isparchitecture.com Editorial Stefan Koller & Tom Spector The 2014 conference of the International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture and its twin themes of autonomy and morality continue to furnish our journal pages with productive discussion. Graham Owen’s opening essay “Whatever Happened to Semi-Autonomy?” traces a strand of recent architectural discourse by reminding us that architecture theory was not long ago engaged in a serious search for an architectural mode of production existing midway between pure formal autonomy and dissolution in social science. He looks for evidence that such a position is still possible in such efforts as activist architecture. The writings of Sarah Whiting and Robert Somol make a prominent appearance in this essay, as well as in Pauline Lefebvre’s “Varieties of Pragmatism: Architectural Objects Made Moral.” Rather than dissect the discourse, as Owen does, Lefebvre elects to dissect the concept of autonomous architectural objects against the concepts provided by American Pragmatism—especially as outlined by John Dewey and Richard Shusterman. She finds promising avenues of exploration made possible by the pragmatist tradition but no clear solution to the problem of seeking agency within architecture itself. Finding the pragmatist orientation towards placing opposing tendencies along continuums more useful than isolating them into clear-cut categories, she seeks to discredit a stultifying pre- delineated moral domain “where some things are included while others are excluded.” A similar conclusion is reached by Diana Aurenque in her essay on Heidegger’s late ethics, AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 2 ED IT OR IA L “Heidegger on Thinking about Ethos and Man’s Dwelling”: “To dwell poetically one has to forfeit the very domain of the moral, a domain in which good and evil have already been decided upon.” While no one would accuse such Heidegger early and middle work mainstays as Being and Time, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” or “Building Dwelling Thinking,” of being breezy reads, Aurenque and Architecture Philosophy hope to initiate a correction to the neglect of Heidegger’s later works by architectural audiences enthralled with BT, “OWA,” and “BDT,” due in no small part to the later works’ reputation for impenetrability, by mapping a wide range of Heidegger’s works characteristic of the late period—above all, his commentaries on Hölderlin’s poetry. To substantiate these assertions about both the accessibility and resonance for architectural audiences of Heidegger’s later work, a piece of that later work, 1970’s “Man’s Dwelling,” is included here as a companion to Aurenque’s exegetical study. Although nine of its companion essays in volume 13 of Heidegger’s Complete Works have been rendered in English before, “Man’s Dwelling” is here translated, by Cesar A. Cruz, for the first time.1 Aurenque herself stays focused on textual interpretation. She deliberately eschews all attempt to deploy her readings of the later Heidegger in the service of wider- ranging reflections, such as those found in the more explorative, at times speculative, readings of Heidegger’s mid-to-late works offered by, say, the scholarship of Rodolphe Gasché, Hubert Dreyfus, or Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe, scholarship that rarely if ever reckons with “Man’s Dwelling.”2 “Man’s Dwelling” finds Heidegger continuing to explore fundamental questions of building and dwelling raised in 1954’s “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Heidegger writes in his nearly-trademarked strategic mode of initially beguiling the reader into following him into a meticulous, even affectionate, examination of a work (or even a single word) from the past for the purpose of providing the necessary critical distance to abruptly turn the reader around to face the existential questions of our time. Here Hölderlin’s poem “The Archipelago,” as its variations unfolded for the poet in the process of writing, serves as his launchpad to tease-out the ideas to which he wants us to attend. But, uncharacteristic for Heidegger, in this essay he actually projects the reader towards the future as well as the present and the past. Heidegger’s suggestion “that man of the present age too dwells poetically in his own way – namely […] unpoetically,” certainly presages similar assertions by such post-humanist-minded architects as Peter Eisenman against Christopher Alexander’s nostalgic holism. With “Man’s Dwelling” and its careful contextualization by Aurenque now available to an English speaking audience, many questions open up, 3 isparchitecture.com especially for readers and future contributors to this journal: How does the reading of this additional text change or inflect existing discourses on Heidegger in relation to architecture? What does it tell us about his analyses of dwelling and other foundational concerns in architecture philosophy? What does “Man’s Dwelling” add to the discourse or to the understanding of architecture more broadly? By expanding the textual material to be reckoned with, of which “Man’s Dwelling” is one piece, Aurenque has laid a useful beginning for such inquiries, even if her own concerns are largely propaedeutic to them. We hope that future contributors feel sufficiently encouraged (or provoked) to join a debate on this work, and furnish us with critical commentary and elaborations of their own. Aurenque and Lefebvre stake out a common ground of phenomenology and pragmatism: the eschewing of a pre-established domain of the moral itself. Thus, where others have sought to bring ethics to architecture, both Lefebvre’s Dewey and Aurenque’s Heidegger seek to rescue architecture, and dwelling, from a too-prescriptive conception of ethics. They thus subvert and redraw the questions behind the 2014 ISPA conference, just as that conference’s Call for Papers hoped contributors would.3 A similar contestation of architecture ethics resurfaces in the present issue’s final two essays. While Dewey, famously, sought to embed aesthetics more fully in life, Adorno’s contrary insistence that art maintain a privileged existence beyond the clutches of capitalism informs Alberto Rubio-Garrido’s “Autonomy and Expression in Architecture.” Rubio-Garrido sees autonomy not as an established concept, but rather as a struggle unleashed in the Enlightenment that begins with Kant, gains gravity with Schiller, and gets a much- needed reinterpretation with Adorno. Adorno’s conception of autonomy and emancipation as Adorno’s liminal presence in these essays [is] a fascinating development “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 4 ED IT OR IA L dialectical, counteracting poles presents the prospect of a more complete understanding of the workings of aesthetics and ethics emerging out of— even thriving on—their limits. While Christian Illies and Nick Ray’s concluding essay, “Obliged to Beauty: An Aesthetic Deontology of Architecture” implicitly opposes— and is greatly challenged by—Rubio-Garrido’s argument for an enigmatic architecture that preserves a fenced-off aesthetic realm in Adorno’s mold, the idea of thriving on limits would seem to operate in the background here as well. The authors call into question the autonomy of the aesthetic realm by exploring the possibilities of an obligation to beauty that is itself moral. If such an interpretation holds, it promises to make the familiar tug between function and aesthetics in the design of architectural works no longer incommensurable. Thus, a different kind of freedom can emerge by acknowledging a lack of full autonomy. In conjunction with their essay, Illies and Ray’s new book Philosophy of Architecture is reviewed, and some of its arguments are examined. We find Adorno’s liminal presence in these essays a fascinating development that we hope inaugurates more exploration of the relation of his thought to architecture. More generally, we hope these concerted investigations continue further discussion, and not conclude it, on the subject of autonomy. 2015 saw several developments of importance for ISPA. First, the society’s 2016 conference in Bamberg, Germany was announced. In a purportedly post-modern, post-humanist age, the conference’s focus on the human holds promise for bringing forth refreshingly contrarian thinking. The conference’s announcement and call for papers is reprinted in this issue’s concluding pages. As always with ISPA’s biennial conferences, readers of Architecture Philosophy will be able to read a selection of premier conference papers in an upcoming issue. With the strong growth of society membership in the past two years, ISPA was able to sponsor two smaller events in the conference off-year 2015 to enable more frequent personal interaction among members. Thus, August 2015 saw the inauguration of an annual ISPA symposium series at the Wittgenstein House in Vienna, the next installment of which is announced in this issue. Moreover, readers can look forward to reading the fruits of that event in Architecture Philosophy’s first themed issue, forthcoming spring 2016, to be edited by Carolyn Fahey. In the second ISPA event, marking the first in North America, an intimate workshop in Taos, New Mexico convened in August. Though the workshop had no stated theme, it was clear that the function of aesthetics as life-expression was either an explicit or implicit topic for 5 isparchitecture.com all participants. This event links this issue’s cover with its centerpiece. It feels unavoidable to speculate that if ever there was an architecture apart from his beloved Greek temples that Heidegger would find emblematic of true dwelling in the Fourfold of gods and men, earth and sky, it would be in something like the Taos Pueblo. ENDNOTES 1. Thomas Sheehan maintains an up-to-date document as to which parts of Heidegger’s Complete Works have been translated into English (and where). See Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe Texts and their English Translations,” Stanford Academia: Thomas Sheehan, last modified October 2014, https://www.academia.edu/9830630/ Heidegger_S_Gesamtausgabe_texts_and_their_English_translations_as_ of_October_2014_. 2. For a thorough overview of Heidegger’s relevance to architects, see Adam Sharr, Heidegger for Architects (New York: Routledge, 2007) and for a recent review of Heidegger’s reception, especially in relation to architecture, see Glen Hill, “Poetic Measure of Architecture: Martin Heidegger’s ‘…Poetically Man Dwells...,’” Architecture Research Quarterly 18, no. 2 (2014): 145-154. 3. Carolyn Fahey and Stefan Koller, June 27, 2013, “Autonomy Reconsidered,” International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture, http:// isparchitecture.com/events/call-for-papers/. Reprinted in Architecture Philosophy 1, no. 2 (2015): 135-6. isparchitecture.com WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SEMI-AUTONOMY? GRAHAM OWEN Writing in the Yale journal Perspecta in the mid- 1980s, K. Michael Hays put forward an argument for “a critical architecture that claims for itself a place between the efficient representation of preexisting cultural values and the wholly detached autonomy of an abstract formal system.”1 In setting up such a relationship between autonomy and criticality, Hays was elaborating his mentor Stanford Anderson’s efforts to promote a pragmatic ethical rapprochement—or compromise—between an autonomous practice that aspired to Kantian rigor and purity and the obligations of cultural—if not also social—engagement. “Quasi-autonomy,” as Anderson had it, or “semi-autonomy” in Hays’s variation, offered the possibility of an architecture resistant to instrumentalization in the service of the dominant order. Both Anderson and Hays were alluding to Louis Althusser’s notion, derived from Karl Marx, that superstructures in capitalist society, taken in this instance to include cultural activities such as architecture, were “relatively autonomous” from its infrastructure, its economic base: Marx conceived the structure of every society as constituted by ‘levels’ or ‘instances’ articulated by a specific determination: the infrastructure, or economic base (the ‘unity’ of the productive forces and the relations of production) and the superstructure, which itself contains two ‘levels’ or ‘instances’: the politico- legal (law and the State) and ideology (the different ideologies, religious, ethical, legal, political, etc.). […] semi-autonomy […] offered the possibility of an architecture resistant to instru- mentalization “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 8 OW EN Their index of effectivity (or determination), as determined by the determination in the last instance of the base, is thought by the Marxist tradition in two ways: (1) there is a ‘relative autonomy’ of the superstructure with respect to the base; (2) there is a ‘reciprocal action’ of the superstructure on the base.2 Anderson’s formulation was originally put forward in a 1966 paper written in response to the positivist, even scientistic, interest of the time in “problem-solving” design methods. Incorporating and elaborating upon that paper in his Perspecta 33 essay of 2002, titled “Quasi-Autonomy in Architecture: The Search for an ‘In-between’,” Anderson began by noting that: [r]ecurrently, anxieties arise around such issues as these: can architecture be other than a mere servant to commercial/capitalist/ideological forces? […] Is not autonomous production the only way to avoid submersion in the material conditions of one’s time? How can a formally driven enterprise like architecture address social issues responsibly (or at all)?3 In the 1966 paper, Anderson had cited Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center as exemplary, in that it was not the “frictionless, efficient” result desired in problem-solving design, but rather a building where “all of one’s senses and the whole of one’s perception are engaged,” a building that is “a world, a context, a problem [not yet solved], and we have the happy opportunity to form ourselves against it.”4 In the later article, de Stijl, exemplified by Gerrit Rietveld’s Schröder House, and the early works of Peter Eisenman such as House I (the Toy Museum in Princeton, NJ), take on this role: The de Stijl and early Eisenman works are of fundamental importance to the discipline of architecture. They project new ways of conceiving material form, space, light, and, at least to my mind, implications for use and meaning. Significantly, these ‘new ways’ are deployed in such a manner as to give as much or more attention to their generalized potentials as to the specifics they initially served. It is in this that they approach autonomy and establish new references within the discipline.