example, Hamlin 1952 and Pevsner 1976), ‘building type’ is used to denote 
the functional kind to which a building belongs: factory, monument, train 
station, church, hotel, town hall, concert hall, school, prison, museum, 
shop, and so on. On the other hand (see, for example, Davis 2006 and 
Krier 2007), ‘building type’ is used to denote the structural kind to which 
a building belongs, as determined by its plan and/or section: centralized 
versus linear, Greek-Cross versus Latin-Cross, single-story versus multi-
story, row versus detached, with or without courtyard or loggia, and so 
on. Westfall seems to use the term in the second sense, and so will I. Of  
course, it is possible two combine the two senses, for example, when one 
speaks of  the dumbbell tenement or the Danish row house as a type. 

4. More recently, Westfall writes that “[t]he presence of  the building idea 
type within the diagram and then the plan allows the building to signify, 
or better, to express, the activity it serves and therefore to connect it 
to the purpose that the institution or arrangements serves within the 
civil, religious, or cultural order” (unpublished, p. 12; my italics). This 
suggests that building types symbolize certain purposes by symbolizing 
(“expressing”) activities serving those purposes.

5. In personal communication, Westfall pointed to a minor inaccuracy in the 
diagrams included in van Pelt & Westfall 1991 (p. 160). The diagrams in 
this paper should better match his intentions.

6. According to Westfall (personal communication), these specifications 
“enter with the conventional configuration that the [plan] diagrams have 
taken within a time and a place and with attention to the actual functions 
that serve the purposes”.

7. By ‘recognizable’ is meant ‘recognizable in their instances’. In other words, 
it must be possible to sort particular buildings according to the types. For 
example, Bramante’s Tempietto in Rome can be classified as an instance 
of  the tholos type, which means that the type is recognizable.

8. Westfall does not ignore the vertical dimension. However, in his view, 
differences along that dimension (e.g., elevation) do not help to differentiate 
types of  building, but merely regional versions of  types (see, for example, 
pp. 162-7). Westfall does not ascribe natural symbolism to such versions, 
in part because he seems to equate ‘natural’ and ‘universal’. As will become 
clear, this is one respect in my reconstruction may differ from the original 
view.

9. “Signs point to particular meanings such as functions and the relative 



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importance of  similar things, while symbols embody the larger purposes 
that enliven the aspiration to live the good life of  justice and nobility” 
(p. 156). 

10. For an analysis of  architectural harmony, see De Clercq 2011. 
However, harmony can be understood here in a wider sense, including 
environmental friendliness.

11. Building cultures are usefully analyzed in Davis 2006, where the term 
‘building culture’ refers to “the coordinated system of  knowledge, rules, 
procedures, and habits that surrounds the building process in a given 
place and time” (Davis 2006, p. 5). Members of  the culture include 
contractors, clients, architects, building users, bankers, and so on.

12. Brolin 1976 provides several examples illustrating how the acceptability 
of  a floor plan may depend on social customs and cultural values (e.g., 
pp. 42-3, 66-7, 99).

13. References are in the bibliography.

14. Here ‘building type’ is used in the structural or structural-cum-
functional sense. See footnote 3.

15. Ackerman acknowledges the tension by concluding that the villa 
“poses a cultural paradox” (p. 34).

16. The connection between architectural types and local character is 
stressed in Davis 2006 (several places) and in Thadani 2010 (p. 694).

RAFAEL DE CLERCQ responds

Question: If  we must admit to some cultural variation for the view of  natural kinds to 
hold plausibility, does then that recognition require us to accept that culture itself  is a natural 
kind to preserve the argument? In other words, if, as many think, culture is significantly 
dependent on conventions to function at a high level, then haven’t conventions crept in through 
the back door?

Answer: The argument in the article does not imply that building types 
are natural kinds; only that they are non-conventional symbols. So let me 
rephrase the question as follows: if  building plans symbolize by virtue of  
their appropriateness, and if  their appropriateness depends at least in part 
on culturally variable elements such as customs, then how can it be claimed 
that building plans are non-conventional symbols? My short answer is that, 
although the appropriateness of  building plans depends on the presence 
of  conventions, it is not itself  a conventional property. Rather, it is a causal 
property (cf. “one might say that a type of  plan is appropriate for an activity 



if  and only if  … using the type for that purpose helps 
to create a successful building, where ‘helps to create’ 
can be understood as designating a causal relation”). 
Perhaps the following example can help to understand 
how a property can depend on conventions without 
being itself  conventional. In Western societies, 
handshaking is among the conventions for greeting. 
As a result, refusing to shake hands may cause 
someone to feel offended. When this happens, the 
relation between the refusal and the feeling is causal, 
but it is also dependent on the existence of  a particular 
convention for greeting.

Q: What does an analysis of  architecture as captured by 
symbolism or type do or speak to, within the philosophical or 
architecture discourse? For example, the Westfall concept you argue 
for could be seen as a potential support for the traditionalists—
Leon Krier, Prince Charles, and their fellows—in their struggles 
with modernists. Do you agree and is this how these ideas apply?

A: I am inclined to think that the main argument in 
the text—plans symbolize activities by virtue of  being 
appropriate for these activities—is neutral between 
modernism and traditionalism. Nonetheless, it is a fact 
that traditionalists tend to be more concerned with 
building types, as can be gleaned from my references. 
Moreover, there is another argument in the text that 
may provide some support for traditionalism, namely, 
where it is said that “[w]hen a building plan comes 
to stand for a certain activity, it becomes all the more 
appropriate to use it for the accommodation of  that 
activity”. For various reasons, local building traditions 
tend to contain types with considerable symbolic 
significance, and this is a reason for drawing on them 
if  the quoted sentence is true.

Q: Kant’s distinction between free and dependent beauty 
bears a relationship to what you discuss here. For Kant, 
the beauty of  architecture was decisively dependent on its 
functioning as intended. Yet ultimately he opted for the idea that 
it wasn’t function per se, but instead a concept of  functioning 
that determined the harmonious play of  mental faculties that 
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Richard Hill, for example, in his Designs and their Consequences, to argue that “We 
do not need actually to use a building in order to respond aesthetically to it: it will be enough 
that we see those aesthetic ideas that are incorporated into its design.” Could you respond to 
this more indirect, or perhaps once-removed sense of  utility as an alternative?

A: I certainly agree that we do not need to use a building in order to 
experience it aesthetically. But the question probably is how, or to what extent, 
a building’s aesthetic or architectural value is determined by its symbolizing a 
certain activity or purpose. It is difficult to answer this question in a general 
way. For example, in some cases, symbolizing a certain activity may be a 
function of  the building, in other cases, it may not be. Similarly, in some 
cases, the symbolized activity may be one that the building was designed 
to accommodate; in other cases, it may be one that the building ended up 
accommodating; and there are still other possibilities. The notion of  function 
enters here in different ways, and accordingly, there will be different answers 
to give for the different cases. In another paper (‘Reflections on a Sofa Bed: 
Functional Beauty and Looking Fit’, Journal of  Aesthetic Education 47:2 (2013)), 
I argue that not all functions are equally important from an aesthetic point 
of  view; for example, I argue that acquired functions are less important than 
original functions. If  this claim is correct, then it is has implications for how 
the above question is to be answered. But in any case, I think there is no doubt 
that symbolization of  activities is aesthetically relevant. This much is already 
implied by the sentence quoted in response to the second question, namely, 
“[w]hen a building plan comes to stand for a certain activity, it becomes all the 
more appropriate to use it for the accommodation of  that activity”.



Is Beauty Still Relevant? Is Art? 
Is Architecture?

Nathaniel Coleman

The Good and the Beautiful

Although notions of  the good and the 
beautiful might seem impossible to discuss in our 
non-foundational age, the continuing relevance 
of  beauty can sit comfortably alongside post-
foundationalist, post-metaphysical, and more 
generally post-modernist thought, no matter how 
much a tendency for slipping back into a structuralist 
mind-set may be evidenced. The relevance of  
beauty and the good are in fact paradoxically 
intensified when thought beyond metaphysics, not 
least when the practical or pragmatic value of  both 
categories is considered. The work the beautiful 
and the good can accomplish in our attempts to 
reimagine professions and their products remains 
vital. For example, all efforts to wrench architects 
and architecture out of  their moribund state might 
well depend on an understanding of  both categories 
for any chance at success.1

The problematic of  what the ‘good architect’ 
is, or might be, in the present epoch arises out of  
disciplinary doubt and reflection on poor results. 
Any discussion of  the figure of  the architect 
must inevitably also include a consideration 
of  what ‘good architecture’ is, or might be. 
Nevertheless, current discourses on both tend to 
be strangely dissociative, as if  architecture could 
be autonomous, or that novelty or a formalist view 
of  architectural aesthetics is enough to preclude 
discussion of  architecture’s social dimension or 
the social obligations of  architects—beyond the 
limiting perspectives of  the marketplace.2 Ideas of  
the ‘good’ in terms of  architectural practice and its 



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results bedevil our capacity to judge as we waiver between ideas of  radical 
subjectivity and absolute ideals. However, when the ethical dimension of  
both the good and the beautiful are recollected, it becomes possible to 
imagine them as bound to the fortunes of  propriety, to appropriateness. 
Doing so is even possible today, albeit as situational, rather than absolute.

The problem of  the good and the beautiful in architecture today 
reveals something of  its intractability and thus also suggests a pathway to 
its solution. In an effort to rescue aesthetics from a street level conception, 
my interest here is the problem of  beauty, more so than the problematic 
of  thinking of  aesthetics in terms of  questions of  beauty as ‘mere beauty.’ 
Such propositions position beauty as if  it were simply a matter of  ‘the look 
of  a particular object,’ or were interchangeable with impulsive ‘liking’; as 
though ideas of  beauty could have no reach beyond formalist aesthetics, 
sensualist proclivities, or radical subjectivity.

Yet, despite its compartmentalization in recent times, the ethical 
dimension of  beauty has persisted at least from the Greek philosopher 
Socrates (died 399 BC), via Plato (died 347 BC), to the Renaissance 
architect and theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), and onward from 
there to nineteenth century social critics John Ruskin (1819-1900) and 
William Morris (1834-1896), and arguably beyond them to architects Le 
Corbusier (1887-1965) and Aldo van Eyck (1918-1999) as well. Each was 
as preoccupied with the aesthetical (as a matter of  beauty) as much as 
the ethical (as also a matter of  beauty). But this only works if  we think 
of  beauty as a sense of  wholeness or at least the striving toward it, as 
Socrates did, summarized by Alberti as ‘that to which nothing may be 
added nor taken away but for the worse’ . Perhaps surprisingly, this 
definition of  beauty turns on an ideal of  comprehensiveness that can 
also accommodate the parts out of  which it is made. It could continue to 
help us to judge works of  architecture, whether radical or conservative, 
postmodern or deconstructive, etc. Indeed, even in an epoch in which no 
syntonic universal ideal of  beauty prevails (in which all master narratives 
are subject to question), the superlative aim of  completeness persists as 
a guide to practice and as a way to judge its results alike. Only in this way 
could Wittgenstein’s claim that ‘ethics and aesthetics are one and the same’ 
be credible.3

In order to work through the problem of  beauty, to rescue it from 
claims of  its apparent meagreness, cases for tradition and hermeneutics 
are made. On the one hand, the thinking of  Ananda Kentish 
Coomaraswamy4 is a proponent of  tradition and inheritor of  the lineage 
from Plato to Morris. On the other, Gianni Vattimo,5 is as much intrigued 



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by a hermeneutics of  tradition as by generalized 
communication and a weakening of  the strong 
thought of  western metaphysics, with its attendant 
inescapable propensity for violence. Vattimo and 
Coomaraswamy share a revaluation, or rethinking, 
of  art that rescues beauty from being ‘merely,’ 
and as such, suggests how architects might begin 
to reclaim the richness of  their task, albeit in a 
dispersed way, to act on behalf  of  the beautiful and 
ethics simultaneously, and in so doing, rescue the 
pervasive claims of  architects to be acting on behalf  
of  the people from being little more than empty 
words forming banal slogans primarily conjured up 
to justify simply doing business.

One kind of Art and Shock: Daniel Libeskind, Toronto Crystal



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Art and Shock: Vattimo

In a passage that begins to confound the conventional divide 
between the ethical and aesthetical, Vattimo charts a pathway to enhanced 
encounters with art (including architecture) that do not simply move 
beyond the aesthetic but which are suggestive of  much fuller experiences, 
precisely because the ‘theoretical, moral, and emotional,’ —the ethical—is 
acknowledged: 

True, on the one hand, enjoying the work always implies or in some sense even 
comes to a head with an act of  aesthetic contemplation, in which the work imposes 
itself  by virtue of  its formal perfection, without further referring to anything that 
might disturb the satisfaction or stillness connected with such a state. 

Up to this point, Vattimo outlines a fairly conventional depiction of  
the nature of  aesthetic experience. However, as the paragraph progresses 
he turns from an exclusively aesthetic understanding toward an ethical one 
as well:

On the other hand, it is equally true that the encounter with a great art work 
always represents not only an ‘aesthetic’ but also a theoretical, moral, and 
emotional experience, which engages the person at all levels and leads us to speak 
of  art’s truth, of  its cosmic nature, and of  its ontological meaning. 

The value of  the recognition outlined above lies in liberating art from 
a ‘formalist view of  beauty,’ that limits understandings of  it to an ideal of  
beauty entrapped within the ‘aesthetic sphere’ and thus as removed from 
the real, or the potential of  having any significant impact on it:

Hence, in concrete experience the work resists being confined within the limits 
of  the formalist view of  beauty, it moves out of  the ‘aesthetic sphere’ in which 
it is enclosed and holds its truth appeal, in the broadest and fullest meaning of  
the word.6

Art’s ‘truth appeal’ resides in its opening up of  vistas onto new worlds. 
Or as Vattimo puts it, “the work [of  art] opens a new “epoch” of  being as 
an absolutely originary event, which cannot be reduced to what it already 
was, and it grounds a new order of  relationships within beings, a true 
and actually new world.”7 The newness of  this world, that art founds, 
captivates experiencing subjects of  it by shocking them. Accordingly, for 
Vattimo the term that defines ‘the encounter between the reader and the 
work ... is “Stoss,” shock or quake: the artwork suspends in the reader all 
natural relationships, making strange everything that until that moment 



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had appeared obvious and familiar.’8 It is worth 
noting that the ‘shock’ that occurs in encounters 
with the previously unknown that art opens up, does 
not necessarily have anything to do with so-called 
‘shock art,’ which shocks in its way by referring to 
‘natural relationships,’ rather than suspending them, 
and by intensifying the ‘obvious and familiar,’ rather 
than making either strange. However, it is Vattimo’s 
description of  intense encounters with art as a 
‘shock’ that is of  the greatest interest.

Art and Shock: Coomaraswamy

In his own attempts to challenge an aesthetic 
view of  art Coomaraswamy also found it necessary 
to refer to ‘shock’ to describe an alternative. 
According to him, ‘For the most part, our ‘aesthetic’ 
approach stands between us and the content of  the 
work of  art, of  which only the surface concerns 
us.’9 For Coomaraswamy, the surface, apparent 
beauty, invites attention, but the real experiential 
payoff  (as much emotional as intellectual) resides 
in getting close to the ideas that motivate the object 
and which it makes visible to the senses, which in 
turn moves, or shocks, us during our encounters 
with works of  art. As Coomaraswamy argues, ‘it is 
not only in connection with natural objects (such 

Another kind of Art and Shock: Calatrava’s Quadracci Pavilion

the work [of 
art] opens a new 

“epoch” of being 
as an absolutely 

originary event, 
which cannot be 

reduced to what 
it already was, 

and it grounds 
a new order of 

relationships 
within beings, 

a true and 
actually new 

world.—Vattimo

“

”



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as the dew-drop) or events (such as death) but also in connection with 
works of  art, and in fact whenever or wherever perception [. . .] leads to 
a serious experience, that we are really shaken.’10 Coomaraswamy uses the 
Pali word saṁvega ‘to denote the shock or wonder that may be felt when 
the perception of  a work of  art becomes a serious experience,’ which, of  
course, is quite similar to Vattimo’s description of  such encounters.11

It is perhaps quite difficult for us to experience works of  art in 
the way either Vattimo or Coomaraswamy describe encounters with it. 
As Kuspit suggests, the commodification of  art, and the overabundant 
stimuli available to us through electronic and mechanical production 
and reproduction of  art works, has made it all but impossible for us to 
gain access to the truth of  art, or the shocking nature of  this.12 Even so, 
most of  us have had encounters with works of  art that have left us 
moved, even shaken, and these tend to be the most memorable, because 
the profoundest. If  even one of  these experiences can be recollected, 
Coomaraswamy’s conviction that “Saṁvega [shock, wonder], then, refers to 
the experience that may be felt in the presence of  a work of  art, when we 
are struck by it, ‘as a horse might be struck by a whip’ will have resonance 
for us.”13 More so, such recollection might begin to suggest what the aim 
of  art, its vocation ought to be (and for architecture as well): to make the 
world strange so that we might see it anew, in all its depth and seriousness, 
such that we might believe with Coomaraswamy that, “In the deepest 
experience that can be induced by a work of  art (or other reminder) our 
very being is shaken (saṁvijta) to its roots.”14

What About Architecture?

The conceit of  philosophers is that architecture is, of  course, an art, 
more so one of  the fine arts, even though in practice today it would be hard 
to describe much of  what is built in the name of  architecture as having 
convincingly been conceived or constructed under the sign of  the fine arts 
– to say nothing of  being serious in the ways described by Vattimo and 
Coomaraswamy above. Rather than tangle with this issue here, I would 
like to consider a conception of  architecture advanced by Vattimo that 
could suggests how it might escape from its entrapment within the logic 
of  capitalism (with its habit for destroying communities): 

[W]hat is left to legitimize our projects? Precisely those conditions of  belonging ... 
which are disclosed as we walk around the neighbourhood and notice that there, 
there used to be an old store, that here, there are traces, ruins, histories.15 

[A]ll that is left is to understand legitimation as a form of  the creation of  



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horizons of  validity through dialogue, a dialogue both 
with the tradition to which we belong and others.16

[E]dification has two principal meanings – to build 
and to be morally uplifiting. Both are quite closely tied 
in today’s rather vertiginous coming and going between 
architecture and philosophy... . That is, edification 
must be ethical, entailing communication of  value-
choice. In the present situation of  thought on the one 
hand and architectonic experience on the other ... the 
only possibility of  edifying in the sense of  building is 
to edify in the sense of  ‘rendering ethical,’ that is, to 
encourage an ethical life: to work with the recollection 
of  the past, with the expectations of  meaning for the 
future, since there can no longer be absolute rational 
deductions. There follows then edification as a 
fostering of  emotions, of  ethical presentability, which 
can probably serve as the basis for an architecture 
determined not by the whole but by the parts.17 

saṁvijta at Kahn’s Kimbell Museum



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The idea of  architecture developed by Vattimo above is both more 
humble and more radical than anything coming from within the discipline 
of  architecture, across the whole spectrum, from the most commercial 
practices, to those that are ostensibly avant-garde, to the apparently 
socially engaged as well. It is Vattimo’s conception of  tradition—as a 
common ground of  belonging, dialogue, and invention—that returns 
thinking about architecture to ethics, which holds out the promise of  
a renewed relevance for architecture and beauty alike. One, however, is 
left wondering why architecture in these days seems all but incapable 
of  thinking such thoughts on its own, suggesting also that at its best, 
philosophy could help it to do so.

The Disembodiment of Beauty

The relevance of  beauty for architecture is far from spent. As ‘a vision 
that has been a source of  inspiration to all Western philosophy’, perhaps 
Plato’s definition of  beauty, as developed in the Symposium, remains at the 
essence of  understanding art and life.18 But if  in the present aesthetic 
preoccupations can seem to limit the basic appeal of  art (or architecture) to 
the eye (as it does music to the ear), it is here that Plato, and his commentator, 
Neo-Platonist philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) following him, 
cease to provide a way for recuperating the relevance of  beauty in the 
present. Obviously, sight and hearing are less physically engaged than taste, 
smell, or touch, making the first two the obvious preference of  idealists. 
By privileging the senses of  sight and hearing to those of  taste, smell, 
and touch Plato and Ficino severely limit the possibilities of  full-bodied 
experience. In this regard, art critic Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) reminds us 
that all the senses are integral to an appreciation of  both life and art. The 
persisting problem of  Plato for art and architecture is the persistence of  
the idea that the highest ideal of  beauty is an appreciation of  it divorced 
from the sensuous—the body —and taken up by ideas and the mind 
alone. As one commentator summarizes:

From Plato comes the view of  the realm of  ideas set off  from the world of  the 
phenomenal which is but an imperfect copy of  the archetype. This distinction 
corresponds to that between the material and the immaterial. In the Platonic 
tradition the note is persistent that the body is a clog.19

Arguably, Plato’s reification of  ideas transforms them into beauties 
lacking in objects. If  the aim of  creativity is beauty, understood – following 
Plato – as associated with the Good, it is difficult to imagine how any 
notion of  beauty can dispense with the body as its origin. If  beauty 



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originates with notions of  the body, how could a 
philosophy of  beauty that exiles the body actually be 
about beauty (or perhaps even about knowledge)? 
If  self  understanding and understanding of  the 
world begin with the body, evolving into mental 
contents that are transformable into symbols 
that make art possible, then arguably, theories of  
beauty that abolish the body (and with it the world 
of  objects), are of  little use to the invention and 
elaboration of  art. Articulating just this dilemma in 
a critique of  Greek philosophy, philosopher Ortega 
Y. Gasset (1883-1955) elaborates on the relation 
between ideas and things, the mind and the body, 
and thoughts and actions:

When the Greeks discovered that man thought, 
that there existed in the universe that strange reality 
known as thought (until then man had not thought, 
or, like the bourgeois gentilhomme, had done so 
without knowing it), they felt such an enthusiasm for 
ideas that they conferred upon intelligence, upon the 
logos, the supreme rank in the universe. Compared 
with it, everything else seemed to them ancillary and 
contemptible. And as we tend to project into God 
whatever appears to us to be the best, the Greeks with 
Aristotle, reached the point of  maintaining that God 
had no other occupation but to think. And not even 

The experience of the “lesser” senses: tactile experience at Ando’s 
Ft. Worth Modern

By privileging 
the senses 

of sight and 
hearing to 

those of taste, 
smell, and 

touch Plato 
and Ficino 

severely limit 
the possibilities 

of full-bodied 
experience

“

”



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to think about things- that seemed to them, as it were, a debasement of  the 
intellectual process ... .