# Anderson notes the importance of the intimacy of scale of these examples, and the fact that “a particular use is not defined.” He observes that “[o]ne is acutely aware of one’s own body in, and in relation to, these environments – and with this, also the anticipation of one’s occupation in various modes.”5 His concerns were thus humanist in nature, and the ethical issues as he implied them suggested, first, the virtue of generous contributions to the discipline, and second, to the community, in effect a duty of care to the built environment and to human experience within it. He concluded: “To seek to live only a life of the mind at one pole, or of materiality at the other, or of coercive power from either, is to impoverish one’s self, one’s 9 isparchitecture.com discipline, and one’s smaller or greater community.”6 Michael Hays, in his Perspecta 21 article of 1984, sets up the dialectical opposition between, on the one hand, “architecture as instrument of culture,” where it occurs as “essentially an epiphenomenon, dependent on socioeconomic, political, and technological processes for its various states and transformations” and “reconfirms the hegemony of culture and helps to assure its continuity,” and, on the other hand, architecture as autonomous form, where both design and its criticism are involved with: the comparative absence of historical concerns in favor of attention to the autonomous architectural object and its formal operations – how its parts have been put together, how it is a wholly integrated and equilibrated system that can be understood without external references, and as important, how it may be reused, how its constituent parts and processes may be recombined.7 On one side, he remarks: describes artifacts as instruments of the self-justifying, self-perpetuating hegemony of culture; the other side treats architectural objects in their most disinfected, pristine state, as containers of a privileged principle of internal coherence.8 In seeking a way out of this dichotomy, Hays proposes an architecture and a criticism characterized by “worldliness,” and in this respect acknowledges a debt to the thinking of Edward Said. Hays’s exemplar of such a semi-autonomous architecture is, perhaps surprisingly, Mies van der Rohe. Citing the unbuilt Alexanderplatz project in particular, as well as the Barcelona Pavilion and IIT’s campus, Hays asserts that: Mies’s achievement was to open up a clearing of implacable silence in the chaos of the nervous metropolis; this clearing is a radical critique, not only of the established spatial order of the city and the established logic of classical composition, but also of the inhabiting nervenleben. It is the extreme depth of Hays proposes the ethical virtue of architectural and interpretive work that does not acquiesce to the interests of hegemonic culture, but at the same time does not withdraw entirely from engagement “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 10 OW EN silence in this clearing – silence as an architectural form all its own – that is the architectural meaning of this project.9 Implicitly, then, in semi-autonomy Hays proposes the ethical virtue of architectural and interpretive work that does not acquiesce to the interests of hegemonic culture, but at the same time does not withdraw entirely from engagement. Also implicit in this opening gambit is a duty of faith to the battle cries of modernism’s avant-garde. In his subsequent writings on this theme of critical architecture, most notably in his books Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject, of 1992, and Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde, of 2010, Hays’s exemplars and his arguments undergo shifts. His exemplars move from Mies to Hannes Meyer and subsequently, in the third book, Aldo Rossi, Bernard Tschumi, John Hejduk, and Peter Eisenman. The shifts in Hays’s arguments have been charted in depth by Louis Martin in his essay “Frederic Jameson and Critical Architecture” published in 2011. Martin notes that Jameson’s thinking becomes increasingly important in Hays’s later writings, which alter the construction of the dialectical oppositions and which address, in turn, the negative dialectics of the Frankfurt School, deconstruction, the pessimism of the Italian critic Manfredo Tafuri, and Lacan’s psychoanalytic thinking. Throughout this period, Eisenman, in parallel with Hays, continues to publish on the topic of a critical architecture, convinced that his own work exemplifies such practice. What had remained constant, says Louis Martin, is that “[c]ritical architecture … seeks change through resistance, negation, and opposition to the forces maintaining the status quo.”10 Mary McLeod, however, had summed up well the haunting skepticism of the Italian critic: [The Tafurian position] views architecture as pure ideology, in which ideology is defined as ‘false consciousness’ – that is, as reflection of dominant class interests. Architecture thus plays a negative social role: it becomes an instrument of the existing power structure. Even purportedly critical architecture (and in this category Tafuri places all utopian impulses in architecture since the Enlightenment) contributes in its uselessness and, more seriously, in its deception to the perpetuation of bourgeois capitalism.11 Responding to Hays’s series of texts seventeen years after their initiation, Sarah Whiting and Robert Somol, also writing in Perspecta 33, offered a “projective” alternative to “the now dominant paradigm of criticality.” For both Hays and Peter Eisenman, they claimed, “disciplinarity is understood as autonomy (enabling critique, representation, and signification), but not as instrumentality (projection, performativity, and pragmatics). […] As an alternative to the critical project, – here linked to the indexical, the dialectical and hot representation – this text develops an alternative genealogy of 11 isparchitecture.com the projective – linked to the diagrammatic, the atmospheric and cool performance.” 12 Where Hays had cited Mies’s exemplary status, Somol and Whiting invoke Koolhaas, contrasting his response to the skyscraper frame in Delirious New York with Eisenman’s experiments with Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino frame: “these New York frames exist as instruments of metropolitan plasticity and are not primarily architecture for paying attention to; they are not for reading but for seducing, becoming, instigating new events and behaviors.”13 Perhaps even more so than Koolhaas, for the purposes of the essay the acting style of Robert Mitchum (read through art critic Dave Hickey) is put forward as an exemplar: “‘Mitchum architecture’ is cool, easy, and never looks like work […]. Here, mood is the open-ended corollary of the cool-producing effect without high definition, providing room for maneuver and promoting complicity with subject(s).” Nevertheless, Whiting and Somol felt it necessary, in their conclusion, to insist that “[s]etting out this projective program does not necessarily entail a capitulation to market forces […].”14 Some of Whiting and Somol’s allies in this cause, however, felt less need to be equivocal.15 In the early 2000s Michael Speaks in particular set out an aggressive polemic against the notion of critical architecture and, indeed, its entire context of critical theory. Speaks’s background included doctoral studies at Duke University with Frederic Jameson, but perhaps of greater ultimate influence on Speaks’s thinking were the debunking diatribes of literary critic Stanley Fish. So motivated, Speaks took on the role of advocate for the “New Economy” movement of that time, particularly as promoted by Kevin Kelly in Wired magazine. Technology was changing everything, according to both Kelly and Speaks, and architecture needed to be not critical but innovative. In one of a series of articles published in the Japanese periodical A+U, Speaks wrote: “Just as theory confronted Technology was changing everything [...] and architecture needed to be not critical but innovative. “ ” AP . vol 1 . No 2 . 2015 12 OW En philosophy with its slowness and morality, so today does pragmatic entrepreneurial thought confront theory with its historical connection to the dreams and utopian aspirations of philosophy.”16 He cites an essay by Alejandro Zaera-Polo, then of Foreign Office Architects, in which the author constructs what he calls a “niche-seeking map” that can, according to Speaks, “be used to create flexible practices that are better able to respond to the new market reality of globalization.”17 In an intriguing passage from the same article, Speaks invokes management guru Peter Drucker. Architectural practice under the avant- garde model, informed by critical theory, Speaks claims, “is nothing more than what […] Drucker calls ‘problem solving’.” For Speaks, practice in this model simply takes direction from theory, and “adds little or no value along the way. Innovation, Drucker tells us, works by a different, more entrepreneurial logic, where, by rigorous analysis, opportunities are discovered that can be exploited and transformed into innovations.”18 Speaks had, whether knowingly or not, repurposed Stanford Anderson’s original opposition of 1966, substituting critical architecture for Anderson’s target, the scientistic design methodology of late modernist “problem- solving.” But Speaks had also inverted that opposition: for Anderson, 1960s problem-solving was too much of the world of corporate capitalism. For Speaks, critical architecture’s version of problem-solving was too little of it; the solution was to embrace wholeheartedly the logic of the market. George Baird, in turn, responded in his essay of 2004, “‘Criticality’ and Its Discontents,” drawing into his analysis of post-criticality the positions of Whiting and Somol’s fellow-travelers Stan Allen, Sylvia Lavin, and Michael Speaks. Noting that for Koolhaas, “if it turns out that ‘criticality’ constrains efficacy, then to that extent ‘criticality’ must give way,”19 Baird is nonetheless ready to allow him some remaining capacity for resistance, but is wary of post-criticality’s potential consequences. To what extent, he wonders, will it develop models to measure “the ambition and the capacity for significant social transformation”? “Without such models,” he went on, “architecture could all too easily find itself […] ethically adrift.”20 Were Baird’s apprehensions borne out? What were the ethical attitudes embodied in calls for a projective, post-critical architecture? Whiting and Somol’s concerns, insofar as they can be interpreted in ethical terms, appear predominantly pragmatic. They address architecture’s capacity to be effective. From their perspective, an avant-gardist position of principled critical distance could not be maintained if architecture was to be recognized as a practice with value in the world, and in this respect they might also be taken as suggesting a utilitarian model. But then there is this business of Robert Mitchum, of “cool”: social autonomy of a kind in 13 isparchitecture.com one sense, to be sure, though in another requiring a social setting in order to be recognized. But doesn’t cool imply a freedom from constraint; an unruffled individualism untroubled by conscience; a natural gift for getting what you want, by whatever means; even rule-breaking as an aesthetic? Is there perhaps a Machiavellian streak in their position? For Michael Speaks, there is no shame in being an operative critic, to use Tafuri’s term; no shame in engaging in promotionalism and career brokerage. In a series of interviews in A+U,21 Speaks extols the virtues of rapid prototyping and versioning enabled by digital modeling and fabrication, and indeed technological innovation in general. Presented as exemplars in this respect are firms such as SHoP; Greg Lynn FORM; Neil Denari; Asymptote; Maxwan; and AMO, the research arm of OMA. Speaks’s use of the business model is millennialist, his rhetoric neoliberal with its embrace of competition, technocracy and the market as arbiters of all success. Does he present us with innovation as an implied ethical duty of the designer? Yet he decries the “moralism” of traditional philosophical intellectualizations of architecture. Success in the marketplace is, evidently, a virtue in itself. For Speaks, there is no other world to be part of; autonomy, semi- or otherwise has become an effective impossibility. Instead, he presents us with the received ethos of social Darwinism. What if we undertake a thought experiment here? What if we take at face value Speaks’s cheerleading for the new-economy business model, for digital technology as the central concern for forward- looking architectural practices, and examine what innovation would really mean? Clayton Christensen, Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard, is a widely admired theorist of what he terms “disruptive innovation,” innovation from below that undermines and displaces the established leaders in a field. Speaks is clearly seeking to be disruptive, to gain market share, so to speak, from [Speaks] decries the ‘moralism’ of traditional philosophical intellect- ualizations of architecture. “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 14 OW EN the established authorities and positions within the field of architectural intellectuals. But Christensen, in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, notes that in the field of technology, disruptive innovations “result in worse product performance, at least in the near term”22: early Japanese cars, for example, early digital cameras compared with film, or the sound quality of cellphones. Here we might recall a lecture that architectural critic Wilfried Wang gave at MIT in the early 1990s. Wang, a staunch advocate of European builderliness in his formal presentation, remarked in discussion afterwards that, by contrast, Rem Koolhaas’s buildings would fall apart in a few years’ time. But might we also understand this lower performance as applying to ethics as well? Christensen’s second major point is that disruptive innovation creates new markets where consumption in that field had not been occurring before. His colleagues cite the example of the ChotuKool, a small-battery powered refrigerator produced by a company advised by Christensen’s consulting firm Innosight. David Duncan, a senior partner there, confirms that “[b]y the standards we are used to, it doesn’t perform well. It would never sell [in North America]! But in rural India they have sold 100,000 units in the last year or two.”23 The analogy is once again rough, but could we understand the connection in this instance as being to the proliferation of iconic architecture in places it had not hitherto appeared: Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, the Emirates, and China, and its ethical performance in those contexts? If there is some insight to be gained for architecture from this thought experiment, how might we understand the motivation of Somol, Whiting, and Speaks’s allegiances? The Oedipal nature of their assaults has been noted by Baird and others. One aspect, however, has not received so much attention: the fact that the promoters of post-critical architecture— Whiting, Somol, Speaks, Stan Allen, and Sylvia Lavin—were all at that time pursuing or already in administrative positions in architectural academe. Now I do not wish to impute ethically questionable activity to all academic administrators, nor indeed necessarily to all members of this group. But it is nonetheless worth noting that the business model was also widespread in the university by this time, with all the consequences for tenure, academic freedom, and collegial values which we experience today. The antagonists of semi-autonomy and critical architecture, Speaks and company, would need to have become entangled, if not embedded, in fundraising, marketing and the academic equivalent of flexible accumulation. In short, a necessary and perhaps ingratiating closeness to capital would have become part of their daily modus operandi. For some, advocating at least a partial autonomy, and a critical