This doctrine has been given the name ‘intellectualism’; it is idolatry of  the 
intelligence which isolates thought from its setting, from its function in the general 
economy of  human life. As if  man thinks because he thinks, and not because, 
whether he will or not, he has to think in order to maintain himself  among things 
... . We do not live in order to think ... we think in order to succeed in 
subsisting ... [and] surviving.20

Ficino’s famous commentary on Plato helps to situate Gasset’s 
criticism of  ‘intellectualism’.21 For Ficino, the real is unreal, which 
encouraged his attempt to prove that the appreciation of  beauty is 
‘highest’ when incorporeal, even if  language, as reality, makes the dis-
realization of  objects all but impossible: things remain as bodies, material, 
and existent. The indefeasible physicality of  thought and beauty renders 
Ficino’s preference for dis-realization peculiar: 

The eyes see nothing but the light of  the sun, for the shapes and colors of  bodies 
are never seen unless illuminated with light, nor do they come to the eyes with 
their own matter itself  ... in this light, since it is separate from matter, the order 
is completely independent of  body.22 

Above all else, the preceding negates bodily experience. It is a peculiar 
intellectual exercise to imagine that since light is reflected off  objects, we 
do not actually perceive them, as they apparently do not actually exist, 
except as the light the eye perceives. The problem here is that even in 
darkness, a body, an object, even beauty, can be perceived. As a Platonist, 
Ficino is obligated to disregard the senses of  taste, smell, and touch. In 
this regard, philosopher Leon Ebreo (ca. 1465- ca. 1521) described taste, 
smell, and touch as “the three material senses”; on the other hand, he called 
sight and hearing “the spiritual senses”.23 Echoing Plato and Ebreo, Ficino 
writes;

Love is the desire for enjoying beauty, Love is always limited to the [the pleasures 
of] the mind, the eyes, and, the ears. What need is there of  the senses of  smell, 
taste, and touch? Odors, flavor, heat, cold, softness, hardness, and the like 
qualities are the objects of  these senses. None of  these is human beauty, Since 
these qualities are simple, and human beauty of  the body requires a harmony of  
various parts. Love regards as its end the enjoyment of  beauty; beauty pertains 
only to the mind, sight, and hearing. Love, therefore, is limited to these three, but 
desire which rises from the other senses is called, not love, but madness.24



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The Return to Embodiment

Ficino’s idealism (as introduced in the 
preceding section) turns on an impoverishment 
of  experience that if  operative would deprive us 
of  our appreciation of  flowers, food, and love-
making – to say nothing of  buildings and dancing 
– as expressions of  beauty and as pathways toward 
different and deeper understandings of  the world, 
ourselves, and others. Further, as much as beauty 
may derive from a divine sense of  goodness, it also 
comes from an appreciation of  the natural world, 
of  landscape, and the body. A deep appreciation 
of  the beauty of  each of  these things requires the 
senses of  ‘odors, flavor’s, heat, cold, softness, and 
like qualities’, not to mention ‘sight and hearing.’ 
Any conception of  the experience of  beauty, or of  
anything else that rejects the fullness of  the senses 
inevitably permits only a partial experience of  the 
world. In contradistinction, Stokes takes up an 
argument for the body in his work on Michelangelo 
(as elsewhere in his writing): 

It is likely that images of  the body belong to the 
aesthetic relationship with every object; emotive 
conceptions of  physique are ancient in us; awareness 
of  our own identity has always been upon the flesh; 
the outer world of  objects was conceived in the first 
place as an extension of  our bodies. This early view, 

The experience of the body: Peter Zumthor’s Vals Baths



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of  course, bears no resemblance to an adult impression. But art tends to return 
some of  the way back to the sources of  feeling and perception.25

Stokes consistently argues for the corporeality of  art and for an art of  
intensity embodying total outward expression. Well-versed in most aspects 
of  his subject, Stokes also turned his attention to what he believed were 
some of  the questionable aspects of  Platonism, Renaissance theory, and 
Neo-Platonism:

Stress upon mathematics, both in the case of  Alberti; and Piero, by itself  
explains nothing of  their art. Similarly Platonism, Neo-Platonism, was but a 
necessary garment, the cover of  nameless joy in things; paradoxically, since the 
philosophy of  Plato is far from the senses, allowing no more value to the sensible 
world than to the individual, that other God of  Renaissance man.26

Despite Stokes’ observations, it might be reasonable to conclude that 
neither philosophies of  beauty nor objects of  beauty any longer occupy the 
center of  considerations of  art or culture. This modern condition arguably 
begins with the advent of  science as we know it and with the secularization 
of  society. In the West, this new condition parallels the loosening of  the 
Church’s temporal powers and the rise of  industrialization, and began to 
take definitive shape during the late Seventeenth century. 

The separation of  mind and body that persists throughout philosophies 
of  beauty, originates the crisis of  meaning in art and architecture that 
continues to persist. Plato’s model is of  man ascending from earthly 
conceptions to heavenly ones. At a certain moment of  elevation the 
process requires transcendence in the form of  disengagement of  the 
mind from the body, of  ideas from reality, with ideas ultimately taking 
precedence over objects and the experience of  them. Gasset considers 
the modern manifestation of  this tension between ideas and objects as 
follows: 

Under the name Reason, then of  Enlightenment, and finally of  culture, the most 
indiscreet deification of  the intelligence were effected. Among the majority of  the 
thinkers of  the period ... culture [and] thought ... came to fill the vacant office of  
a God who had been put to flight.27

The desire to liberate the mind from the body, in order to free ideas, was 
acceptable, if  filled with foreboding, so long as all-knowing continued to be 
tied a-priori to the body. These ties were both effected and supported by a 
sense of  God, that concept above man, and deriving from us, which once 
promised to keep the human world from descending into chaos. Without 



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such a conception we are on our own. The more 
the emergence of  the Modern World is explored, the 
more the loss of  God has left moderns flailing about 
for something to hold on to, and for something to 
bind us to the earth. God, once perceived as the 
center of  all and the origin of  Love, and therefore 
of  beauty, creativity and human beings, was reason 
enough for virtuousness. Without the comforting 
anchors of  God and religion—which gave purpose 
to art and architecture over and above what the 
state could provide—enlightened moderns are left 
wondering how we could have ever lived with God, 
and simultaneously how it could be possible to 
live without Him (Her), despite the many horrors 
justified in the name of  religion. 

With the advent of  reason and the victory of  
ideas, humans have become ever more estranged 
from those parts of  thought that were once bound 
to love, beauty, goodness, and personal conceptions 
of  God; ties that were, often enough, the source 
and justification for humane character. Reification 
of  ideas, and the deification of  them that followed, 
greatly concerned Gasset, who intuited the extreme 
danger of  such operations, in particular leading to 
the dehumanization of  art: “The idea instead of  
functioning as the means to think an object with, is 

The desire to 
liberate the 

mind from the 
body, in order to 
free ideas, was 

acceptable, 
if filled with 

foreboding, 
so long as 

all-knowing 
continued to be 
tied a-priori to 

the body 

“

”

The body surrogate: Sensual form at Norman Foster’s Sage 
Gateshead 



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itself  made the object and the aim of  thinking.”28

Conclusion

Philosophers of  beauty have often seen beauty as a means to an end 
– the conduit from earthly to divine love. For most, moving from the 
corporeal to the incorporeal must follow one route: from the feet to the 
head. So long as ideas about ideal beauty proceeded along this route, lesser 
sensual forms deriving from the body had a place. The heady—at times 
earthy—sensuality of  the body, and its manifold references could still find 
a place in thoughts about art and beauty, without apparently contradicting 
ancient philosophy. 

However, the dominance of  absolute reason, with its corollaries of  
quantification and abstraction has loosened connections between real and 
idealized beauty. Paradoxically, as thinking and making drift skyward to 
the realm of  pure forms (pure ideas) desire has become dissociated from 
attainable objects (including from the body): a disconnection intensified by 
the increasing dominance of  screen time in everyday life, which inevitably 
atrophies the senses other than seeing and hearing. Mind dissociated from 
body, ideas from reality, and the spirit from the everyday, encourages 
scientistic thought processes disconnected from the sensuous reality of  
persons, and things. Ultimately, recuperating the relevance of  beauty for 
inventing art and architecture, no matter how irrelevant they may appear, 
turns on rekindled awareness, “that memory helped reality to retain the 
things received by the five senses.”29

Although ‘the five senses and memory’ have largely been outsourced 
to virtuality and digital data, Voltaire’s pronouncement in Memory’s 
Adventure is even more relevant today than when first published in 1775. 
Mnemosyne’s admonishment in the story is especially apropos: “Imbeciles 
I forgive you; but this time remember that without the senses there is 
no memory, and without memory there is no mind.”30 The dominion of  
thought processes masquerading as scientific, as if  objective, measurable, 
and uncontaminated by emotion calls out for a rejoinder; recollecting 
beauty and its mirror in the body would be a good place to start. 

ENDNOTES
1. A condition adeptly theorized by Manfredo Tafuri (1935-1994), amongst others. 
2. Autonomy is a fallacy I will leave aside for the moment. 
3. Wittgenstein, L. [1921] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Abdingdon: Routledge, 

2001. §6.421, p. 86.
4. Coomaraswamy was born 1877, Columbo, Ceylon – died 1946, Needham, 



Massachusetts
5. Vattimo was born 1936, Palermo, Italy
6. Gianni Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth (New York: Columbia, 2008), p. 158.
7. Ibid., p. 152.
8. Ibid.
9. A. K. Commaraswamy, ‘Saṁvega, “Aesthetic Shock,”’ Harvard Journal of  Aesthetic 

Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3 (1943), n. 2, p. 174.
10. Ibid., p. 176.
11. Ibid., p. 174.
12. Donald Kuspit, ‘Secrets of  Success: Paradoxes and Problems of  the Reproduction 

and Commodification of  Art in the Age of  the Capitalist Spectacle,’ Available 
online at: http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/art-and-capitalist-
spectacle2-8-11.asp (Accessed 09 May 2012).

13. A. K. Commaraswamy, ‘Saṁvega, “Aesthetic Shock,”’ Harvard Journal of  Aesthetic 
Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3 (1943), p. 178.

14. Ibid.
15. Gianni Vattimo, ‘Project and Legitimization I,’ Lotus International 48/49 (1986), 

p. 121-122.
16. Ibid., p. 124.
17. Ibid., p. 125.
18. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns, Philosophies of  Art and Beauty (Chicago: 

University of  Chicago Press, 1976), p. 68.
19. Roland H. Bainton, Early Christianity (New york, Toronto and London: Van 

Nostrand, 1960), pp. 12-13.
20. Ortega Y Gasset, ‘The Self  and the other’ [1952], in The Dehumanization of  Art 

and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (Princeton University Press, 1968), 
pp. 194, 195, 196.

21. Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium (de Amore), 1475, in 
Philosophies of  Art and Beauty, eds. A. Hofstadter and R. Kuhns (Chicago: University 
of  Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 204-238.

22. Marsilio Ficino, de Amore, in Philosophies of  Art and Beauty, p. 222.
23. Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: Architects of  the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 

MA: MIT Press, [1983] 1991), p. 13.
24. Ficino, de Amore, in Philosophies of  Art and Beauty, pp. 207-208.
25. Adrian Stokes, Michelangelo [1958], in The Critical Writings of  Adrian Stokes, Vol. III 

(Great Britain: Thames and Hudson, 1978), p. 33.
26. Adrian Stokes, Art and Science [1949], in The Critical Writings of  Adrian Stokes, Vol. 

II (Great Britain: Thames and Hudson, 1978), p. 194.
27. Gasset, ‘The Self  and the other’, p. 197.
28. Gasset, ‘The Dehumanization of  Art’ [1925], in The Dehumanization of  Art and 

Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 18.
29. Voltaire, Memory’s Adventure [1775], in Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories, Trans. 

Donald A. Frame (New york and Toronto: Signet Classic: New American Library, 
1961), pp.325-326.

30. Ibid., p. 328.





A new interpretative taxonomy 
for works of architecture

Rick Fox

I. Recent Interpretive Practice 

A core aim of  architectural interpretation 
is to elucidate, explain, make sense of, and help 
others understand the existing built-environment, 
proposed works of  architecture, architectural 
theories, and other elements of  architectural 
discourse. Indeed, there are numerous aspects of  
architectural works, theories and discourse about 
which we may render interpretations.  The field 
of  architectural interpretation broadly construed 
includes, inter alia, the literature of  philosophical 
aesthetics, the writings of  design professionals, 
architectural thinkers and educators, the views of  
architectural critics, and the voices of  the general 
public.

In this essay, I aim to introduce readers to a 
new philosophically grounded approach I have 
developed for organizing interpretive positions 
within architectural discourse.  The interpretive 
taxonomy I advocate relies on some philosophical 
insights from the American philosopher Michael 
Krausz. I will concentrate my efforts on presenting 
an overview of  the taxonomy, and focus on its 
importance to the philosophy of  architecture.  
To illustrate various elements of  the framework, 
I mention particular works, and discuss specific 
views, but the focus here is not on a detailed 
examination of  specific works, nor do I offer a 
robust rejection or endorsement of  any particular 
view. Before I get into the framework’s specifics, let 
me try to establish the breadth of  the problem, by 
offering three examples where interpretive practice 
would benefit from a more rigorous understanding 



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of  the space of  interpretation. 