distance, from the 15 isparchitecture.com hegemonic social order might well have appeared, in these circumstances, to be a liability. Some reflexive institutional critique appears to be necessary here, although this is a subject for another essay.24 What of the ethics of the actual projects of the projective camp? Reinhold Martin tackled this question in an essay of 2005, taking to task some of that movement’s exemplars for their involvement in the 2002 exhibition and competition for the rebuilding of Ground Zero. Foreign Office, Martin noted, accompanied their entry with the exhortation: “Let’s not even consider remembering…. What for? We have a great site in a great city and the opportunity to have the world’s tallest building back in New York.”25 Greg Lynn, for his part, asserted that “the transfer of military thinking into daily life is inevitable.”26 The projects, says Martin, “monumentalize, in exemplary ‘post- critical’ fashion, the neoliberal consensus regarding new ‘opportunities’ opened up by techno-corporate globalization. Accordingly, the responsibility of professionals in the new world order is confined to facilitating the ‘new’ while washing their hands of the overdetermined historical narratives […] through which this new is named.”27 Things came to a head at the Projective Landscape Conference, held at the Technical University of Delft in 2006 and including Hays, Somol, Whiting, Speaks, Stan Allen, Roemer van Toorn, and Reinhold Martin, among others. As reported by the web site Archined, Willem Jan Neutelings asked “what should he do if he were asked to build a new head office for the fascist Vlaams Belang party? While the assembled panellists (twenty in total) fiddled uneasily with their glasses, a high-spirited Robert Somol bellowed ‘take the job’. Somol then turned on Michael Hays: ‘I don’t care what you think. You do your thing and I’ll do mine, and let’s both have fun.’” Reinhold Martin observed that the “idea […] that the arrival of capitalism opens an immense field of possibility in which the Speaks and company, would need to have become entangled, if not embedded, in fundraising, marketing and the academic equivalent of flexible accumulation “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 16 OW EN designer can experiment freely is an outstanding example of ideology.” This criticism Michael Speaks “heartily laughed away saying, ‘The market is something that happens, and what happens is reality, not ideology’.”28 And finally, what of the arch-exemplar of the post-critical, Rem Koolhaas? At least from his earliest days in America, Koolhaas had exhibited a consciously transgressive enthusiasm for the commercial. Delirious New York, of course, assigns the power of a subconscious manifesto to the commercial production of Manhattan architecture, and while at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, Koolhaas had produced an exhibition on the work of Wallace Harrison. The exhibition, even then, had the Nietzschean title “Beyond Good and Bad.” Two decades later, writing on the effects of globalization on the city, Koolhaas remarks that: [w]e realize . . . that we are now moving into uncharted territory, a territory characterized by fluid conditions – flows of traffic, flows of human beings, flows of money, flows of work. […] Confronted with this mutation, this new urban condition, we refuse to recognize that we are powerless to forestall it. […] I would like […] to help make us […] a profession able to formulate perfectly rational answers to perfectly insane questions. For it seems clear that we are increasingly confronted with utterly irrational problems, problems that we no longer have the luxury of refusing.29 As Louis Martin observes, “the iron cage of an oppressive status quo becomes through Koolhaas’s sublime descriptions the terrifying splendours of the real, a real in which there is no situation rotten enough for not containing a new positivity. To negativity and resistance, Koolhaas opposes an exhilarating acceleration of the real as the only strategy for achieving change.”30 In a 2004 interview with Mark Leonard, Koolhaas attempted to rationalize his acceptance of the CCTV commission, then estimated to be worth $740 million, elaborating on the nature of the opportunity: In the CCTV building there is a utopian nostalgia that is the foundation of architecture and in my work in the past there have been very few triggers for that. […] What attracts me about China is [that] there is still a state. There is something that can take initiative of a scale and of a nature that almost no other body that we know of today could ever afford or even contemplate.31 Apologists for the Koolhaasian position have often invoked the image of the surfer as a redemption or transcendence of that position’s affiliation with globalized capital, and as an attempt to redirect narratives of architecture’s powerlessness. A “new pragmatism,” in the face of the overwhelming complexity of undecidable outcomes, informs the choice of ride.32 The surfer, far from being overwhelmed by the inexorable 17 isparchitecture.com force of events, instead is skillful enough to ride the wave, to use its massive energy and power to enable his or her own (spectacular) performance. Of this image, several observations need to be made. First, the surfer presents the (Deleuzian) trope of the intuitive calculator, able to judge speed and position with an uncanny ability. Second, the flow that the wave exemplifies is indeed inexorable, a force of nature, its direction unchangeable (and, ultimately, determining of the surfer’s own). Third, in capitalizing upon this force for his performance, the surfer not only valorizes but also aestheticizes the wave: through his work, he gives it legitimacy.33 The image of the surfer, in its positive valence, is another metaphor of innovation in the face of massive change. But how does Koolhaas feel about innovation of the kind that motivated Michael Speaks: iPhones, wireless fridges that remind you what to buy, the Internet of Things? Could it be that, with the passage of time, he has finally fallen off his board? As Jay Merrick wrote in a review of the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, directed by Rem: despite his craving for data, Koolhaas has become increasingly concerned about what he referred to at the Biennale launch event as ‘digital regimes’. And he added: ‘I seriously question if it’s safe and sane to surrender more and more of our information … if our current involvement with digital technology continues, our houses will betray us.’34 For those who feel they have witnessed a different kind of betrayal—by the members of the post- critical international star system who seem willing to build anything for anybody anywhere—a turn to architecture as activism appears to offer an ethical alternative.35 Amid present-day efforts to instrumentalize architecture once again—but this time as agent of environmental and social redemption—has the argument for semi-autonomy come full circle? Activist architecture does, as in Stanford Apologists for the Koolhaasian position have often invoked the image of the surfer as a redemption [...] as an attempt to redirect narratives of architecture’s powerlessness “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 18 OW EN Anderson’s model, seek to detach itself from the dominant culture—or at least distance itself from it. What is its economic model, after all? Some activist work is funded by grants, which is to say potentially by surplus accumulation of capital channeled—or some might say laundered— through philanthropic entities. Other activist work is enabled through pro bono professional services and volunteer labor, which is to say again by surplus accumulation that enables members of one class to donate their time to assist another. Could we say that these kinds of activist work follow a traditional development aid model, in which there is a charitable transfer of wealth without necessarily being accompanied by capacity building? If so, would research work in international development ethics come into play on these issues? Anderson’s criteria for quasi-autonomy include the capacity for fundamental and generalizable contributions to the discipline. Activist work, however, can be characterized as having exhibited an abundance of goodwill and, initially at least, a shortage of theory. Have such contributions to the discipline occurred—can they occur—if the existing discourse, the existence of a discipline per se are brought into question by activist praxis? Do activist practices, then, mirror the predicament of Michael Speaks, in that from their perspective there is no disciplinary world in which to place the other foot? What theory and discourse as do exist seem to have emerged from areas such as critical urban studies, but these fields, with their emphasis on bottom-up spatial production, are by nature suspicious of elite professional interests.36 The next ethical frontier, I suggest, is to determine how the design disciplines and professions can get on board, in an intellectually productive way, without leaving some of their most valuable baggage behind, and without hijacking the bus. This baggage includes the fundamental and generalizable contributions that Anderson still valued so highly: those “new ways of conceiving material form, space, light, and […] implications for use and meaning” that can establish “new references within the discipline,” but pursued without the exclusive “life of the mind […] or of coercive power” leading to that impoverishment of self, discipline and community he feared so much.37 ENDNOTES 1. K. Michael Hays, “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” Perspecta 21 (1984): 15. 2. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” trans. Ben Brewster, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (Monthly Review Press, 1971). Originally published in 19 isparchitecture.com La Pensée, 1970. Accessed June 30, 2014, https://www.marxists.org/ reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm. 3. Stanford Anderson, “Quasi-Autonomy in Architecture: The Search for an ‘In-Between’,” Perspecta 33 (2002): 30. 4. Ibid., 33. 5. Ibid., 35. 6. Ibid., 37. 7. Hays, “Critical Architecture,” 16. 8. Ibid., 17. 9. Ibid., 22. 10. Louis Martin, “Frederic Jameson and Critical Architecture,” in The Political Unconscious of Architecture: Re-opening Jameson’s Narrative, ed. Nadir Lahiji (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 198. 11. Mary McLeod, quoted in Louis Martin, “Frederic Jameson and Critical Architecture,” in The Political Unconscious of Architecture: Re-opening Jameson’s Narrative, ed. Nadir Lahiji (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 173. 12. Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, “Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism,” Perspecta 33 (2002): 74. 13. Ibid., 75. 14. Ibid., 77. 15. Indeed, as Ole Fischer has pointed out, in “post-critical” work, “[d]iagrams, slogans, logos, and new media are deployed as a kind of ‘mental PowerPoint’ to reduce the complexity of architectural projects to recognizable icons, core messages, or brands, and thus to promote a fast, approximative perception and an intensive experience or atmospheric ‘feeling’ – particularly with regard to a broad audience of occupants, consumers and clients,” in contrast to the difficulty and resistance of “critical” work. I thank Dr. Fischer for drawing my attention, after the first presentation of this paper, to his excellent essay which tackles similar issues at greater length. The reader is directed to that paper for a finely nuanced and more extensive discussion of the theoretical ramifications of “the critical.” See Ole W. Fischer, “Architecture, Capitalism and Criticality,” in The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, eds. C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen (London: SAGE, 2012), 59. 16. Michael Speaks, “Architectural Theory and Education at the Millennium, Part 3: Theory Practice and Pragmatism,” A+U 372, no. 9 (2001): 24. 17. Ibid., 22. 18. Ibid. 19. George Baird, “‘Criticality’ and Its Discontents,” Harvard Design Magazine 21 (2004): 18. AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 20 OW EN 20. Ibid., 21. 21. Michael Speaks, “Design Intelligence [Parts 1-12],” A+U 387-399 (2002-2003). 22. Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (New York: HarperBusiness, 2011), quoted in Craig Lambert, “Disruptive Genius,” Harvard Magazine, July-August 2014, 39. 23. Ibid., 41. 24. See, for example, my “After the Flood: Disaster Capitalism and the Symbolic Restructuring of Intellectual Space,” Culture and Organization 17, no. 2 (2011): 123–137. 25. Reinhold Martin, “Critical of What? Toward a Utopian Realism,” Harvard Design Magazine 22 (2005): 107. 26. Greg Lynn, “A New World Trade Center,” Max Protetch, www. maxprotetch.com/SITE/PREVIOUS/ANEWWTC/FORM/index. html, quoted in Reinhold Martin, “Critical of What? Toward a Utopian Realism,” Harvard Design Magazine 22 (2005): 107. 27. Martin, “Critical of What?,” 107. 28. “Design Intelligence – Speaks & Co in Delft,” Archined, published March 27, 2006, accessed June 24, 2014, http://www.archined.nl/ archined/5303.0.html. Spirited and subtly argued defenses of criticality in architectural practice and theory were also mounted by the contributors to the “Critical Architecture” conference of 2004 and publication of 2007. On the relationship to autonomy, see particularly the editors’ introductory essays in that volume and those of Leach, Cunningham, Benjamin, Heynen, Barber, Dovey, and Rice. Eds. Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser, and Mark Dorrian, Critical Architecture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007). 29. Rem Koolhaas, “Understanding the New Urban Condition: The Project on the City,” GSD News (1996): 13. 30. Louis Martin, “Frederic Jameson and Critical Architecture,” 198. 31. Mark Leonard, “Power housing”, Financial Times, March 6/7 2004, W6-7. 32. See Cynthia Davidson, “Introduction,” Anyhow (Cambridge, MA/New York: MIT Press/Anyone Corporation, 1998), 10, and John Rajchman’s essay in the same collection. 33. Passages in this section appeared in my introduction to Architecture, Ethics and Globalization (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009). 34. Jay Merrick, “Rem loves the smell of information in the morning,” Architects’ Journal, June 6, 2014, 53. 35. See, for example, “Architecture and Ethics,” Architectural Record, June 2014, 167-206. 36. As discussion with colleagues, after the first presentation of this paper 21 isparchitecture.com in Delft in 2014, suggested, a further productive conjunction might be made with the arguments of Erik Swyngedouw regarding the post-political in environmental debates. Although the proponents of the post-critical in architecture celebrated the expanded ability of designers to embrace the complexity of issues embodied in any contemporary project, it is through professional and technological expertise that this expansion is achieved. Swyngedouw too is skeptical about expertise so mobilized and its ability to neutralize sociopolitical debate. 