Whether a new work of  architecture ought to “fit in” with extant 
works is an enduring problem in architectural theory and practice. 
Frequently, architectural works are criticized on the grounds that they do 
not belong. Many famous, and now respected, works have been criticized 
for this supposed failure.   

The contextualist argument relies on the claim that the existing context 
deserves our respect, and we ought to show deference to current norms 
and practices in our decision-making about how to, or even whether 
to, alter it. The argument, however, also makes a deeper supposition, 
namely, that the context is comprised of  self-evident facts and meanings. 
Yet, understanding what is “already there” is often more than simply a 
straight-forward documentation of  a few observable facts; it is a matter 
of  active engagement and interpretative practice. So, the background 
views of  the interpreter as to whether the context is “fixed” play a 
relevant role. The way we construe the boundaries of  a given context, and 
determine which aspects of  it are salient for our understanding is also a 
matter of  interpretative practice.    When we encounter a familiar work 
of  architecture we do not feel compelled to interpret it; we simply take it 
for granted. An alien or anomalous work that does not comport with our 
current understanding challenges us, and we are inclined to try and make 
sense of  it. Indeed, the views of  the interpreter may be affected in the 
process. The anomalous thing may prompt some of  us to recontextualize 
a few of  our existing beliefs as we attempt to make sense of  the world and 
the anomaly. Others prefer instead to reject the anomaly and adhere to 
their cherished certainties. Commonplace interpretive practices regarding 
context fail to account for its malleability, and the dialectic nature of  
interpretive practice. 

The rebuilding efforts on New York’s World Trade Center site 
following the events of  9/11 illustrate a second type of  interpretive 
problem. Significant disagreement exists in answer to the question, What 
does 9/11 represent? Answers that have been offered include, but are 
not limited to: 1) the unprovoked attack marks the turning point from 
the Cold War to the “War on Terror;” 2) it is a pointless act perpetrated 
by psychopaths who simply want to kill vast numbers of  innocent people 
as a demonstration of  their cruelty; 3) Islamic fundamentalists seek to 
end Western imperialism by any means possible—no matter how violent; 
and, 4) the attack is a misguided hatred of  global democracy and global 
freedom. For our purposes, the precise answer does not matter all that 
much, since it is not the real focus here. No matter what specific answers 



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are offered, the question itself  calls our attention to 
a broader philosophical concern, namely, is there 
a single right interpretation of  these events or 
not? Furthermore, it is clear that the meaning of  
the underlying events, no matter how we construe 
them, significantly affect our interpretation of  
the architectural work that is supposed to denote, 
memorialize, exemplify, or express them. In these 
sorts of  cases, our background knowledge, beliefs, 
and values play a significant role in the interpretive 
process. These background views often include 
beliefs about what role architecture ought to play, 
if  any, in responding to important social, political, 
and historical events.  

To further complicate attempts to interpret 
the meaning of  and best response to 9/11, the 

View of New York’s world trade center



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Byzantine array of  stakeholders has been the source of  a number of  
complicated political, economic, aesthetic, and interpretive disagreements 
over whose interests the work ought to advance, and whose stake ought to 
take precedence.  When the results of  the international design competition 
sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation were 
unveiled in Fall 2002, the popular response was unprecedented.  Unlike 
most of  the other entries, Daniel Libeskind’s proposal resonated loudly 
with prominent architectural critics and the public. Ada Louise Huxtable 
emerged as an early advocate of  Libeskind’s proposal and remained an 
unwavering supporter of  the priorities expressed in his design.  Conversely, 
Herbert Muschamp, architecture critic for the New York Times, dismissed 
the rich symbolism employed in the design as jingoistic. John Silber, 
professor emeritus of  philosophy and law, and former president of  
Boston University, scathingly criticized the proposal calling it “an exotic 
and enticing jumble of  novelties” that expresses “hubris and a penchant 
for absurdity.” 1 Still other observers felt strongly that the only correct 
response to the tragedy was to rebuild exactly as before. How could 
such divergent interpretations all be, in some sense, correct or at least 
admissible?   

We take it for granted that all of  these critics are interpreting the same 
work of  architecture. This commonplace assumption, however, overlooks 
deeper philosophical questions about the nature of  the thing they are 
interpreting. For instance, it is a commonplace argument nowadays 
that complex things (such as a work of  architecture) license a plethora 
of  interpretations, and our contemporary society is prepared to regard 
so many things as indeterminate anyhow. Additionally, it is commonly 
accepted that in a pluralist society diverse and divergent interpretations 
ought to be encouraged, and tolerance ought to be embraced. Many argue 
that non-judgmental acceptance of  a plurality of  viewpoints is the ideal 
we should strive for in a democratic society. But, as the controversies 
surrounding the various interpretations of  the Freedom Tower design and 
the 9/11 Memorial illustrate, it seems counter-intuitive to think we are 
genuinely obligated to countenance every interpretation offered. Is there 
a non-arbitrary basis for admitting some interpretations while excluding 
others? If  so, how would this impact interpretive practice?

The question of  how to properly construe the relationship between 
the three-dimensional form of  an architectural work and its meaning, a 
staple of  debate within architectural discourse, illustrates a third type of  
interpretive problem.  A celebrated debate in 1989 between Leon Krier and 
Peter Eisenman on the theme of  “Reconstruction versus Deconstruction”2 



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forms a case in point. At the time, the stylistic 
skirmishes over historicism and the “next wave,” 
of  which this debate was a part, garnered a great 
deal of  attention, and pre-occupied many of  us in 
the architectural community.  It came as no surprise 
at the time that, stylistically, Krier and Eisenman 
were far apart with Eisenman claiming that history 
had few relevant precedents for contemporary 
conditions while Krier argued that all the necessary 
precedents already existed prior to modern times. 
The enduring gulf  between them is rooted in their 
divergent views about what a work of  architecture 
is, how we understand it aesthetically, the role 
architectural discourse is supposed to play within 
culture, and how best to interpret what a work of  
architecture means. The underlying philosophical 
differences between Eisenman, the paradigmatic 
spokesperson for autonomy and Krier, the 
traditionalist, could hardly have been greater. 

While the urgency of  this particular debate 
seems to have waned, the deep, unresolved 
disagreement about what properly constitutes a 
work of  architecture, and how we are to interpret 
or explain it remains worthy of  our philosophical 
attention. In my view, both historicism and 
deconstructivism are examples of  interpretive 
practices that rest on a few philosophical mistakes. 
Historicism is built on the premise that an object’s 
determinacy secures only one right interpretation 
of  it while deconstructivism, an example of  critical 
pluralism, holds an object’s indeterminacy licenses 
an open-ended plurality of  interpretations. (The 
critical pluralist argues that: 1) there can be more 
than one good way to construe the initial object; 2) 
divergent  interpretations are always admissible; 3) 
differing interpretive aims provide differing criteria 
as to what constitutes a valid interpretation;  and, 4) 
disagreements among qualified interpreters can be 
reasonable yet they may not be reconcilable. What 
makes critical pluralism  attractive, according to its 
advocates is the intuition that taken together several 



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judgments may be inconsistent, yet each judgment could be individually 
true. Since the identity of  the thing being interpreted is not stable, it is not 
susceptible to fixed  interpretation. Thus, critical pluralism  gives us a polite 
way to  have our strenuous disagreements, and robust truth at the same 
time.) These sorts of  claims: that what a work of  architecture is necessarily 
entail how many interpretations of  it we ought to hold admissible, while 
widely accepted, are mistaken; the entailment is not necessary. 

As I think these examples illustrate, what we have in each situation, 
ultimately, is a stand-off. We need a better way to talk about interpretive 
practices within our discipline to transcend their intractability. Architectural 
practitioners, theorists, critics, educators, and philosophers of  architecture 
need new interpretive tools.  

II. A Krauszian-style Taxonomy

In this enterprise of  developing new tools we need a philosophically 
grounded approach to architectural interpretation that: 1) promotes 
interpretive tolerance, whereby architecture may be interpreted in a 
number of  ways, without fostering unrestricted license; 2) serves as a 
superior framework to others prevalent in contemporary architectural 
interpretation, notably critical pluralism; and, 3) is not based on the false 
assumption that an object’s ontology necessarily entails the number of  
interpretations we find admissible. 

One candidate for introducing a new basis for architectural 
interpretation can be found in the two-tiered framework advocated by 
Michael Krausz. This framework differentiates the interpretation from the 
thing being interpreted, called the object of  interpretation. I prefer the term 
interpretandum, because this makes clear that what is being interpreted 
could be a real object, an abstract object, a sense perceptible phenomenon, 
a theory, or a social practice, but is not necessarily a material thing. One 
of  Krausz’s major contributions to the philosophy of  interpretation is his 
insight about the logical non-entailment between our ontological theory 
of  the interpretandum and the number of  interpretations we hold as 
admissible of  it. This thesis is called the detachability thesis. I offer the 
following formulation:

D: Our ideal interpretive stance with respect to the number of  admissible 
interpretations of  a given common object is logically detachable from specific 
ontological theories.

It is this mechanism that de-couples ontological theories from 
interpretive ideals. Each enterprise is logically independent of  the other; 



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neither logically entails the other. Thus, it is this 
thesis about the logical non-entailment between 
specific ontological theories of  interpretanda and 
the number of  interpretations we hold about them 
that sets up the overall framework of  possible 
interpretive positions that I advocate. Next, I offer 
overviews of  two ontologies useful for architectural 
interpretation, followed by a discussion of  the two 
interpretive ideals that comprise this taxonomy.

II.I: Realism/Constructivism 

One difficulty with the literature of  architectural 
theory and professional practice is that typically 
design professionals, architectural educators, and 
theorists do not have philosophically articulated 
ontological views. This makes it difficult to discern 
the full extent of  their interpretive position. 
Although I discuss various ontological views about 
what an architectural object is, for the purpose of  
articulating various interpretive positions, I do not 
endeavor to resolve in this essay whether there is a 
correct ontology for works of  architecture, and if  
so, what it ought to be. 

The gulf  between realists and constructivists 
derives, at least in part, from the distinction between 
object-as-such and object-as-represented. The 
realist may not be able to say precisely how things 
are, but insists that there is a way that they in fact 
are. The realist holds that realism can be defended 
even if  access to the way the world is cannot be 
(fully) obtained. Constructivists hold that this 
is a distinction without a difference, and that the 
object-as-such collapses into object-as-represented. 
Since the object-as-such does no interpretive work, 
then according to the constructivist, it ought to 
be dropped. For the constructivist, objects are 
never simply “given,” and no fact of  the matter 
exists that grounds either the interpretation or the 
thing being interpreted. So, it is in this way that all 
attempts to segregate objects-as-such from objects-

One of 
Krausz’s major 

contributions to 
the philosophy of 

interpretation is 
his insight about 

the logical 
non-entailment 

between our 
ontological 

theory of the 
interpretandum 

and the number of 
interpretations 

we hold as 
admissible of 
it.  This thesis 
is called the 

detachability 
thesis

“

”



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as-represented fail according to the constructivist. Any interpretive 
framework that presupposes that interpretanda are constituted as matters 
of  fact is already predisposed to realist ontology; frameworks denying 
this are predisposed to constructivism. Such presumptions would be 
detrimental to the larger project of  showing how an object of  interpretation 
is constituted within interpretive practices, and that the ontology of  an 
interpretandum does not necessitate the number of  interpretations we 
ought to find admissible. 