37. Anderson, 5. isparchitecture.com FROM AUTONOMY TO PRAGMATISM: OBJECTS MADE MORAL PAULINE LEFEBVRE INTRODUCTION This paper departs from a problem that architects often face: do they really have to choose between their interest in the production of built objects (in their shape, their spatiality, etc.) and their commitment to broader social concerns? Must architects focus on social concerns at the expense of the built object in order to be morally responsible? These questions touch on the relations between autonomy and criticality which have been fiercely debated in recent architectural theory: does criticality rest on autonomy? After introducing these controversies and disentangling the notion of autonomy at their center, I propose to look into the philosophical tradition of pragmatism as offering a way out. Following some recent interpretations of pragmatism, this paper addresses the possibility of an immanent critique, the reconciliation of ethics and aesthetics, the way ethnographies show architectural objects as active participants in design practice, and investigates how a pragmatist view of ecology invites sensitivity to objects’ moral claims. 1. “ENGAGING AUTONOMY”: OBJECTHOOD AND RESPONSIBILITY Responsibility is acquainted with everything but the object: its relations, its origins, its use, life and context. A focus on the building and its objecthood and certainly on its form is simply irresponsible.1 Sarah Whiting used these words to introduce a lecture entitled “Engaging Autonomy,” which she gave at SCI-Arc in Fall 2013. She presented her talk as “a plea to acknowledging the importance of the Must architects focus on social concerns at the expense of the built object in order to be morally responsible? “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 24 LE FE BV RE object, for them not to be thrown out in the name of responsibility.”2 Her words demonstrate a real concern regarding architecture’s autonomy and its relation to responsibility; she wonders how to maintain architecture’s definition as a specific practice, with specific concerns and skills (designing space and objects), without being dismissed as indifferent to larger moral and social concerns. Whiting is worried about what she calls the “context-object opposition,” which tends to polarize two opposed postures: the autonomous architect concerned with the production of objects versus the social architect immersed in moral negotiations. These two poles define a scale on which it would be possible to situate every architectural practice, a scale between the object and the context, between forms and procedures,3 between autonomy and engagement, but also between aesthetics and ethics (Figure 1). This scale represents the frequently discussed “intractable conflict between an aesthetically autonomous architecture […] and an ambitious social agenda for the built environment.”4 By introducing her position as one that is “engaging autonomy,” Whiting attempts to bridge the extremes: she articulates an ambition at the level of the object’s singularity and at the level of its context. However, by assembling such a contradictory pair of terms, Whiting does not really escape the opposition she tries to tackle between the autonomy of the object and the architects’ responsibility to engage with its consequences. When looking at Whiting’s own architectural projects, one can see that they are highly formal and conceptual, using disciplinary games based on historical references (e.g., the X House based on a distortion of Palladio’s plan, Figure 2)5 or geometrical variations (e.g., the Golden House based on the development of the box-like volume of the entrance hall) (Figure 3).6 One can thus wonder with what context these objects are engaged at all. Whiting’s assessment does keep the object well to one side, and “its relations, origins, use, life and context” to the other. Yet, Whiting’s concern needs to be considered seriously: how to maintain objects at the center of architects’ preoccupations without isolating them from moral concerns? Opting for a pragmatist perspective, this paper will challenge Whiting’s assertion by the following programmatic proposition: responsibility is acquainted with the object only as far as that object is FIGURE 1: DIAGRAM OF CONTEXT-OBJECT OPPOSITION. 25 isparchitecture.com FIGURE 2: X HOUSE, (UNBUILT). FIGURE 3: Golden House, 2010, Princeton, New Jersey. AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 26 LE FE BV RE dependent on its relations, origins, use, life, and context. Actually, dealing with this problem pragmatically implies that we care for the consequences of our propositions. Therefore, this issue will not just require that we expand our definition of built objects; it will also rely on a redefinition of the ‘moral’, shifting our understanding of the term from a delineated domain in which (built) objects are occasionally and graciously included, and often are not. 2. CRITICAL OR NOT: DISENTANGLING AUTONOMY Whiting developed the notion of “engaging autonomy” as an answer to the criticisms she had to face after she had been involved in a vast debate about architects’ autonomy and responsibility. In 2002, Whiting co-authored with Robert E. Somol a provocative paper in an issue of the journal Perspecta entitled “Mining Autonomy.”7 The editors wanted the issue to “examine the evolving legacy of architectural autonomy and its relationship to architecture’s potential to act as a critical agent.”8 Whiting and Somol’s paper proposed to overthrow what was then called ‘critical architecture’ in favor of an alternative posture, which they named ‘projective architecture’. Critical architects had chosen to act from within tight disciplinary limits and to take an oppositional posture to the rest of culture, a posture based on distance and negation. They founded their ‘criticality’ on the autonomy of the discipline, which allowed detachment from contemporary phenomena. Criticality, autonomy, and responsibility were tightly bound together. Instead, Whiting and Somol proposed to “shift the understanding of disciplinarity as autonomy to disciplinarity as performance or practice.”9 More importantly, they refused to rely upon “oppositional strategy.”10 Because they rejected such forms of ‘criticality’, their paper became the target of fierce objections against what came to be known as the ‘postcritical’ generation.11 Those objections largely rested on the assumption that criticality is the only safeguard against irresponsibility and is inevitably bound to autonomy: if deprived of the necessary distance, architects end up driven by market-forces, vulnerable to the pressures of contemporary society and unable to serve for better ends. Whiting and Somol were accused of ‘compromising with the real.’12 Because they wanted to engage the contingencies of actual situations, they were doomed to lose any criticality, which was bound up with distance and resistance. The detractors of the postcritical were not ready to envision an alternative view on criticality itself; they refused to consider a responsible position which would not be based on autonomy. Whiting uses her expression “engaging autonomy” to deny she has ever been ‘postcritical’: she reaffirms her rejection of a distant posture (she wants to engage fully contemporary phenomena) while saving the 27 isparchitecture.com specifics of the discipline and of the objects produced there. Yet, her contradictory expression remains trapped within the dichotomy it tends to escape. A convincing way out of this sterile opposition still needs to be worked out; this paper seeks to contribute to that issue. The discussion above can only be fully grasped if two related ways of understanding ‘autonomy’ are disentangled. First, autonomy relates to the strict delineation of the field of architecture. Second, autonomy relates to the distance and resistance that are considered to be necessary conditions for criticality. Both are fully modern conceptions, inherited from Kant: first, his notion of arts’ disinterestedness; second, his view on morality as a capacity belonging to autonomous intentional beings facing moral laws. In this context, arts and morality are neatly separated domains: aesthetics on the one side, ethics on the other. But both rely on a certain understanding of autonomy.13 Consequently, the scale between autonomy and engagement drafted earlier needs to now organize itself around (at least) three poles instead of two: autonomy of the field, autonomy of the critical subject, engagement with the context (Figure 3). This triangular shape greatly helps to understand the positions taken in the debate: ‘critical architecture’ builds its moral criticality on the autonomy of the field; Whiting reasserts the objections largely rested on the assumption that criticality is the only safeguard against irresponsibility and is inevitably bound to autonomy “ ” FIGURE 3: RE-ORGANIZATION OF CONTEXT-OBJECT OPPOSITION. AP . vol 1 . No 2 . 2015 28 LE FE BV RE specificity of the field (as producing and caring about objects) but not its mission of resistance; the objections against the postcritical (critical practice) reaffirm both the necessity to engage the context and to do so critically, meaning from a position of moral autonomy. Yet criticality—and moral responsibility with it—remains bound to autonomy in either case, be it of the field or of the subject. In order to take a position in these discussions about architecture’s autonomy and its relationship to criticality, this paper will examine ways in which some interpretations of the philosophy of pragmatism prove useful to overcome the dichotomies that remain. 3. PRAGMATISM 1: SOMA-AESTHETICS FOR AN IMMANENT CRITIQUE Interestingly, this much-commented controversy about criticality in architecture has become associated with pragmatism. At some point, the ‘postcritical’ position and its propositions were indeed grouped under the label “A New Architectural Pragmatism.”14 This expression relates to pragmatism in the common sense of the word: the young architects involved were reasserting practice over theory and were eager to realize actual buildings. But—more surprisingly perhaps—the ‘postcritical’ has also become associated with American pragmatism, i.e., the philosophical tradition initiated by Peirce, James, and Dewey in the late nineteenth century and recently revived in various fields of academia. Indeed, a few years before Somol and Whiting’s provocative paper, a major conference was organized in New York, which built propositions for architecture upon the philosophical tradition of pragmatism.15 As this initiative shared a number of the same people and the same issues with the postcritical discussion, it is sometimes considered as a precedent.16 Richard Shusterman, one of the contemporary pragmatist philosophers invited to the conference, took part in the debate for the very reason that it had been associated with pragmatism. Shusterman’s work takes over from Dewey’s aesthetic philosophy. Shusterman’s position is interesting for the present discussion because he is one among those who picked up Dewey’s legacy in order to reconcile ethics and aesthetics. For him, pragmatism has the advantage of opposing the Kantian legacy by negating both the idea that aesthetic judgment is disinterested and that ethics is based on general rules of behavior. Shusterman considers that art and aesthetic judgment should not be seen as totally distinct from ethical considerations and sociopolitical factors.17 At the conference on architecture and pragmatism, he explains how a pragmatist aesthetics inherited from Dewey is closer to the experience of art and how it does not restrict itself to abstract arguments formulated outside of this actual experience. Shusterman calls the field that he develops from these assumptions “soma-aesthetics.” Nine years later, for a conference at the Bauhaus, he elaborates on 29 isparchitecture.com this claim and proposes what it could mean for architecture. He decides to address the postcritical controversy because he believes that a pragmatist insight might prove useful. His view is that Somol and Whiting’s projective proposition has been abusively called ‘postcritical’ due to the reductive idea that “a critical attitude is supposed to require an external and autonomous position—at the same time detached and disinterested.”18 Instead, Shusterman’s soma-aesthetics proposes “a model of immanent critique in which our critical perspective does not require one to situate oneself completely outside of the situation at hand, but simply necessitates one to look reflexively at that situation without being absorbed by immediate feelings; this is a perspective where the posture is more decentered than external.”19 His definition of critique is based on the capacity of the body to discriminate among experiences: the body poses critical judgments. He applies this model of “immanent critique” to architecture as he believes—along with the so- called ‘postcritical’—that “[architects] cannot stand outside of what entangles them in the world […] the architect can only be complicit and tangle with it.”20 Shusterman thus affirms that pragmatism is far from being incompatible with criticality: it offers a helpful alternative view on criticality. In the same text, Shusterman attempts to defend a second aspect of Somol and Whiting’s projective architecture: their emphasis on the atmospheric quality of architectural production. For Shusterman, there is a critical potential in those qualities, which is rarely recognized: “Suspicion always weights on these dimensions, which are in principle considered as ungraspable and useless for exercising criticality.”21 This view echoes Whiting’s concern that what architects are dealing with (designing objects, spaces, atmospheres) is regrettably not associated with any moral or critical capacity. But Shusterman explains why he believes that atmospheric qualities and affective dimensions of architecture do have a critical potential: our attention to these aspects can be practiced; they art and aesthetic judgment should not be seen as totally distinct from ethical considerations and sociopolitical factors “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 30 LE FE BV RE can become the object of conscious (critical) judgments. For Shusterman, the challenge of criticality in architecture is in the development of our sensibility to these somatic perceptions. 