For the aesthetic realist, aesthetic properties are reified; there are real 
properties in the work and these ought to ground our judgments about 
it. Aesthetic realism does not demand that for any given artwork only a 
single aesthetic description is admissible; more than one description may 
be admitted. The realist view of  what constitutes a work of  architecture 
is that a work is necessarily a “brick and mortar” building possessing 
aesthetic properties, and standing before us. The claim that the difference 
between a building and an architectural work ought to be grounded in 
the possession of  aesthetic properties is well entrenched. When the 
British architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner famously remarked, “A 
bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of  architecture,”3 
he likely meant that aesthetic properties make the difference. The ontic 
locus of  aesthetic quality is in the work. By implication, then, aesthetic 
judgments are seen as stating truths that occur in virtue of  some mind-
independent state of  affairs. Realists hold that a substantial notion of  
truth is a valuable resource in ridding ourselves of  interpretations we find 
inadmissible. Preference is a measure of  how an interpretation comports 
with descriptive truth. Thus, under architectural realism elucidation aims 
at explicating actual or emergent properties in the work itself  – it is an 
object-centered ontological enterprise. 

The constructivist would find these claims unsupportable. According 
to the constructivist, a work of  art is primarily a mental object; its physical 
presence is primarily a device for transmitting meaning from one mind 
to another. Advocates hold that aesthetic perception is theory laden and 
thus we ought to drop any talk in aesthetics of  an un-interpreted world. 
The architectural constructivist holds that the design is the work of  
architecture, and a building is just a “brick and mortar” instantiation of  
that work. Under the constructivist’s approach a work of  architecture can 
be construed to exist in multiple media; a floor plan drawing, a perspective 
rendering, and a 3-D computer model could simultaneously constitute the 
same design, and hence the same work of  architecture. In a recent interview, 
the writer and architect Iman Ansari poses a question to Eisenman that 



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probes the difference between the [architectural] 
object and the idea of  the [architectural] object. 
Eisenman responds, “‘Real architecture’ only exists 
in drawings. The ‘real building’ exists outside the 
drawing. The difference here is that ‘architecture’ 
and ‘building’ are not the same.”4

It is important to note that this distinction 
between ‘architecture’ and ‘building’ is possible 
even where no actual brick and mortar construction 
exists that can be pointed to as the finished work. 
Thus, under architectural constructivism elucidation 
characteristically aims at clarity of  consciousness—
at epistemic rather than ontological clarity. It is an 
interpretation-centered epistemic enterprise.

In Section 3, I will expand on these ontologies 
as a way of  further illustrating the structure of  
this taxonomy. The next major component of  the 
framework is comprised of  the interpretive ideals 
of  singularism and multiplism, to which we now 
turn.

II.II: Singularism & Multiplism

Krausz distinguishes and explicates two 
interpretive ideals. One he calls singularism; the 
other he calls multiplism. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, 
offers a helpful summary, “An ideal is a critical 
stance that identifies the range of  admissible 
interpretations of  a given object prior to the conduct 
of  interpretive inquiry.”5 As Krausz uses the term 
in his interpretive philosophy “idealization” is best 
construed as something like the “desiderata of  
interpretive practice.” Thus, an “ideal” refers to a 
value or belief  about interpretive practice that is 
worthy of  being optimized and promoted – it is a 
norm of  practice. (In private conversation Krausz 
has stated that he does not intend “ideally” to be 
read in any Platonic way.)

Singularism is the view that there is a one-to-
one relation between the thing being interpreted 
and an interpretation, and several admissible 

Singularism is 
the view that 

there is a 
one-to-one 

relation 
between the 

thing being 
interpreted 

and an 
interpretation

“

”



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interpretations are conjoinable into a single “unified” interpretation.6 I 
offer the following formulation of  the singularist thesis:

S: ANY given object of  interpretation necessarily answers to one and only one 
ideally admissible interpretation. 

The singularist holds that incompatible interpretations cannot be jointly 
defended, and incomplete knowledge about competing interpretations 
ought not act as a barrier to embracing the ideal of  a single comprehensive 
interpretation. For the singularist, under ideal conditions there just is one 
and only one right interpretation.7 Although the singularist advocates the 
pursuit of  a single right interpretation it should be noted, however, that 
the singularist need not advocate infallibilism. The possibility exists, even 
for the singularist, that any given interpretation could be replaced with a 
better one. In this formulation the singularist understands the admissibility 
of  a given interpretation in bivalent truth-functional terms.

For any given object, when distinct interpretations are present, the 
singularist would argue that the true ones are conjoinable into a single 
coherent interpretation. Logically, a conjunction is true just in case 
each of  its conjuncts is true. So given a number of  interpretations, 
the adherent of  singularism first determines which are true and which 
false, and then proceeds to work out how the true ones are conjoinable. 
Contemporary architectural interpreters, particularly those committed to 
critical pluralism, are unlikely to hold a strict view of  S. Yet, I hold that 
a thickened description approach, where a “unified” singular view of  the 
work emerges, qualifies as singularism. Later, I will argue in more detail 
why I think Zaha Hadid holds this view. 

Multiplism is the view that a one-many relation holds between the 
thing being interpreted and interpretations of  it. I offer the following 
formulation of  the multiplist thesis:

M: SOME objects of  interpretation MAY answer to more than one ideally 
admissible interpretation.

This thesis claims that multiple non-convergent interpretations are 
ideally admissible and ought not be conjoined into a single “unified” 
interpretation. The multiplist is committed to the view that sometimes 
there just is no such singularity, and holds that more than one interpretation 
could legitimately be held at the same time. Though multiplism recognizes 
that while several interpretations may be possible, not all of  them 
should be considered equally admissible; further it is not the case that all 
admissible interpretations are equally preferable. This allows the multiplist 
to embrace certain singularist cases, but not vice versa. The multiplist 
could acknowledge that there are cases where a one-to-one relation 



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between an interpretandum and an interpretation 
could occur without committing to the truth of  
S. In this formulation the multiplist understands 
admissibility in multivalent terms, in Krausz’s 
words as, “reasonableness, appropriateness, aptness 
or the like.”8 For the multiplist, affirming one 
interpretation as admissible does not necessarily 
exclude others as inadmissible. Even though 
multiplism does not adopt a bivalent mode of  
determining admissibility, principled distinctions 
among competing interpretations remain possible. 
Thus not every would-be interpretation is 
admissible. So, the architectural multiplist is keen 
to point out that rational inquiry about works of  
architecture does not mandate a bivalent “true-
false” assessment of  an interpretation.

III. Interpretive Positions

With this understanding of  ontological theories 
and interpretive ideals we are better equipped to 
understand the import of  the four main interpretive 
positions that a Krauszian-style taxonomy affords. 
Two of  these positions are orthodox; two are 
heterodox. The orthodox view is that constructivists 
promote a multiplicity of  interpretations while 
realists promote a single right interpretation. In 
my view, it is precisely their individual entrenched 
commitments to their respective orthodox views 
that deeply mired Eisenman and Krier during 
their rancorous 1989 debate. I offer Leon Krier, 
the American philosopher Michael Mitias, and the 
British philosopher Roger Scruton as characterizing 
the real-singularist position, and those of  Nelson 
Goodman and Peter Eisenman as characterizing 
the constructive-multiplist view. I would argue that 
in addition to being divided by their ontological 
commitments, these advocates embrace differing 
interpretive ideals that further divide them.

The detachability thesis, D, suggests that the 
heterodox interpretive positions of  constructive-

Multiplism is 
the view that 

a one-many 
relation holds 

between the 
thing being 

interpreted and 
interpretations 

of it

“

”



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singularism and realist-multiplism might be fruitful ones to hold. I offer 
two British architects, Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers, both modernists, as 
examples of  constructive-singularism and realist-multiplism, respectively. 
While both of  them embrace the stylistic virtues of  architectural 
modernism, and on the surface this would seem to unite them, their 
ontological commitments and their differing stance about how many 
interpretations are ideally admissible creates an interpretive gulf  between 
them. Hadid’s commitment to modernism amounts to singularism, insofar 
as she holds that the proper role of  architecture is singularly fulfilled to 
the extent every project strives to be culture-altering and an opportunity 
to invade “new territories.”9 Rogers’ considerably more conciliatory view 
that architecture ought to be capable of  adapting to emerging social 
and technological circumstances, and be aesthetically resilient enough 
to endure alteration amounts to multiplism. While the views of  Hadid 
and Rogers characterize the heterodox interpretive positions, their views 
may not be exhaustive of  their respective positions. As with the orthodox 
positions, the views of  these interpreters ought to be seen as instances of  
the positions they occupy within the taxonomy, and not fully constitutive 
of  the entire position. 

Under Mitias’ realist-singular account, a work of  architecture emerges, 
that is it comes into being, in the aesthetic experience of  a building. Our 
experience of  the building as the physical structure of  an architectural 
work is the proper starting point for aesthetic inquiry. He rejects the claim 
that external factors such as background knowledge of  cultural practices 
and knowledge of  symbol systems are inherent to the work’s features qua 
object. According to Mitias, in his essay, “Expression in Architecture,” 
buildings possess and express their properties:

A building possesses its aesthetic properties. Those properties are not…added, or 
introduced, to the work from the outside, regardless of  the nature of  this external 
source. They originate from the building.10

Yet these aesthetic properties are not ready made realities, rather 
they exist as potentialities in the work. Aesthetic perception is needed to 
discover properties in the work “not given to ordinary perception.”11 In 
this way aesthetic properties are emergent in the aesthetic experience of  
a work. He writes:

This means that a building becomes art, i.e. acquires its aesthetic identity as 
a work of  art, only during an event of  aesthetic perception, and outside this 
perception its status is similar to the status of  ordinary objects.12

In a subsequent essay, “The Aesthetic Experience of  the Architectural 
Work,” he clarifies his view that aesthetic qualities are not feelings 



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evoked in the observer when aesthetic attention is 
brought to bear on the object, rather the quality is 
inherent in the object itself.13 His commitment to 
a realist ontology forces the conclusion that what 
distinguishes a building from a work of  architecture 
is the existence of  potential aesthetic properties in 
the latter but not in the former. Similar to Pevsner’s 
view, aesthetic properties are the ontic difference-
makers between ‘architecture’ and ‘building.’ 

Mitias embraces the view that there is only 
one set of  non-contradictory properties that can 
be said to emerge from a given artwork. The claim 
that aesthetic qualities inhere but not as ready-made 
realties, that is, as actual properties given to sense 
perception, but as potentialities in the work implies 
a certain singularism insofar as Mitias does not 
think that it is possible for several non-convergent 
aesthetic potentialities to emerge from the same 
building. The singularist is keen to point out that 
it cannot be the case that p & ~p are inherent in 
the same work. Mitias certainly does not want to 
countenance the idea that contradictory qualities 
could emerge from the same work for two different 
interpreters. If  two people hold contradictory 
views, then someone must be wrong. Taken 
together Mitias’ claims of  aesthetic realism are 
supposed to compel his conclusion that a single 
right interpretation of  a work is the goal of  inquiry.

In his essay, “How Buildings Mean,” Nelson 
Goodman claims that architecture is a building that 
symbolically functions, that is, a work of  architecture 
performs a referential function that a mere building 
does not. Although modernist works of  architecture 
typically do not denote anything outside themselves, 
at least not in the manner of  classical architecture, 
neither are they devoid of  meaning, contrary to the 
claims of  realists such as Krier. Under Goodman’s 
account the work qua object has features that allow 
it to point both outside itself  and to itself. A given 
work of  architecture has meaning in virtue of  its 

Hadid’s 
commitment 

to modernism 
amounts to 
singularism

“
”



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capacity to simultaneously embody, and make explicit reference to, the 
properties it possesses. Thus, a building’s meaning is rooted in what it 
exemplifies. One example he cites is Gerrit Reitveld’s Schroeder House 
(1924), Utrecht, where the work references its own structural features of  
columns, beams and walls.

One advantage of  Goodman’s constructivist account is that the 
difference between a building and a work of  architecture does not require 
any distinction between ordinary and aesthetic perception. Furthermore, 
his view that referential functioning, at least in part, ought to ground 
the divide that separates a building from a work of  architecture has an 
additional advantage for the constructivist, because this approach does not 
require an ontological resolution of  aesthetic properties. It only requires 
human understanding of  symbol systems. 