4. THE PROBLEMATIC CONFLATION OF ETHICS AND AESTHETICS Such a reconciliation of ethics and aesthetics features many promises but it still needs to overcome certain objections deriving from the fact that architects are more often accused of confusing ethics and aesthetics than they are of keeping them separated. They often pretend to deal with ethical issues directly through the aesthetic dimensions of their oeuvre. They do this by assimilating good aesthetics with morality, by attributing moral virtues to tectonics and forms. In a book that takes the form of a pamphlet against architecture’s autonomy, Jeremy Till denounces this fact because “ethics are thus detached from their essential condition of being worked out through shared negotiation and instead are situated in a very controlled environment that positions the architect as arbiter.”22 Till denies that ethical properties may be attributed to materials or objects or configurations themselves. He denounces the claim that if a brick wall is carefully built, it is not only a source of aesthetic pleasure or technical mastery but also becomes morally valuable. This critique thus brings us back to the ‘object’. Till notes that such a conflation of aesthetics and ethics can only happen “in the parallel universe where morals are attached to objects.”23 And he believes that it is a very dangerous conflation, as architects absolve themselves of a part of their responsibility regarding other humans just because they have been faithful to the tectonic properties of the bricks. Or even worse, the bricks are made responsible for the consequences rather than those who designed them. That is what happened with modernist social housing, accused on its own of all social troubles, as if the buildings could be detached from those who decide for them, design and maintain them, live in them. Till is radical on this topic: “To put it simply: a brick has no morals.”24 He firmly stands on the side of those who upset Whiting by stating that “a focus on the building and its objecthood and certainly on its form is simply irresponsible.”25 Actually, Till’s problem is not with architectural objects in general but with the way they are considered as isolated from their social setting and from their consequences on the human beings affected. The problem with “objecthood” is when it is all about static objects, produced from the inside of an autonomous field of practice, as if they were independent of external matters. What is needed might then just be, as Stefan Koller notes, “a proper ontology of architecture [which] will individuate architectural entities in a way that accommodates social relations.”26 The question is thus not just about the possible reconciliation of aesthetics and ethics but 31 isparchitecture.com about the way architectural entities are considered. To readdress our moral relationship to objects, we must reconsider the ontological weight we attribute to them. 5. PRAGMATISM 2: ETHNOGRAPHY OF ARCHITECTURAL ‘THINGS’ In the face of that question, yet another pragmatist thread in architecture might be traced. This one appeared under the form of ethnographic accounts of architectural practices. Such work consists in attentive depictions of architects at work. Ethnographic accounts borrow their methods from similar works conducted in Science and Technology Studies (STS), and their views from the Actor- Network Theory (ANT).27 The main exponent of this thread is Albena Yaneva, whose first major publication is subtitled “A Pragmatist Approch to Architecture.”28 These ethnographic descriptions of architectural ‘objects’—architecture’s so-called products and tools: buildings, plans, models, etc.—show how far such objects are from being static. By observing how they are mobilized and circulate in a given situation, the ethnographer can point to the fact that objects are acting upon people; they are not only being used. Some of these studies focus on the devices used by architects (models, plans, sketches) and depict such devices as active participants in the design process instead of as mere passive tools.29 Others show how a building in the making—which has not been built yet and may not be built—does already have a (moral) life of its own as it gathers lots of concerns around it: Following the proactive powers of architectural projects to mobilize heterogeneous actors, convincing, persuading or deterring them, buildings will be tackled here as becoming social (instead of hiding behind or serving the social), as active participants in society.30 These ethnographies show how poorly architects are armed to understand the situations they are in and which involve humans as well as nonhumans, in strangely symmetrical ways. Usually, nonhumans are neatly separated from humans: they are considered To readdress our moral relationship to objects, we must reconsider the ontological weight we attribute to them. “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 32 LE FE BV RE as static and passive, they are at best useful, at worse constraining; and if they show any traces of activity at all, it is only in support of humans’ projections. Together with Bruno Latour, Yaneva regrets that the object is always detached from the concerns it actively provokes: A building is always a ‘thing’ that is, etymologically, a contested gathering of many conflicting demands. […] And yet we either see the uncontested static object standing ‘out there,’ ready to be reinterpreted, or we hear about the conflicting human purposes, but are never able to picture the two together!31 These descriptions of architectural practices offer a radical perspective on nonhumans and the way they engage moral problems posed to architects at work. The authors, however, do not suggest any form of programmatic ambition, except for a methodological agenda. Yet, new ways of representing the practice ‘as it actually is’ can result in surprising accounts for practitioners themselves, who might have to reevaluate their practice. These precise (and potentially powerful) descriptions will hopefully nourish more conceptual (more philosophical) and more speculative works in architecture.32 Indeed, when ethnography starts to “repopulate” social sciences with nonhumans,33 it opens many philosophical and moral questions: let us admit these beings do play an active role; are they to be considered ‘moral’ as well? Once their claim to be taken as such is heard, the contours of the moral itself are redrawn, precisely along these claims. 6. PRAGMATISM 3: AN ECOLOGY OF THINGS Several works in moral and political philosophy address these questions from a pragmatist perspective. Two of them seem particularly relevant here: Emilie Hache’s “Propositions pour une écologie pragmatique” and Jane Bennett’s “A Political Ecology of Things”. Both opt for a pragmatist approach departing from empirical descriptions of problematic situations on which they then build their moral or political philosophy. Their approaches and concepts are based on a double pragmatist legacy: that of the ‘founding fathers’ (mainly James’s moral philosophy and Dewey’s political theory) and that of Bruno Latour (his pragmatist sociology as well as his pluralist empiricism). Although they are not dealing with architecture at all, they address our responsibility regarding ‘things’ when their ability to claim is recognized. They might thus serve as sources for further developments in architecture, regarding the problem addressed here. Emilie Hache’s work provides a pragmatist account of moral responsibility in the face of the present ecological crisis. Hache opts for a version of responsibility that is ‘heteronomous’. It is not based on the autonomy of the moral subject who must be responsible for her actions. On the contrary, responsibility is understood as ‘responsiveness’, meaning that one has to respond to claims that are pronounced by others. And with the 33 isparchitecture.com ecological crisis, more and more things start to make claims. Also, things—which used to be mute—are much louder when their existence is threatened; humans also become more attentive when they understand that they are directly concerned. Hache borrows this idea from Latour’s work in political ecology, where he describes the ecological crisis as “a general revolt of the means”34: more ‘objects’ or ‘nonhumans’ require to be considered as ends; they impose themselves as such. Their claims impinge on human beings in the form of concerns: glaciers are becoming moral, as they gather concerns around them. Opting for a pragmatist perspective, there is no point saying that glaciers are moral as such. For Dewey, values are not prior abstract principles; they are not definitely inscribed into things either; instead they manifest themselves in the way we care for things.35 Things thus become moral in situations, to the extent that moral concerns gather around them. But it is unfair to consider them as mere material stuff unable to claim: they have their own path of existence, which is now in danger, and which comes into calling for our attention. A pragmatist ‘heteronomous’ responsibility thus allows us to consider things as being made moral. But their morality is not imposed upon them— projected on them—by human beings, who choose once and for all what can be declared moral or not. Instead, moral responsibility lies in the relationship one maintains with things. “The moral dimension comes from a certain way to be well treated by another, from the way one addresses another.”36 An idea of morality built on pragmatist philosophy is thus relational: no one and no thing is moral on its own; the question is always about “becoming moral together.” Responsibility relies on the attribution of unforeseen competences to another, forming attributes that did not preexist the relation. An answer to our initial problem starts to appear here: architects’ responsibility also depends on the attribution of moral capacities to ‘objects’ as far as we interact with them. Also, it becomes clear that it is not a matter of definitely inscribing ‘objects’ into architects’ responsibility also depends on the attribution of moral capacities to ‘objects’ “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 34 LE FE BV RE the realm of moral, even under certain conditions; the realm of the moral itself is redefined in a pragmatist way. As William James notes, there is no moral in vacuo and there can be no definition of moral outside of given situations where concerns emerge.37 Jane Bennett’s work follows arguments close to Hache’s and she is very explicit on the agenda this entails. She affirms that “the ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open to it.”38 Despite of all the similarities with Hache’s pragmatist moral philosophy, Bennett’s appeal to “vital materialism” introduces more than a difference of vocabulary. By insisting on things’ vitality or vibrancy, vital materialism tends to attribute to things a certain degree of life which is independent from their relation with humans. Yet, Bennett situates our ethical responsibility in the “assemblages in which we find ourselves participating,”39 and thus also insists on the relational aspect of responsibility. By defining ethics as “a cultivated discernment of the web of agentic capacities,”40 she insists on the responsibility which a pragmatist moral philosophy imposes on every practitioner: an inquiry on all beings concerned, characterized by an increased attention to their demands to be heard, and followed by the obligation to respond to them. 7. CONCLUSION: CONSIDERING OBJECTS OTHERWISE All these pragmatist insights provide a promising answer to the issue raised by Whiting’s concern that “responsibility is acquainted with everything but the object: its relations, origins, use, life and context”. This problem matters and requires a proper answer: can we care for objects and still be morally responsible? Would it be possible for architects not to be forced to choose among these concerns, not to consider them as mutually exclusive? As formulated, this problem may lead us to seek moral attributes in objects themselves, in order to include them in the definition of a moral domain populated with moral beings. The question then becomes: under what conditions can an object be considered moral? But this question cannot be asked nor answered in general. It is not enough to reverse Whiting’s sentence and argue that ‘responsibility is acquainted with the object, only as far as it is dependent on its relations, origins, use, life and context.’ Responsibility is a matter of considering objects otherwise,41 recognizing their agency, hearing their ability to claim, and acting in the face of their consequences. But, opting for a pragmatist perspective, the aim is not to define objects as moral once and for all, to include them in the realm of moral, while leaving the moral domain untouched. Indeed, following William James, the moral has nothing to with a delineated domain where some things are included while others are excluded. According to him, situations become moral as soon as claims emerge, because they imply 35 isparchitecture.com obligations to be dealt with. Thus, pragmatism does not allow philosophy to decide which objects are generally to be considered moral or not. Instead, morality is a matter of situation; the philosopher can only inquire on ever more ways of being moral, ways which are always situated. Consequently, morality requires those who are involved in a given situation (designers among others) to note how objects claim and to invent ways to make them matter. It is in this sense only that Whiting’s sentence can be reversed, and experimental answers can be tried with in architectural practice. ENDNOTES 1. Sarah Whiting, “Engaging Autonomy,” SCI-Arc Media Archive (presentation, Public Lecture Series, SCI-Arc, Los Angeles, CA, November 7, 2013), accessed August 23, 2013, http://sma.sciarc.edu/video/sarah- whiting-engaging-autonomy-2. 2. Ibid. 3. Hashim Sarkis, “On the Line between Procedures and Aesthetics,” in The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking about “Things in the Making”, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 92–103. 4. Tom Spector, “Pragmatism for Architects,” Contemporary Pragmatism 1, no. 1 (2004): 133–149. 5. “X House,” WW Architecture, accessed August 23, 2013, http:// wwarchitecture.com/PROJECTS/X%20HOUSE/X%20HOUSE.html. 6. “Golden House,” WW Architecture, accessed August 23, 2013, http://wwarchitecture.com/PROJECTS/GOLDEN%20HOUSE/ GOLDEN%20HOUSE.html. 7. Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, “Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism,” Perspecta 33 (2002): 72-77. 8. Michael Osman et al., “Editor’s Statement,” Perspecta 33 (2002): 7. 9. Somol and Whiting, “Notes around the Doppler Effect,” 75. 10. Ibid. 11. Georges Baird, “‘Criticality’ and Its Discontents,” Harvard Design Magazine 21 (2004): 16–21. 12. Roemer van Toorn, “No More Dreams? The Passion of Reality in Dutch Architecture...and Its Limitations,” Harvard Design Magazine 21 (2004): 22–31; Reinhold Martin, “Critical or What? Toward a Utopian Realism,” Harvard Design Magazine 22 (2005): 104–109. 13. Cf. Nathaniel Coleman, “The Myth of Autonomy,” ArchitecturePhilosophy 1, no. 2 (2015): 157-178 for a more precise portrait of the autonomist project in architecture. My own ‘disentanglement’ of the senses of autonomy, however, differs from Coleman’s. 14. William S. Saunders, ed., The New Architectural Pragmatism: A Harvard AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 36 LE FE BV RE Design Magazine Reader (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 15. Joan Ockman, ed., The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking about “Things in the Making” (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000). 16. A. Krista Sykes, Constructing a New Agenda: Architectural Theory 1993- 2009 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010). 17. Richard Shusterman, “The Convergence of Ethics and Aesthetics: A Genealogical, Pragmatist Perspective,” in The Hand and the Soul: Aesthetics and Ethics in Architecture and Art, ed. Sanda Iliescu (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). 18. Richard Shusterman, Soma-Esthétique et Architecture : Une Alternative Critique (Genève: Haute école d’art et de design, 2010), 35. (translated by the author) 19. Ibid., 36. 20. Ibid., 34. 21. Ibid., 46. 22. Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 176. 23. Ibid., 174. 24. Ibid., 177. 25. Whiting, “Engaging Autonomy.” 26. Stefan Koller, “Architects on Value: Reducing Ethics to Aesthetics?,” in Ethics, Design and Planning of the Built Environment, eds. Claudia Basta and Stefano Moroni (New York: Springer, 2013), 61. 