In Goodman’s view of  meaning, exemplification plays an important 
cognitive role with respect to works of  art, because it affords epistemic 
access to features we might not otherwise attend to. As this line of  
reasoning demonstrates, it is not incoherent to talk of  an internal locus for 
meaning, particularly for non-representational works, but focusing on the 
notion of  a locus tends to reify meaning and distract us from Goodman’s 
central point that the value of  a work of  art is its role in furthering our 
understanding, and that meaning is a correlate of  that understanding. 
As Catherine Elgin has remarked of  Goodman’s views, “Understanding 
works of  art is not a matter of  passive absorption, but of  active intellectual 
engagement with symbols whose syntactic and semantic features are often 
elusive.”14

His endorsement of  a multiplist ideal is explicit and unmistakable, “A 
work of  art typically means in varied and contrasting and shifting ways 
and is open to many equally good and enlightening interpretations.”15 The 
multiplicity of  interpretations Goodman is prepared to accept appears 
to be rooted in his commitment to constructivism. Goodman makes 
an important point about his view of  the nature of  architecture and 
interpretation. He writes “More than any other art, architecture makes 
us aware that interpretation cannot be so easily distinguished from the 
work.”16 His path to multiplism is evident insofar as what we think the 
work is due to our interpretations of  it – our interpretations thus construct 
the work.

Can a constructivist object to Mitias’ ontology yet concur with S? 
I hold that this is a reasonable result and I offer the Iraqi-born British 
Architect Zaha Hadid as an example of  a constructive-singularist. She 
is a constructivist due to her thorough-going reliance on the centrality 



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of  “constructed” symbol systems in her work. No 
determinate meaning exists to be discovered, so 
she claims. She is a staunch advocate of  aesthetic 
modernism and, in her view, this is the singular 
lens through which works of  architecture ought to 
be interpreted.17 Her unyielding commitment to a 
purified aesthetic modernism and her advocacy of  
the aesthetic implications of  modernity is clear:

We can no longer fulfill our obligations as architects if  
we carry on as cake decorators. Our role is far greater 
than that. We, the authors of  architecture, have to 
take on the task of  reinvestigating Modernity ... there 
is only one way and that is to go forward along the path 
paved by the experiments of  the early Modernists.18

In claiming that Hadid’s commitment to 
aesthetic modernism grounds her singularism, I 
am not making the larger claim that all adherents 
of  modernism are necessarily advocates of  
singularism. Nor am I making the claim that 
modernism is somehow the aesthetic equivalent 
of  singularism. In Hadid’s case her singularism is 
rooted in her commitment to modernism, yet this 
commitment in itself  does not entail that only 
singular interpretations emerge from modernity. I 
classify her as a singularist, largely because I think 
that a thickened description of  her work renders 
a single interpretation of  it the best approach. 
The thickened description argument for S relies 
on the distinction between “thin” concepts and 
“thick” concepts. Thick concepts are those where 
less variation is tolerated among instances. So, in 
the process of  building up numerous descriptions 
of  the thing under inquiry we narrow the range of  
admissible variations of  it, and thus come to see it 
as “unified.”

Stylistically, Hadid stands in stark contrast to the 
British philosopher Roger Scruton. In his book The 
Classical Vernacular Scruton argues that generations 
of  architects educated in a modernist outlook 
that rebuked traditional ornament, traditional 



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materials, and the orders of  classical Greek and Roman architecture have 
created aesthetically disappointing and nihilistic works that disregard 
the civic nature of  architecture.19 In short, he argues that classicism is 
more aesthetically correct than modernism. He is forthright in his disdain 
for modernism, “its language is uncouth, unredeemed by detail, utterly 
indifferent to its surroundings, or to the person who is obliged to pass 
by the building.”20 We need to see that his aesthetic commitment to 
classicism need not be tied to his interpretive commitment to singularism. 
A multiplist, for example, could hold the views expressed by Scruton that 
modernism is not aesthetically satisfying, but reject his claims about the 
sole “true” function of  architecture. Clearly Hadid and Scruton disagree 
about the aesthetics of  modernism. Even though both are singularists 
they are divided by their ontology.

In contrast to these two singularists, the British architect Richard 
Rogers stands as an example of  a realist-multiplist. He is a realist insofar 
as he is committed to the view that the thing being interpreted, the “brick 
and mortar” building, is constituted independent of  what interpreters 
think. Rogers holds that technology, scientific research, and an emphasis 
on function should serve as the basis for contemporary architecture. 
However, he also holds that architecture ought to be capable of  adapting 
to changing social and technological needs. He is a multiplist due to his 
deep reliance on an “open ended” architectural object that is in principle 
flexible enough to admit numerous interpretations. He writes:

Though a building must be complete at any one stage, it is our belief  that in order 
to allow for growth and change it should be functionally and therefore visually 
open-ended. This indeterminate form must offer legible architectural clues for the 
interpretation of  future users. The dichotomy between the complete and the open 
nature of  the building is a determinant of  the aesthetic language.21

Yet we need to be careful not to argue that an underlying indeterminacy 
of  the work is what necessitates his being a multiplist. Contrary to the 
deconstructivist position, this line of  reasoning would undermine M1, 
rather than bolster it. Instead, it is important to show that in principle a 
common object is countable yet it admits of  more than one interpretation. 
That Rogers holds this outcome to be both possible and desirable is 
evident in the following passage:

The building form, plan, section and elevation should be capable of  responding 
to changing needs. This free and changing performance will then become part 
of  the expression of  the architecture of  the building, the street and the city. 
Program, ideology and form will then play an integrated and legible role within 
a changing but ordered framework. The fewer the building constraints for the 



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users, the greater the success; the greater the success 
the more the need for revision and then programmatic 
indeterminance will become an expression of  the 
architecture.22 

Rogers points to an important set of  difficult 
cases, namely, those objects of  interpretation that 
change over time. These sorts of  cases present 
difficulty not because they threaten our interpretive 
ideals; both singularism and multiplism remain 
unaffected. The singularist, for example, would 
argue that the one-to-one relation still holds over 
time, because at any given time the single right 
interpretation is grounded in the state of  the object 
at that particular time. The multiplist would agree 
that an object’s changed status could, though not 
necessarily would, ground different interpretations 
than those rendered earlier, but not because 
multiplism is false. These cases are difficult, 
precisely because where something is physically 
altered, the question emerges, Do we have a new 
interpretanda or not? What would constitute a 
priori limits to alteration, such that the interpretanda 
remains “fixed,” is difficult to say but is the crux 
of  the interpretive problem facing contextualists 
discussed at the outset. 

Under a Krauszian-style interpretive account, 
the community of  informed interpreters would 
be relied upon to determine, on a case-by-case 
basis, whether or not alterations to a given work of  
architecture create a new object of  interpretation.23 
Furthermore, this same approach to resolving 
interpretive disputes about individual works would 
apply to the larger context within which a new work 
is to occur. Some works of  architecture change the 
context within which they occur, and some do not. 
This realization that a dialectical relation exists 
between our views about context, and our views 
about the identity of  interpretanda could help 
move the contextualist debate forward. 

As the World Trade Center site example 

Hadid and 
Scruton disagree 

about the 
aesthetics of 

modernism even 
though both are 

both singularists

“

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illustrates, the ways in which architecture ought to memorialize human 
events continues to be a significant source of  interpretive disagreement. 
This framework makes it clear that interpretive debates often occur 
on many levels simultaneously. And this may be a significant source 
of  their seeming intractability. When differences in belief  about the 
underlying events (what it is that is being memorialized) are conflated 
with how admissible interpretations elucidate architectural responses to 
it, disagreement is bound to occur. Additionally, the framework makes it 
evident that one could be a either a singularist or a multiplist with respect 
to an underlying event, and proposed responses to it. Whether a critic 
could be a singularist about an underlying event, and a multiplist in regards 
to proposes responses (or vice-versa) is a question this approach explicitly 
raises. 

This taxonomy also brings conceptual clarity to the Krier-Eisenman 
debate by providing an account of  how their respective positions are 
both grounded in specific, yet differing, ontological commitments and 
differing interpretive ideals. In spite of  their many differences, both 
Eisenman and Krier, in effect, endorse the view (though they would not 
have phrased it this way), that claims about what a work of  architecture 
is necessarily entail the number of  interpretations of  it we ought to hold. 
As this taxonomy makes clear, both Eisenman and Krier have overlooked 
a crucial philosophical point about the relationship between their own 
ontological views and their interpretive ideals.

IV. Responding to Objections

Several objections may be raised against this taxonomy. Here, I address 
a few. 

Objection 1: Many contemporary works of  architecture are indeterminate, 
and this undermines S.  This is the critical pluralist’s objection. I concur, 
that one feature many contemporary works have in common is their 
indeterminacy. The existence of  indeterminate works, however we 
construe them, is a separate issue from whether indeterminacy compels 
the adoption of  a specific interpretive ideal. Importantly, the success of  
both S and M depends necessarily on the notion of  commonality—the 
proper construal of  a common object. For differing interpretations of  
entities to meaningfully compete they must be about a common object 
of  interpretation; they must be about the same thing. As I have already 
argued here, the determinacy of  the object of  interpretation does not 
necessitate singularism, nor does indeterminacy necessitate multiplism.24 

Thus, indeterminacy does not threaten S1—it remains a defensible ideal. 



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Objection 2: The taxonomy is incomplete; there are 
more than two ontologies for works of  architecture. This 
objection is almost certainly true. There is at least 
a third major ontological theory – constructive-
realism – in this taxonomy that I discuss elsewhere, 
but given its philosophical complexities I chose 
to forego discussion of  it for two reasons: 1) 
the difference between internal and external 
constructive-realism makes it difficult to determine 
the relevance of  constructive-realism as an 
architectural ontology; and, 2) no one within the 
field of  architectural interpretation, as far as I know, 
has advanced anything to discuss. 

Objection 3: There are lots of  interpretations about 
architecture; not just four. True, insofar as we are 
talking about the number of  actual interpretations; 
they are inestimable. But an interpretation is not an 
interpretive position. The focus of  the taxonomy is 
to articulate a philosophically-grounded framework 
that fosters enhanced dialogue and comprehension 
of  interpretive positions and strategies. As I have 
argued, the number of  interpretive positions is 
not unlimited. My aim here is not to articulate and 
then adjudicate specific interpretations, but rather 
to enrich dialogue among disputants, build a few 
bridges, and get beyond the interpretive gridlock 
that has characterized architectural interpretation in 
recent decades. 

Objection 4: The detachability thesis, D, fails. For the 
sake of  brevity, I offer two reasons why D succeeds. 
First, each of  the four positions is coherently 
adoptable. There are no internal contradictions 
within any of  them. Second, the methodological 
issue of  which interpretive ideal we should adopt, S 
or M, can occur prior to interpreting any particular 
object, and it simply does not hinge on how we 
characterize the ontology of  the object we are 
interpreting; one issue is located at the level of  
practice, the other at the level of  ontology.

In conclusion, the interpretive framework 



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I propose has numerous advantages. First, the interpretive conduct 
it sanctions with respect to the number of  admissible interpretations 
does not entail an a priori commitment to a specific ontological theory, 
something architects do not possess as a matter of  professional training, 
and something that few architectural theorists articulate in any careful or 
systematic fashion. Second, where an interpreter is committed to a particular 
ontology with respect to works of  architecture, such commitment does 
not obligate them in advance to accept a specific number of  admissible 
interpretations. Being a realist, for example, does not compel an interpreter 
to embrace the view that a single right interpretation exists. Last, it is useful 
for assisting interpreters that may be unable or unwilling to overcome 
differences in their interpretive positions and reach agreement about 
the cultural value and meaning of  specific works. For all these reasons, I 
consider this interpretive framework to be a substantial improvement over 
what we have now.