27. Albena Yaneva, “Understanding Architecture, Accounting Society,” Science Studies 21, no. 1 (2008): 3–7. 28. Albena Yaneva, The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009).2009 29. Sophie Houdart, “Des multiples manières d’être réel,” Terrain 46 (2010): 107–122; Albena Yaneva, Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2009). 30. Yaneva, The Making of a Building, 18. 31. Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, “Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture,” in Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research, ed. Reto Geiser, (Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser, 2008), 86. 32. Bruno Latour’s work is exemplary of such a continued enterprise: departing from a series of ethnographic inquiries into modern practices (science, law, economics, etc.), the anthropologist lately turned into a philosopher: his Inquiry into Modes of Existence turns the empirical material collected into the ontological project of pluralizing modes of existence. 37 isparchitecture.com See Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 33. Olivier Thiéry and Sophie Houdart, Humains, non humains: Comment repeupler les sciences sociales (Paris: La Découverte, 2011). 34. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 35. John Dewey, La Formation Des Valeurs (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2011). 36. Emilie Hache, Ce à quoi nous tenons: propositions pour une écologie pragmatique (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2011), 32. (translated by the author) 37. William James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” International Journal of Ethics (1891), reprinted in William James, The Will to Believe (New York: Longmans, Green & Company 1897). 38. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 14. 39. Ibid., 37. 40. Ibid., 38. 41. In a way, my proposition follows David Leatherbarrow’s when he proposes an “architecture oriented otherwise,” an architecture “oriented beyond itself,” which would accommodate forces beyond the architect’s control. But only in a way, because Leatherbarrow’s notion of orientation focuses more on the way architectural objects inscribe themselves or distinguish themselves from their physical surroundings, and less on the way the physical environment can be taken into account and thereby be made moral. See David Leatherbarrow, Architecture Oriented Otherwise (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008). isparchitecture.com HEIDEGGER ON THINKING ABOUT ETHOS AND MAN’S DWELLING 1 DIANA AURENQUE Heidegger’s reflections on dwelling point us to a distinct ethos, a distinct way of being in the world. As he puts it in “Letter on Humanism,” “Dwelling is the essence of Being-in-the-world.”2 He thus explicitly relates the theme(s) of ‘being-in’, themes raised in his early work, to that of dwelling, and thus to thinking about ethos. As Heidegger frequently reminds us, ‘ethos’ (ἦθος) means “the dwelling of man, his sojourn in the midst of all that is.”3 Already at this juncture, it is decisive to hold on to the idea that ethos, understood as sojourn, always relates us to an obligation of sorts.4 This much transpires if we consider that being without sojourn indicates a state of up-rootedness. And a person who is uprooted, without sojourn, is a person who ‘stands’ nowhere, and may well not understand much of her own position either. In the course of the present paper I would like to show, accordingly, that Heidegger’s philosophy not only essentially comprises a reflection on ethos, on man’s sojourn in the world, but also that this reflection queries a genuine obligation man enters. That reflection thus queries whether there is an appropriate way of residing or sojourning, and seeks to articulate an exemplary dwelling for man. And if (as remains to be shown) there is furthermore an appropriate way of human sojourn, of ethos, then this trajectory will also contain, or afford, direction and guidance. It contains direction insofar as exemplary ethos denotes something we need to seek. It is not the case that humans, by their very nature, are endowed with an appropriate ethos. Ethos is rather, and actually, a becoming—is Ethos, understood as sojourn, always relates us to an obligation of sorts. “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 40 A UR EN Q UE something that exists historically, or that happens in existence. Dwelling, as Heidegger frequently puts it, “is something we have yet to learn.”5 He emphasizes repeatedly how we always are already in the world—always already enjoy a sojourn in it of sorts. And even so, we have to obtain a certain distance from the very form of ethos we are most familiar with, an ethos we enjoy as a matter of course and without much reflection. Such lack of reflection accrues from the routines of our everyday life and a certain obliviousness towards being itself. By gaining a distance from that familiar ethos we can make truly ‘our own’ both the world and ourselves. Without such distance, everyday phenomena comprising things, fellow human beings, and one’s own being lose the very value that makes them themselves. Heidegger beckons us towards a particular form of sojourn not only in his late works, but also in his early Freiburger lectures or even in Being and Time. But his late works, this paper will show, deal with the matter and related themes more directly and explicitly than previous works. DWELLING AND THE FOURFOLD Concerns with spatiality exert a formative influence on Heidegger’s language in his late works, and constitute a cornerstone of his reflections in those works. In his late thought, the problematization of man’s sojourn receives explicit elaboration. Words like ‘dwelling’, ‘sojourn’, and ‘ethos’ now feature in the foreground of his (so-called) ‘ontic-historical’ reflections. While a certain reflection on ethos forms a recurrent theme across Heidegger’s thought, it is only in the context of his ‘topology of being’6 that Heidegger begins to explicitly reflect on human sojourn and human dwelling. Unlike in Being and Time, Heidegger’s late work is no longer concerned with the essential and inessential modes in which Dasein or a distinctly human way of being takes on existence. Rather, his main concern is now with the essential and inessential ways in which humans design or conceive of their being, their Sein. In this regard, dwelling is central. His essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” makes it rather clear that ‘dwelling’ is not merely conceived of as one’s having or possessing an abode or roof over one’s head: it rather designates “the main feature of human existence (Dasein).”7 On the one hand, we are to think of human existence as arising from dwelling; on the other, the nature of (making) poetry is to be determined as (a form of) building.8 Dwelling, in its inner contours, has to be traced to and thematized as dwelling and (the making of) poetry. Just as dwelling can only be obtained through building, true building only happens to further dwelling. Heidegger here refers to an etymological relation between ‘I am’ (ich bin) and ‘building’ (Bauen).9 In that regard, the 41 isparchitecture.com ‘I am’ that goes with ‘building’ actually denotes ‘I dwell’. He writes, “The way I am and you are, the way in which we humans are on this earth – that is building, that is dwelling.”10 Making poetry and dwelling are likewise related in their origin. To make poetry is not merely one (of many possible ways of) “letting oneself dwell”: it rather denotes “the actual ways of letting oneself dwell.”11 Heidegger terms the essential and actual (or proper, eigentlich) dwelling a sojourn in the Fourfold (Geviert). This ‘Fourfold’ denotes the gathering of four domains or ‘quarters’, namely heaven and earth, divine and mortal.12 And this gathering receives expression in a “world play,”13 that is, denotes the actual form in (and as) which human existence realizes itself or manifests in a world of things. Accordingly, the truth about (human) being becomes manifest in this Fourfold: “We thought of the truth of Being in worlds[,] of ‘world’ as the mirror play of the Fourfold of heaven and earth, of mortals and immortals.”14 More precisely, Heidegger conceives of the dwelling in the Fourfold as a poetic way of dwelling. DWELLING POETICALLY If man dwells in the Fourfold, he dwells poetically.15 Heidegger takes over Hölderlin’s poetics of man’s ‘poetic dwelling’: “Full of merit is the man who in his toil manages to produce works.”16 Human toil and creation of a work is here interpreted as an accomplishment (such as, for instance, man-made culture). But that accomplishment does not suffice, by itself, to understand human existence or Dasein in its foundation, insofar as culture is only a derived consequence of the more original ‘poetic dwelling’ of man. In his lecture on Hölderlin (winter semester, 1934-1935), Heidegger gives a clue for understanding ‘poetic dwelling’: “By this I mean: the historical existence or Dasein of man is borne from a foundation, and directed by that [mode of] being which poets experience ahead [of the rest of us], The ‘I am ‘ that goes with ‘building’ actually denotes ‘I dwell’ “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 42 A UR EN Q UE which they put into verbal garb for the first time and thereby bring to the people.” 17 It follows that the poetic has to be understood as an originating and measure-bestowing endowment,18 because to found something means “the foundation of what hitherto was not.”19 Poetic (use of) language brings to the fore a design or concept of being for an entire community. The way that ‘being’ beckons man (here) corresponds to how the ancients conceived of the divine to beckon in poetic creation. This leads Heidegger to say that “the poet […] is a founder of being.”20 If Heidegger says (with Hölderlin) that poets found “what persists,”21 what exactly does this founding moment denote? For poetry neither discovers, nor invents, the historic dimension of human existence as such. Rather, that dimension is being ‘founded’ in this sense: poetry corresponds to the enunciation of being itself. In the unconstrained creation of poetry, the boundary between the merely possible and the real is created anew. The poet’s “dream yields the not-yet-appropriated fullness of the possible and preserves a transfigured remembrance of the real.”22 That remembrance of the real is such that “the possible and (more precisely) what is still to come, arrest our expectations, and arise as one where art bestows history, a dream.”23 This new order of things— Heidegger calls it the poets’ “dream”—is “terrible, because for those it shows itself to, the dream rips them out of a careless sojourn in a reality they are used to, and throws them into the horrors of the unreal.”24 The expression “horrors of the unreal” refers to the infinite expanse of ‘the possible’; that expanse appears as “horror” because its fleeting nature cannot be grasped by purposive or practical rationality. The horror it instills is the terror of the unknown and uncertain, a horror man attempts to evade and flee along his life’s path. The poet does not reside or remain in “a careless (mode of) residing”25 but copes with the fleeting nature (and contingency) of human existence through his creative work. For Heidegger, dwelling poetically ultimately means sensitive attention to things. This dwelling is a stance “in the presence of the divinities,” a stance of solemnity “towards the nearness of things’ essence.”26 The poet attends (and respects) in his poetic dwelling the gathering of things in a way that respects their diversity and coherence. The poet dwells in a manner that itself is a preservation happening in poetic dwelling. But this is only possible so long as the poet remains awake and sober in relation to those things. Accordingly, the stance in dwelling poetically must be sober and attentive: To acquire free use of one’s own ability means to ever more exclusively acquiesce in being open towards what one is assigned – acquiesce in alertness of what is yet 43 isparchitecture.com to come, in a sobriety that […] retains only what is needed. A sober, attentive openness towards the sacred is at once a concentration on the quiet, corresponding to that ‘resting’ on which the poet dwells and thinks. This resting is an ability to remain in one’s own.27 Such “learning” of man’s own poetic essence simply requires a radical and attentive willingness to accommodate oneself with the order of the world, an order that arises from the world’s becoming. Or, because we already are poets, we have to become poets. This signals, not merely an element of Pindar in Heidegger’s philosophy, but also the thought that ‘dwelling poetically’ is to remain (persist) in conformity with what is. ‘Dwelling poetically’ is something as yet to be attained—it is, for Heidegger, something one needs to make one’s own. By dwelling poetically one realizes a return to ‘one’s own’, a state rendered attainable through recognition of the foreign or alien: “To be freely able to draw on one’s own, to first acquire free use of one’s own, first requires confrontation with the foreign.”28 Thus man has to become a “traveler,”29 needs “to render oneself, in what is foreign, strong and ready for what is one’s own; for what is one’s own cannot be acquired by a sudden grasp for the (apparent) own.”30 Man must appropriate what is his own, and that requires a process of appropriation intimately related to experience of the foreign. Such self- appropriation is certainly not easy: “What is one’s own is hardest to find and, thus, easiest to miss.”31 Precisely because it is hardest to find, “its search has to be longest, and as long as it’s sought, it won’t be lost.”32 Heidegger calls this search for one’ s own a “steady reluctance,” namely “the reluctance of one who dwells long on the same spot, looks forward and backwards, because he searches and persists in a point of transition, a threshold. Finding and appropriating one’s own, is at once a reluctant transition.”33 He who is searching for his own, and understands himself to be ‘on his way’ to himself or journeying to himself,34 dwells poetically. For Heidegger, dwelling poetically ultimatley means sensitive attention to things. “ ” AP . vol 1 . No 2 . 