ENDNOTES

1. John Silber, Architecture of  the Absurd: How “Genius” Disfigured a Practical Art. 
(New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2007), 59.

2. Peter Eisenman and Leon Krier, “Peter Eisenman versus Leon Krier: My 
Ideology is Better Than Yours,” Architectural Design 59, 7-18.

3. Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of  European Architecture (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 
2009), 10.

4. See “Q & A: Peter Eisenman”, in The Architect’s Newspaper, Vol7, Issue 5, May 
29, 2013. p. 22.

5. Andreaa Deciu Ritivoi, Introduction to Interpretation and its Objects, ed., Andreea 
Deciu Ritivoi (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 8.

6. Michael Krausz, Introduction to Is There a Single Right Interpretation?, ed., Michael 
Krausz (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 1.

7. For proponents of  the singularist view see David Novitz, “Against Critical 
Pluralism,” in Is There a Single Right Interpretation? ed. Michael Krausz (University 
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 101-121; and, Brandon 
Cooke, “Critical pluralism Unmasked,” British Journal of  Aesthetics 42, 296-309. 

8. Krausz, Introduction, Is There a Single Right Interpretation? 2.

9. Zaha Hadid, “The Eighty-Nine Degrees,” in Theories and Manifestoes of  
Contemporary Architecture, 2nd Ed., ed., Charles Jencks and Karl Kropf  
(Hoboken: Wiley Academy, 2006), 280.

10. Michael H. Mitias, “Expression in Architecture,” in Philosophy and Architecture, 
ed., Michael H. Mitias (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 99.

11. Mitias, “Expression,” 99.



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12. Mitias, “Expression,” 100.

13. Michael H. Mitias, “The Aesthetic Experience of  the Architectural Work,” Journal 
of  Aesthetic Education 33, 64. 

14. Catherine Z. Elgin, “Relocating Aesthetics,” in The Philosophy of  Nelson Goodman: 
Nelson Goodman’s Philosophy of  Art, Vol 3, ed., Catherine Z. Elgin (New York: 
Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997), 171. 

15. Nelson Goodman, “How Buildings Mean,” in Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other 
Arts & Sciences, ed., Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin (Indianapolis: 
Hackett Publishing, 1988), 44.

16. Goodman, “How Buildings Mean,” 45.

17. Hadid, “Eighty-Nine Degrees,” 280.

18. Hadid, “Eighty-Nine Degrees,” 280.

19. Roger Scruton, Introduction to The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an 
Age of  Nihilism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), xiii. 

20. Scruton, Classical Vernacular, 16.

21. Richard Rogers, “Observations on Architecture,” in Theories and Manifestoes of  
Contemporary Architecture, 2nd Ed., ed., Charles Jencks and Karl Kropf  (Hoboken: 
Wiley Academy, 2006), 252.

22. Rogers, “Observations,” 253. 

23.What constitutes the community of  informed interpreters, and who qualifies for 
admission into it, is an important aspect of  the framework. For a more in-depth 
treatment see Chapter 3, Richard N. Fox, Interpreting Architecture: A Krauszian 
Approach. (Long Beach, CA: California State University Long Beach, 2009).

24. I first argued this point in Richard N. Fox, “Ambiguous Works of  Architecture: A 
Krauszian-style Interpretive Approach to the Gehry Residence,” (paper presented 
at the Pacific Division Meeting of  the Society for the Philosophic Study of  
Contemporary Visual Art, San Diego, California, April 2011).  In the paper I 
offered a critical extension of  the notion of  a common object of  interpretation 
and examined what we ought to look for in construing what the common object 
amounts to when we examine a specific work of  architecture. I argued that: (1) 
concerns about determinacy ought not compel us to adopt a particular interpretive 
ideal; and, (2) a work’s ambiguity does not hinder interpreter’s ability to agree on 
what constitutes the common object of  their interpretive disagreement.



Andrew Ballantyne’s books include

Key Buildings From Prehistory to the Present: Plans, Sections and Elevations, 2012

Architecture in the Space of  Flows, 2012 (co-edited by C. Smith)

Deleuze and Guattari for Architects, 2007

Architecture Theory: A Reader in Philosophy and Culture, 2005

Architecture and Experience: Radical Change in Spatial Practice, 2004

Architectures: Modernism and After, 2004

Architecture: A Very Short Introduction, 2002

What is Architecture?, 2002

Architecture, Landscape and Liberty: Richard Payne Knight and the Picturesque, 1997

Andrew Ballantyne and Stefan  koller



Trying to think in a connected 
sort of way

Andrew Ballantyne in conversation with stefan koller

Question: You’ve written Deleuze and Guattari for 
Architects, you’ve written on architecture philosophy, but 
originally you’ve written things that were maybe not so clearly 
yet situated within the philosophy of  architecture. How did 
you eventually came to that material and why?

Answer: It is difficult to summarize, but my 
doctorate and my first book were about Richard 
Payne Knight and the theory of  the Picturesque. I 
was interested in the topic from the point of  view 
of  architecture theory, but it turned out to be the 
theory of  everything else as well. Especially the 
theory of  landscape design, people’s relationship 
with their environments, people’s relationship with 
ideas, and the ideas that they use to think about 
things, think about places, think about nature and 
how they engage with nature. So I found myself  
going on a very wide-ranging study of  Knight’s 
ideas.

I first encountered him as a theorist of  
architecture through Peter Collins’ book, the 
Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture where he’s 
positioned as someone who thought all rules were 
wrong. That seemed to me to be so evidently 
sensible. I didn’t understand why anyone would 
every have moved on from that position. So I 
wanted to find out about him, and through a very 
rich, very rewarding character who turned out to 
have lots of  interest.

Now of  course I do understand why people 
moved on from that position. Because if  you have 
rules, it simplifies things, it cuts down the range 
of  choices. Often what you want as a designer is a 
reason to limit what you’re interested in so that the 

Often what 
you want as 

a designer is a 
reason to limit 

what you’re 
interested in 
so that the 

question isn’t as 
multifarious as it 

could be

“

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question isn’t as multifarious as it could be, but it’s focused on the issue 
of  the day, or of  the issue that we decide to make the issue of  the day, 
and that simplifies things. It resolves the question into what we’re dealing 
with now.

Q: These are all inherently, genuinely, legitimately philosophical questions. At what 
point does moving on and engaging with people like Deleuze and Guattari become a 
move towards philosophical questions? Or is it more of  the same that just happens to 
be concerned with authors who are recognized by others as having philosophically dealt 
with the built environment?

A: I’m not sure, but what I want to pick up on in that question is the 
idea of  the variety and multifariousness of  the world as we know it, of  
things, and the way we need to simplify it in order to deal with it. What I’d 
hope that I try to do is engage with lots of  things and the big complexity 
of  what we are immersed in and then fasten on different things to focus 
on in each text. 

So, we hone in on something and try and address some sort of  
questions, but I do want the background richness and the background, 
complexity or chaos – whatever it is – I want that to be part of  my life, 
part of  my intellectual outlook, and so there’s a tradition of  dealing with 
those things. Deleuze and Guattari very nicely formulate it as nomadic 
thought where you move about, you change the set of  ideas that you’re 
using to deal with the world from one occasion to another, and you use the 
ideas that are the most effective at the given time, given what you are trying 
to do, what you’re trying to think about, what you’re trying to engage with 
and then move on from them and use a different set on another occasion.

Q: Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche talks about taking other peoples’ insights like 
arrows that have landed on the ground and that we can just pick them up and shoot 
them off  again. So it seems you instrumentalize the arrows and you make them do the 
things that you want them to do for you. In the sense there is a tradition that engages 
these broader questions more narrowly or in a more design-oriented context, is that 
one way to draw on and instrumentalize the philosophical tradition? In order to pose, 
articulate, and sometimes answer questions within the tradition of  architecture that may 
be harder otherwise to unearth?

A: My first reaction is to think, ‘I don’t know, I’ll have to go away and 
think about that’. But, what I do know is that I don’t read philosophical 
texts as a philosopher. I read them, however I do read them. There are 
some things that jump out and seem interesting, seem compelling and 
I somehow latch on to and they seem like something that I’ve got to do 
something with. If  what I’m doing with that concept is just explaining 
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I have no role, there’s no point in my doing that. 
Other people can do that. The philosopher has 
done it already. Why would it be interesting just to 
repeat back what the philosopher has said? What 
I’m interested in doing is taking it up, picking up 
that arrow, firing it to a new place, and seeing 
where it lands. It’s an instrument for exploration of  
something. You find that it will do something, and 
I’m not always clear what it’s going to do, but I have 
this feeling that something is going to happen with 
it. We find out as we progress with the text, with 
the thinking, with exploring that idea, seeing what it 
leads ups with, and seeing where it lands.

Q: In Deleuze and Guattari for Architects you 
quote from a novel by Bernard Malamud where he reads 
Spinoza. Malamud reads Spinoza with great speed and says, 
‘sometimes I wouldn’t understand a sentence and I would 
go through it and afterwards I felt I wasn’t the same man 
anymore’. So there’s a transformative potential of  philosophy 
here which doesn’t require Malamud’s character to read 
Spinoza’s text the way academically trained philosophers 
might feel compelled to do (line by line). So it’s a way to 
open up something about architecture without knowing 
where it will lead you, but also without feeling compelled that 
for philosophy to do this, you have to follow an academic 
philosophical attitude of  engaging the text. Is that fair to 
say?

A: Yes, it is fair to say, but also I would say that 
one of  the things that I like about listening to 
philosophers is that methodical presentation of  an 
argument and leading me through step-by-step. I 
hope that’s something that I can learn from and can 
follow that sort of  procedure. I’m not sure that it 
always works out that way, but I would hope (to 
have) that clarity of  thinking and the precision 
of  thinking that philosophers are so good at 
demonstrating. That’s something I’d aspire to do 
and that I’d hope that I could learn from.

The way that I come across philosophers being 
used by architects, far too often, is of  imperfectly 
understood ideas being collaged together. I know 

The way that 
I come across 
philosophers 
being used by 

architects, far 
too often, is 

of imperfectly 
understood ideas 

being collaged 
together

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that if  I hear the names of  more than three philosophers in a sentence 
I panic. I just know that I’m not being presented with something that’s 
being thought through. I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that I 
don’t know everything, and I’m perfectly contented with the fact that 
there may be philosophers who’ve thought the way I’ve thought before, 
and I’m not referencing them; that doesn’t invalidate the argument. What 
I’m really keen on doing is trying to think in a connected sort of  way like 
philosophers do. It’s that I want to learn from them more than anything.

Q: What I find so interesting is the way you characterize your work, the way you 
characterized what you sometimes find in the field, and what I think many of  us have 
encountered. Of  course, that is nothing at all peculiar to architects. Philosophy belongs 
to the public and to a readership well beyond the academic establishment, which means 
that people engage with it without scholarly scruple. Perhaps in the same sense that they 
read novels without having to feel the need to attend a seminar on say French literary 
theory first.

Sven Olov-Wallenstein’s book on bio-politics contains a history of  all of  
Enlightenment philosophy. That’s not a presentation, or representation, of  someone 
like Kant or Locke in these pages that is recognizable to a trained philosopher, but at 
the same time it would be extremely effective, and has been extremely effective in opening 
up some questions to ask of  architecture, or to confront architecture with. 

That’s exactly the same mixture of  not being too scrupulous with the source 
material to be able to arrive at something original. That is something that Olov-
Wallenstein does, in a very short space, and I understand that you give yourself  and 
your own philosophical explorations much more space and fewer authors to work with. 
But compared to your work, is the Olov-Wallenstein example a difference in degree, or 
difference in kind?

A: Well, I don’t know my way around that text, but I would guess that 
the substance of  it, if  it’s doing something valuable, probably isn’t in those 
introductory remarks. That’s setting the scene and if  it is doing something 
valuable then it would have to be thinking through things in a more careful 
way than that. It may be giving a few broad-brush strokes to set things up. 
There may be something inaccurate or wayward in that, but maybe that’s 
not important, that’s just background. The key to it would be the central 
argument where the ideas are properly engaged. I don’t know, but that’s 
my suspicion from your description there. There’s always something that’s 
in the background that you don’t know about but you might need to make 
reference to it, just as something maybe out of  focus in the background 
which nevertheless is helpful in establishing some sort of  context.

Part II of  this interview will appear in Vol. 1, No. 2 of  Architecture Philosophy.



Review

The driving force behind the corporeal turn in 
recent philosophy is to overcome what many see as 
a stultifying reliance on the eye in the Western canon 
of  aesthetics for both knowing and appreciating 
the world. Developments in neuroscience would 
bear-out this effort. Knowing is closely tied to the 
emotions and the emotions are closely tied to the 
more immersive senses of  touch, taste, hearing 
and smell. By paying closer attention to non-visual 
ways of  perceiving, designers stand to make their 
work more responsive to desires for a more fully 
experienced world. Contributing to this endeavor, 
Ritu Bhatt has convened some of  the most well-
known names in the philosophy of  embodied 
aesthetics and in the role of  the body in design 
to bring together the under-theorized disciplines 
of  architecture and aesthetics, and to explore how 
dissolving certain disciplinary boundaries could 
help reconsideration of  the body in design. While 
the results of  this cross-disciplinary work give 
encouraging signs of  the vitality of  this line of  
inquiry, any such work inevitably leads to questions 
of  the state of  the sub-discipline and the identity of  
the audience. The mostly engaging and well-written 
essays fall short of  providing clear answers to these 
questions. 

The book is divided into two sections; the “Role 

Rethinking Aesthetics: The Role of Body in Design, 
Edited by Ritu Bhatt

New York: Routledge Press, 2013.

ISBN 978-0-415-53474 (hbk)/978-0-415-53475-8 (pbk)

Price $170.00 (hbk)/$49.95 (pbk)

Reviewed by Tom Spector



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of  Aesthetic Response in Everyday Life,” and “Modes of  Aesthetic Response: 
Tacit Perception and Somatic Consciousness.” It begins with well-established 
pragmatist philosopher Richard Shusterman’s “Everyday Aesthetics of  
Embodiment.” Since his book Pragmatist Aesthetics, in which he lays out the 
concept of  “somaesthetics,” Shusterman has been a prominent exponent of  
the embodied nature of  aesthetic response. So it makes sense that he would 
lead-off  the essays. But the piece is also a wonderfully clear-headed account 
of  his efforts to sensitize himself  to an embodied consciousness—especially 

of  the associated increased sensory participation (perhaps we should call it 
a renewed aesthetic living) possible to achieve, in his case, by immersion in 
a Zen Buddhist school in Japan. 

This essay is followed by Mark Johnson’s “Dewey’s Big Idea for 
Aesthetics” In which Johnson gives a concise explanation of  Deweyan 
aesthetics: 

Art reveals, through immediate presentation of  qualitative unities, the meaning 
and significance of  some aspect of  our world, either as it was, is, or might be….
Dewey’s central question here is how art realizes meaning. His answer is that art 
achieves meaning by enacting in us a heightened awareness of  the “pervasive unifying 
quality” of  a given situation.” Johnson then argues for a set of  implications that 
follow from a Deweyan interpretation of  art and aesthetics. Most importantly, 
“Pervasive qualitative unity” is what makes an experience aesthetic. Furthermore, 
this unity is the main point of  works of  art. These two ideas imply the third point 
that “any aesthetic theory or critical analysis that attends only to selected features of  
an artwork will necessarily fail to capture what is most important (pg. 42).

Johnson’s reappraisal of  Dewey’s relevance provides both a sensitive and 
well-reasoned set of  implications for embodied aesthetics.

Three more essays round-out Part One. Sonit Bafna provides a 
worthwhile close reading of  an iconic building in downtown Atlanta, Marcel 
Breuer’s Atlanta Public Library, completed in 1980. While it is delightful to 
revisit a building that asserted high modernism on a mostly unappreciative 
town, it is curious that the essay is primarily concerned with the visual in a 
book emphasizing embodiment. 

Following Bafna, Remei Capdevila-Werning’s essay on symbolism in 
buildings rides a mini-wave of  a resurgence of  interest in Nelson Goodman. 
The author reminds us of  the Nelsonian ways in which buildings convey 
meaning through the “main modes” of  “denotation and exemplification” and 
the lesser modes of  expression and indirection (pg. 89). But the meanings of  
these terms get stretched a bit. Does the Villa Rotunda “symbolize harmonic 
proportions” as the author asserts (pg. 88), or does it enact them and realize 
them? The further assertion that “there are no true or false interpretations, 



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but rather, right or wrong, adequate or inadequate 
to the work’s symbolic functioning” is perplexing 
(pg. 94). How could an interpretation be right or 
wrong if  it is completely uncoupled from its being 
true or false? Capdevila-Werning would have it that 
fitness or aptness would suffice, but how could these 
concepts be stable without some correspondence 
theory of  truth under them? 

Chris Abel’s nearly forty-page essay “The 
Extended Self ” tells the story of  twentieth century 
architects’ naïve attempts to capture embodiment, 
the more sophisticated explanations provided 
by Polanyi, and confirmation by more recent 
developments in neuroscience. The purpose is to 
provide a convincing argument for the existence 
in all humans of  extensive body maps. These well-
developed maps, the author hopes, could be used 
to provide a more psychologically sound basis 
for teaching design than do current methods that 
more resemble indoctrination. Though they do 
not directly engage architecture theory, these ideas 
could surely be the basis for substantial further 
work.

Part Two opens with Galen Cranz’s “Somatics 
and Aesthetics” which both condenses and builds 
on her exploration of  the near environment 
provided by her well-regarded book The Chair. 
The essay provides a concise look into somatics – 
the conceptual fusing of  sensation, emotion and 
knowledge – with examples of  its implications 
for design thinking based especially in the author’s 
knowledge of  the Alexander Technique. 

Following Cranz, Yuriko Saito’s “The Moral 
Dimension of  Japanese Aesthetics” is one of  the 
standout essays in the volume. Her main point, 
similar to the one Kant attempted to establish in 
the Critique of  the Power of  Judgment, is that aesthetic 
sensitivity enhances one’s ability to act ethically. Her 
examples drawn from Japanese arts provide vivid 
examples of  the relationship between aesthetic and 

Saito’s main 
point is that 

aesthetic 
sensitivity 

enhances one’s 
ability to act 

ethically

“

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moral concepts. These examples also seem capable of  extension into other 
cultures. 

Editor Ritu Bhatt’s own contribution discusses the relevance of  both 
Feng shui and Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language as illustrative of  
“unconscious relationships with space, day-to-day cognition, and normative 
frameworks of  knowledge” (pg. 183). Bhatt wishes, not to promote either 
concept, but rather to use their persistence as traditional agent-empowering 
practices to help overcome the seemingly intractable opposition between 

high modernist presumptions to get at architecture’s essence on the one 
hand, and post-critical assertions that such theoretical projects are best left 
alone on the other. While bringing some rapprochement to these conflicting 
outlooks would be welcome, it is a lot to ask of  these two examples. While 
both Feng shui and A Pattern Language are intimately connected with 
embodiment in space, it is hard to say what is new that either brings to the 
discussion. 

The last two essays, David Seamon’s short “Environmental 
Embodiment, Merlau-Ponty, and Hillier’s Theory of  Space Syntax” and 

Juhani Pallasmaa’s “Mental and Existential Ecology” should be seen more 
as survey pieces suggestive of  future areas of  inquiry than as presenting a 
sustained argument. Seamon’s straightforward aim is to introduce Merlau-
Ponty to sociologies of  space, place and body. Pallasmaa introduces a 
basketful of  concepts: “loss of  silence,” mediation between “world and 
self,” the neurobiological insights of  artists, “existential space,” the primacy 
of  touch, the loss of  hapticity and how architecture structures not only 
experiences but our inner world. The essay’s speculative nature makes the 
reader wonder if  it would have been better placed as an introductory piece. 
Perhaps its inclusion at the end of  the volume was meant to leave readers 
with a sense of  large vistas yet to come, but those of  us who want to know if  
this new cross-disciplinary effort has direction will not come away with any 
strong compass points. 



isparchitecture.com

About the Authors

David Leatherbarrow is Professor of  Architecture at the University of  Pennsylvania.

Paul Guyer is Jonathan Nelson Professor of  Philosophy and Humanities at Brown 
University.

Emmanuel Petit is Associate Professor of  Architecture at Yale University.

Nathaniel Coleman is Reader in History and Theory of  Architecture at Newcastle 
University.

Rafael De Clercq is Associate Professor, Department of  Visual Studies, Lingnan 
University.

Rick Fox is a principle architect in the firm Stratos Form.

Image Credits

Schreiner House: David Leatherbarrow
Daisy house and Stanley Tigerman courtesy of  Tigerman Mccurry Architects
Westfall’s diagram: Rafael DeClerq
All photos in Is Beauty Still Relevant?: Nathaniel Coleman
9/11 memorial: Tom Spector
Andrew Ballantyne and Stefan Koller: Carolyn Fahey



AP . vol 1 . No 1 . 2014

Architecture Philosophy conducts double-blind reviews of  all papers submitted. Each 
paper is reviewed by one philosophy expert and one architecture expert. Reviewers 
are members of  the editorial board and are asked to evaluate submissions according 
to the following criteria:

Appropriateness to the field of architecture philosophy
Does the paper acknowledge and/or build on existing scholarship in both 
architecture and philosophy?
Does the paper acknowledge existing scholarship in philosophy and architecture 
respectively?

Philosophical analysis
Is philosophy engaged directly?
Is there an argument?
Is there analysis of  the claims made?
Is the logic of  the argument presented explicitly?
Are the paper’s arguments valid and sound?

Architectural analysis
Is architecture engaged directly?
Is architecture’s relevant history/contemporary situation acknowledged?
Is architecture’s history/contemporary situation dealt with accurately?

Originality
Is this paper a contribution to knowledge?
Does the paper present new ways of  solving philosophical problems 
in architecture (philosophy) or does it engage architecture to illustrate 
philosophical problems?
Does the paper present new ways of  engaging architecture and the built 
environment?

Presentation
Is the paper written in English to general academic writing standards for the 
humanities?
Does the paper follow the journal’s submission guidelines?

review criteria



isparchitecture.com

Please direct all submissions and general inquiries to isparchitecture@gmail.com. 
There are no deadlines for submissions, unless otherwise announced (e.g. special 
issue, conference proceedings, etc.).

submission Types
Authors are invited to submit full papers, response pieces, and book reviews. Full 
papers should be between 4,000 and 5,000 words, response pieces between 500 and 
1,500 words, and book reviews between 1,000 to 2,000 words.

General Formatting
All submissions should be presented in accordance with the University of  Chicago 
Style. Papers should be MS Word documents, 12 point font, Times New Roman, 
double-spaced, and with no additional or otherwise unique formatting.

Photo Guidelines and Image Permissions
Images should be at least 300 dpi and read well in greyscale prints. The images should 
be submitted as individual files (TIFF or JPEG), in combination with proof  of  
copyright permission. Authors are responsible for obtaining image permissions, and 
are asked to have done so prior to submitting their papers for review. The Oklahoma 
State University image archive is also available for use. Please send inquiries about the 
OSU image holdings to Prof. Tom Spector at tom.spector@okstate.edu.

The papers published by Architecture Philosophy are protected by copyright. The 
content must not have been previously published and cannot be republished without 
the permission of  the journal’s copyright holder. The copyright holder is Oklahoma 
State University.

Authors are responsible for obtaining copyright permission for the use of  images 
in their papers. Original images created by the author are acceptable, and copyright 
access to the Oklahoma State University image archive is available to the journal and 
its authors. In most cases, authors will be seeking image permissions and are asked 
secure image permissions on their own before submitting their paper for review.

submission guidelines