2015 44 A UR EN Q UE Heidegger already announced the relation between “self-hood”35 and actual dwelling in his Introduction to Metaphysics (delivered in the summer term of 1935): “Man only reaches himself, and is a Self, in a mode of historicity and questioning.”36 Man’s self-hood can thus not be attained without a certain stance, an idiosyncratic form of residence or sojourn. Only by dwelling poetically can man be brought to accord with his own essence—meaning, can man realize what he always and already is: the most uncanny. “To be the most uncanny – that is the foundational trait of man’s essence.”37 Via poetry and the disclosure of historic space—the location of our actual dwelling accomplished in poetry—humans attain access to themselves. Poetic dwelling has its own measure in persistence: “Return endows the persistence of what is unequal. When that persists, then that persistence alone is in which fate can persist in a state of purity.”38 Heidegger calls this “persistence of a persisting fate” “the measure of actual dwelling,”39 as it shows itself in the measure of actual poetic dwelling. And that persistence is precisely a time of celebration, meaning, a time for the unusual and the rare, and thereby the moment in which fertile rupture occurs with one’s customary and familiar relations to the world. The significance—even the reality—of the familiar is put into question, occasioning a return to the uncanny. Dwelling poetically is, in that light, this idiosyncratic persisting in the actual place, in the Fourfold opened up towards whichever thing we face: “To persist is, now, no longer the mere insistence of the ready- to-hand. Persistence happens. It brings the Four into the light of their own.”40 DWELLING AND MEASURE Heidegger’s reflections engage the ethical also in another respect— with respect to their ideas of measure and measuring. Here, the heavenly receives special attention: “Man has always already measured himself as (hu)man in relation to something, and in relation to something heavenly.”41 The heavenly, however, is only gathered by a measure—the divine. When Heidegger, with Hölderlin, tells us that in dwelling man “measures” himself against—that is, competes with42—the deity, Heidegger primarily means that existing man always has to find anew the interrelation that gathers things together. That measure is not rendered present by an invention of man—but only occurs in relation to the respective way in which a thing allows itself to be seen. What Heidegger calls “measuring” reveals itself in the act of making poetry.43 The poet gathers a measure of all things from the things showing themselves. This measure is, for Hölderlin, an unknown God,44 always 45 isparchitecture.com alien and never familiar. Equating the divinity with a measure—moreover, an unknown measure at that—is, however, problematic: “The divinity as He who He is, is unknown to Hölderlin, and the divinity qua this Unknown is verily the poet’s measure.”45 That the divinity should be something revealed by the heavens also means that Hölderlin’s divinity—the measure—is to be understood in the respective context of its becoming apparent, in the heavens of the Fourfold. The divinity is kept open as precisely an open measure through its dwelling in the Fourfold. The poet’s measure is, in this sense, never an external and already decided one, but rather becomes the measure as things command, meaning, [the measure of] the Fourfold: “Building (das Bauen),” which is poetics, “appropriates from the Fourfold the measurements for all cross-measurements of the spaces, which in turn assume [their] space through places that bestow them.”46 As Heidegger puts it in his 1970 essay “Man’s Dwelling,” “Earthly poets are just those who take measure of a heavenly measure.”47 Precisely because the poet knows better than anyone else that there is nothing that is unique and bestows measure and meaning for all time, is he able to ever bestow new being: “It bestows higher clarity, one that enables all things to appear in their own and which provides a measure to all that is mortal.”48 In that regard, the poets’ saying(s) correspond to the voice of being. Since being ever appears under new historical guises, there is a never-finished need for repetition, as occurs through being founded poetically. Dwelling poetically is the possibility of an actual sojourn of man, in contrast to the careless sojourn in an age of modern technology. In his lecture “Wherefore Poets?,” Heidegger emphatically notes that technology is, so to speak, an illusory or deceptive sojourn of man. It is, “as if there could be – for the relation of essence, by which man is related to the whole of being through the technical What Heidegger calls “measuring” reveals itself in the act of making poetry. “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 46 A UR EN Q UE will – a segregated residence in an annex building, an annex able to offer more than a transitory way out of self deceptions (such as taking refuge in the Greek pantheon).”49 In poetry, a return to ‘the open’ is drawn—that very open that remains shut in a technical ethos. To dwell poetically thus means to persist in that openness in which things come to the fore first and show themselves in their truth. It is about opening up to, and letting in, the truth of things, the truth of other people, of the world. Insofar as the things-that-are (das Seiende) are conceived in their relative determinacy in relation to their historic origin, these things remain open towards being, in dwelling and thinking: “In thinking we first learn of dwelling in that region, in which occur the overcoming of being’s fate, the overcoming of the constellation (das Gestell).”50 Only by man dwelling in the Fourfold, a Fourfold realized poetically, is the possibility of ethos in an age dominated by ‘constellation’ possible. Here, the actual ethos is always already latently present in ‘the constellation’. Man cannot but relate to the poetic, cannot but be (in an actual or inauthentic way) poetic, for “even the man of today’s age dwells, in his own way, poetically,”51 as Heidegger puts it in “Man’s Dwelling.” Yet, on the border of paradox, Heidegger inserts an ethical measure into the poetic, into its very name: “Man of the present age too dwells poetically in his own way – namely, that is, as per (unter) the name of his Dasein, unpoetically.”52 Heidegger says, echoing Hölderlin, that our mode of dwelling today is “unpoetic.”53 It is a mode in which “man seizes measure from an earth that his machinations leave disfigured.”54 The ‘unpoetic’ dwelling in the ‘constellation’ is a sojourn in which man relates himself to the whole world (all things in it, other people, and his own being) by seizing domination. If the unpoetic nature of our being in the world today is conceived as such, this means that “there is no measure on this earth, but rather that the earth can give no measure when it is quantified on a planetary scale, that the earth is carried away in the lack of measure.”55 Poetic dwelling registers this in “the lack of holy names” and “the deity’s death”: only a sojourn in the open region, which smacks of the lack [of holy names], permits insight into that, which today is, but from which it is lacking.”56 In this regard the poet’s role comes to the fore, paradigmatically: the poet is a paradigm and exemplar, for he not merely gazes but also shows, has “the demonstrating gaze for what is open, an openness in which the divinities alone become guests and men can build an abode within which the True is, and of which men can grab hold of.”57 Such bestowing of dwelling is the original dwelling of the poet, for this measure originally founds the actual dwelling of man. The poet accomplishes this by having the measure designed with ever a view to allowing himself to get 47 isparchitecture.com close to the, ever differently appearing, world. The poet’s measure, put differently, is ever built anew as the situation commands. POETIC SPEECH AND ITS DWELLING Dwelling poetically, then, receives prominence in poetic speech. “How does man dwell poetically? He dwells thus because he speaks thus.”58 The poet draws on “the free use of his own ability,”59 meaning, he does not use language,60 but rather takes language for what it originally is, namely as endowment. His bestowing through language is set in conformity with being,61 and thus his endowment conforms to “the openness for what he is assigned to, the alertness of what is yet to come.”62 The poetic endowment of words resides thus in the openness for what is to come and ever possible. Such openness for the alien and foreign is the poetic dwelling of the poet—a place of residence that the gods visit where they are [our] ‘guests.’63 Only the poet, possessing an “essential gaze for the possible,”64 may create the very openness necessary to enable the gods to appear. The possible and the possible foundation of all assembly65 can only appear when room for such an appearance has been opened. The divinities are thus guests in our language. Poetic dwelling must first become hospitality, a friendly waiting on and for the gods. Whether or not man welcomes the gods with hospitality is his own decision. If he decides in favor then his words respond to the claims of the gods. Consequently, man decides in favor of his belonging to the occasion or happening. Poetic language serves conformity with that happening in which the gods only begin to speak (and commit themselves) to us. The word naming the divinities’ claim is the word remaining faithful to the particular (and only) self- display of the phenomena. A description of how things are through poetic language is not a seizing, a determination of a thing, but the literal mirroring of that thing in the very manner it appears in. A The poet is a paradigm and exemplar, for he not merely gazes but also shows. “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 48 A UR EN Q UE word’s validity arises for Heidegger not in the “public claim of what is written,”66 but purely in the word’s relation or obligation to the thing itself. As Heidegger emphasizes time and again, man has to learn actual dwelling as the dwelling of the poet. The poet joyously dwells in that “sparse nearness,”67 meaning, he knows that what appears is not the only possibility of openness (of becoming apparent), in contrast to man who only abides in the public. And since only poetic man “has the demonstrative gaze for the open,”68 it is his task to help other people to build their abodes such that in them is truth. The poet’s role is, however, for Heidegger “neither to instruct, nor to educate”, but rather “he permits the reader to let be, so that he may attain by himself an affection towards the essential, to which the friend of the family [the poet] already tends so as to talk to us.”69 Others don’t yet know that sojourn in “sparse nearness”—they have to yet learn how to dwell. The poet helps others to return to their home. This home is the proximity to the origin. In that home man recognizes himself, not only as “someone learning of things,” but also as someone knowing that things are “in strife.”70 The fundamental mood of reluctance is “the mood of a thinking come home to the origin.”71 Akin to the underlying mood of reluctance in Heidegger’s 1936-1938 Contributions to Philosophy, reluctance here is the “knowledge that origin cannot be experienced immediately.”72 If man persists in this fundamental mood, he knows that the mystery is more encompassing than any specific openness of being, and he remains in a stance open to the possible. In dwelling poetically, man knows that the concealed, the secret, the original, and the indemonstrable can never be transferred completely into the determinate and present. CONCLUSION: DWELLING AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL ETHOS Dwelling poetically turns out to be the actual sojourn, the actual ethos of man. Man here remains open towards the possible, alert to how individual phenomena become apparent. If we re-examine that ethos more carefully, it becomes impossible to reconcile with the very possibility of an existence bound by rules a priori. The measure of poetic dwelling only ever arises from the respective sojourn in the company of things, and not from a pre-existing measure. To dwell poetically one has to forfeit the very domain of the moral, a domain in which good and evil have already been decided upon. By poetry, “the region will remain open for the presence of the mortals in [that region].”73 And yet this forfeiture of morality occurs in favor of an ethos in which the truth of things, of world and others, can attain their validity in their respective and very own way. In this way poetic dwelling connects to a philosophical ethos—because in this dwelling it is paramount to not miss out on the true self-appearance of the phenomena. 49 isparchitecture.com Or put differently: the task is to take up a [form of] residence in which the equanimity74 towards the truth of things is preserved—and not the obstinate will to security. Furthermore, the philosophical ethos accentuated in dwelling poetically can be said to receive primary articulation as a phenomenological ethos. How the phenomena themselves are to be perceived can never be dictated externally, but exclusively from the phenomena themselves and the very context or correlation in which they appear to us in the first place. The phenomena and their possible characters are precisely what is preserved in poetic dwelling and its poetic, endowing speech. Dwelling is for Heidegger of such a kind that man has to take responsibility for himself. Dwelling thus carries an insurmountable intrinsic paradox: we always already dwell with what is original; precisely because we do, it remains concealed: “To dwell in one’s own is that which arises last, rarely comes together, and always remains hardest.”75 And that is why dwelling as dwelling has to be yet acquired when it comes to man, so that man can truly be what he already has been—namely, “uncanny” and foreign unto himself.76 “The most uncanny of the Uncanny is Man himself.”77 In his own being uncanny, foreign, and without home, resides man’s essence, even when man himself may not see this. Humans essentially dwell in the Fourfold, and yet in the exiguous age of modern technology they dwell without awareness of their own existence: “Not yet are the mortals owners of their own essence.”78 It appears as if man dwells asleep in the Fourfold. Dwelling becomes what is customary,79 and escapes notice. If it does so escape notice, however, the essence of dwelling “can never be pondered as the foundational trait of being human.”80 Accordingly, the age of technological domination becomes an age bereft of home and earth. Man has become estranged to his own essential dwelling, and this We always already dwell with what is original; precisely because we do, it remains concealed. “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 50 A UR EN Q UE estrangement of his essence constitutes a loss of essence itself. Just as home is a becoming—namely a return to one’s own through the unfamiliar and foreign,—dwelling in the Fourfold embodies that moment in which we sojourn once again with what is original. Beyond that, dwelling in the Fourfold denotes a specific dwelling radically different from everyday dwelling under the dominance of technology. To at all recognize the “actual want of dwelling”81 is enough to put us on a path to rescue, even if that rescue can only happen by a re-claiming of essential sojourn, of dwelling in nearness to the truth of being. Heidegger’s thought “that the mortals have to ever first search for the essence of dwelling, they have to yet learn how to dwell,”82 directly portends the domain of original ethics and its original ethos. Human being realizes itself only by a sojourn in the Fourfold and the world of things. Man’s essence only becomes manifest through a particular dwelling: “To spare the Fourfold – to rescue the earth, receive the heavens, expect the gods, and accompany mortals – this four-fold sparing is the simple essence of dwelling.”83 Man has to acknowledge this ‘simple essence’ of dwelling. Heidegger’s enlightenment of man’s dwelling indicates the actual and thus highest form of dwelling. Heidegger’s own reflections on ethos constitute a gesture indicating direction. There is a concealed and yet actual and original mode of existence, one we have to seek. Dwelling in the Fourfold is something we have to yet reach. And we will only reach it by coming to recognize it as man’s true dwelling. ENDNOTES 1. This paper builds on my book, Diana Aurenque, Ethosdenken: Auf der Spur Einer Ethischen Fragestellung in der Philosophie Martin Heideggers (Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Karl Alber, 2001), and was translated by Stefan Koller. 2. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in the Heidegger Gesamt- sausgabe (GA), volume 9, page 358.—Translator’s note: The Gesamtsausgabe is an ongoing effort to collect the complete works of Heidegger in German. With the exception of “Man’s Dwelling”, all Heidegger translations in this paper are original to the paper, and are from here on referenced in abbreviated form, by GA volume and page number. 3. Heidegger, “Essay on Heraclitus,” GA 55:214. 4. Translator’s note: Heidegger’s term for ‘being obliged’ denotes our being bound, existentially rather than morally, to something or other—even the world itself, as Heidegger explains in “Man’s Dwelling.” See Heidegger, “Man’s Dwelling,” GA 13:215. 5. Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” GA 7:163. For an alternative 51 isparchitecture.com translation of this essay see Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Row, 1971), 141-160. 6. Heidegger, “From the Experience of Thinking,” GA 13:84. 7. Heidegger, “…Poetically Man Dwells…,” GA 7:193. For an alternative translation of this essay see Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 213-229. 8. Translator’s note: As before, an idiomatic verb for ‘to make poetry’ is sorely lacking in English. Such a verb exists in German and Greek, and denotes not just the creation of verse (rather than prose), but more generally, to make things unconstrained by preconception and established technique. 9. Cf. also Heidegger, Prolegomena, GA 20:213: “I dwell, reside in (and with) the world as my familiar other.” 10. Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” GA 7:149. 11. Heidegger, “…Poetically Man Dwells…,” GA 7:193. 12. Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” GA 12:202. The term further contrasts an understanding of the world as ‘Gestell’, an understanding both ego-centric and dominated by means-ends practical rationality. For discussion of the Fourfold, see also Heidegger, “…Poetically Man Dwells…,” “Building Dwelling Thinking,” and “The Thing,” as discussed below. 13. Ibid. 14. Heidegger, “The Turn,” GA 11:121. 15. Cf. Heidegger, “Language and Home,” GA 13:180. 16. Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, GA 4:89. For an alternative translation, see Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity Books, 2000). 17. Heidegger, On Hölderlins Hymnen ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhein’, GA 39:184. 18. Cf. Heidegger, “Johann Peter Hebel,” GA 16:493-494: “True and elevated poetry always accomplishes this one thing only: bringing the non- apparent into appearance.” 19. Heidegger, On Hölderlin’s Hymns ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’, GA 39:184. 20. Ibid., 33. 21.Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderin’s Poetry, GA 4:41. 22. Heidegger, On Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘Remembrance’, GA 52:121. 23. Ibid. 24. Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderin’s Poetry, GA 4:113. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 42. 27. Ibid., 118. Translator’s note: Observe that the German for ‘one’s own’ (das Eigene) here and in the sequel allows an impersonal reading where the English does not; comparable to how English translators of Being and Time have to render Heidegger’s decidedely impersonal das Man as ‘the They’. AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 52 A UR EN Q UE 28. Heidegger, On Hölderin’s Hymn ‘Remembrance’, GA 52:123. 29. Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderin’s Poetry, GA 4:23-24. 30. Heidegger, On Hölderin’s Hymn ‘Remembrance’, GA 52:123. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 124. 34. Or, Wanderung. See Heidegger, “Address on Hebel,” GA 16:537. 35. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, GA 40:152. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid.,160. 38. Heidegger, Eludications of Hölderin’s Poetry, GA 4:105. 39. Ibid. 40. Heidegger, “The Thing,” GA 7:175. Translator’s note: (to be) ‘ready-to- hand’ is the near literal translation of ‘Vorhanden(sein)’, a key term of Being and Time. See Heidegger, Being and Time, GA 2. 41. Heidegger, “…Poetically Man Dwells…,” GA 7:199. 42. Translator’s note: The German ‘messen’ can importantly mean both. 43. Heidegger, “…Poetically Man Dwells…,” GA 7:200. 44. Cf. ibid., 200-201. 45. Ibid. 46. Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” GA 7:171. 47. Heidegger, “Man’s Dwelling,” GA 13:215. 48. Ibid. 49. Heidegger, “Wherefore Poets?,” GA 5:294-295. 50. Heidegger, “The Turn,” GA 11:71. Translator’s note: ‘constellation’ (Gestell) denotes the (technological) contrast of the Fourfold (Geviert). 51. Heidegger, “Man’s Dwelling,” GA 13:219. In order not to clutter the main text, lengthy quotations from this text have been moved to a separate Appendix below. See Appendix, section 31, including a less literal rendering of the present line. See further Appendix, sections 1-9 on how Heidegger sets up his discussion of Hölderlin. 52. Ibid. See also Appendix, section 31. 53. See Appendix, sections 22-28. Heidegger’s argument here builds on the foregoing analysis in sections 15-21. 54. See Appendix, sections 31-32. 55. See Appendix, sections 33-35, and cf. sections 29-30. 56. Heidegger, “The Lack of Holy Names,” GA 13:235. 57. Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, GA 4:148. 58. Heidegger, “Solicited Prolegomenon to a Poets’ Reading at Bühler Heights,” GA 16:470. 59. Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, GA 4:118. 53 isparchitecture.com 60. Cf. Heidegger, What is Thinking, GA 8:132-133. 61. Cf. Heidegger, “Solicited Prolegomenon,” GA 16:470: “How does Man speak? He speaks in conforming to language. For actually, language speaks. Mortals only ever speak by conforming, and by thus having fulfilled their essence in relation to language’s own encouragement.” Translator’s note: ‘Conform’ and ‘fulfil’ in German are cognates of ‘language’ and ‘speak’: it is impossible to render the ensuing poetic quality of Heidegger’s sentences here. 62. Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, GA 4:118. 63. Ibid., 120. Translator’s note: As will shortly become obvious, Heidegger plays here on the German term for hospitality, Gast-Freundschaft, lit. kindness to strangers, which in Greek is xenia (antonym: xeno-phobia): the stranger or xenos is shown hospitality, and the Greek gods would typically travel under the disguise of a foreign visitor or xenos. 64. Heidegger, On the Essence of Truth, GA 34:64. 65. Translator’s note: gathering (Versammlung) corresponds in ancient Greek to ekklesia, our word for church, as in ‘ecclesiastic’. 66. Heidegger, “Solicited Prolegomenon,” GA 16:471. 67. Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, GA 4:25. 68. Ibid., 148. 69. Heidegger, “Address on Hebel,” GA 16:541. 70. Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, GA 4:36. 71. Ibid., 131. 72. Ibid. 73. Heidegger, “Man’s Dwelling,” GA 13:215. See Appendix, section 12, with sections 10-11, 13-14. 74. Translator’s note: Gelassenheit is cognate with the earlier ‘einlassen auf’, a verb used earlier to denote how man should be open to things—by letting them be as they are, also in relation to him, as opposed to seeking to control things by technical means or means-ends reasoning. 75. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’, GA 53:24. 76. Translator’s note: Heidegger plays on the German relation of ‘uncanny’ (unheimlich) to the lack of ‘home’ (Heim). 77. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’, GA 53:83. 78. Heidegger, “Wherefore Poets?,” GA 5:274. 79. Translator’s note: In German, ‘Gewöhnung,’ a pun on ‘dwelling’ (wohnen). 80. Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” GA 7:150. 81. Ibid., 163. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., 161. See again the definition of the Fourfold. isparchitecture.com APPENDIX: HEIDEGGER’S “MAN’S DWELLING” TRANSLATED BY CESAR A. CRUZ For ease of cross reference between essay and appendix, paragraph numbering has been added to the appendix, as well as page references to the German original in volume 13 of the Heidegger Gesamtsausgabe.1 [1] [213] Hölderlin’s saying – “Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells on this earth” – is hardly registered by us, has not been fully fathomed; nor has it entered our collective memory.2 And how could it? In light of contemporary reality – a reality regarding itself, and the very reserves it draws on, as that of a self-made and self-sustained society – the poet’s saying is easily watered down by just about anybody as fanciful. Poetry is seen in contemporary society as the production of literature. [2] That Hölderlin’s saying is not taken seriously is also testified to by the present stage of Hölderlin research. That research groups the saying among the poet’s “questionable works” because its text has not come down to us in manuscript form, or so Wilhelm Waiblinger emphatically states at the close of his 1823 novel Phaedon. By contrast, Norbert von Hellingrath’s “Prologue to a First Edition of Hölderlin’s Translations of Pindar” (1911, page 58, note 3), talks of “passages that in essence well could be genuine.” Hellingrath’s [214] efforts at researching Hölderlin’s oeuvre rested on a distinct poetic approach to the poet himself – a poet (Hölderlin) who one day may stand revealed as the poet herald of a future art of poetry. [3] Strangely enough, the adjective “poetic” does Hölderlin’s saying [...] is hardly registered by us, has not been fully fathomed; nor has it entered our collective memory. “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 56 CR UZ not occur in Hölderlin’s poems in the final text of his published works. Nevertheless the Stuttgart edition (II, 635) includes the adjective as variant in line 28 of the poem “The Archipelago”, the relevant passage (lines 25- 29) reading as follows: Likewise, heaven’s own, they, the powerful up on high, the silent ones, Who a serene day and sweet slumber and foreboding From far away cast over the head of men sensitive and receptive to it Out of the fullness of their might, even they, the ancient companions in play, Dwell, as before, with You…3 [4] In the first draft, instead of “the ancient companions in play, / Dwell,” Hölderlin writes “poetic companions in play, dwell.” Thus the poetic thought of a poetic dwelling is in no way foreign to the poet. But the adjective “poetic” in the quoted passage qualifies the manner of dwelling of the heavenly bodies, not man’s.4 What then does “poetic companions in play” say if instead it turned out to say “the ancient companions in play” in the final version? [5] In what respect are the “ancient” the “poetic”, and the “poetic” the “ancient”? [6] The heavenly bodies in the poem refer to things that always have been – ‘ones of yore’ – as well as to things that shall return in what is yet to come. They are ones of yore in a twofold sense. Their being of yore explains their present state, their everlasting aspect in Hölderlin’s phrase of the “ever blooming stars” (Draft, II, 365) goes beyond mere persistence. The ancient companions in play bring, to “men sensitive and receptive to it,” the serenity of day and the night’s slumber and foreboding. These companions donate constancy to mortals across their lifetime, and are thereby poets (or ‘poetizing’ ones). The ancient companions in play “dwell poetically” with the god of the Aegean Sea, with its islands and the inhabitants. [7] [215] Even though the final version of the poem calls the heavenly bodies the “ancients,” this did not eliminate their designation as “the poetic ones.” For the verses that follow (lines 29-42) begin by expressly naming the most supreme of the celestial bodies, “the day’s sun,” the “all transfiguring” sun – and line 38 calls it “the poetizing one.” The sun bestows a clarity that allows all things to shine forth in their uniqueness and gives to mortals their measure. [8] And yet, the poem “The Archipelago” expresses itself in more meaningful and complete a manner than a set of inevitably fragmented notes ever could. [9] Meanwhile, a question imposes itself. Don’t the passages, certified by the poet’s own hand and preceding the final version of this poem, 57 isparchitecture.com diminish or entirely do away with any doubts surrounding the authenticity of the words “In lovely blueness blooms” (employed by Hölderlin in a prose text) from which the line “full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells on this earth” was taken? Even if this were true, the distinction mentioned above between “the ancient” versus “the poetic” would still remain. [10] According to “The Archipelago”, the heavenly bodies “dwell poetically,” with the sun being, as the most supreme of heavenly bodies, “the poetizing one.” The designation “poetic” thus goes with “heaven’s own.” According to the later prose text, “poetic dwelling” goes with the mortals “on this earth.” [11] According to “The Archipelago,” the heavenly ones were inclined to impart to those on earth their measure. According to the prose text, mortals concede the imparting of their measure to the heavenly. “Imparting their measure in equal ways?” we may ask, ere we pause and hear the text’s own question: “Is there a measure on earth?”, and have to immediately ponder the text’s own answer: “There is none.” [12] The poetized ones on earth are only the measure-takers of a heavenly gift of measure. Poetized mortals always only bestow meaning by building on something they themselves already received. For Hölderlin, the making of poetry is not a creative power that resides in the individual poet. Rather, it is a measured building (Bauen) the heavenly ones employ, to the full extent of their power, with works of Saying being the result of such building. In this way a region is kept open for mortals to sojourn within it.5 [13] [216] That region’s overall inclination ought to be termed a clearing: a clearing in which the heavenly ones incline towards Earth’s mortals in a manner both foreign and generous, and where those on earth incline to the heavenly by way of gratitude and cultivation. To a region of such For Hölderlin, the making of poetry is [...] a measured building (‘Bauen’) the heavenly ones employ “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 58 CR UZ inclination belongs, by way of giving and receiving of measure – thus, poetically – that the heavenly and mortals each dwell in their own way and alongside one another. [14] Still, isn’t all of this a mere dream, the creation of an arbitrary imagination that is lacking all reality, any prospects of possible realization, every claim to validity and obligation? [15] A single casual glance upon the state of the world today may suffice to compel us towards these questions. Yet here we overlook too easily that Hölderlin himself became cognizant of what poetry demanded and of its hazards along his path – more cognizant than we ever could become today, reflecting on his thought. [16] The closing stanza of the hymn “The Journey” expresses this as follows (Hellingrath IV, 171; Stuttgart Edition II, 141): Heaven’s servants Are ever so wonderful, Just as all of God’s children. Through a dream it comes to him who wants just once To steal from heaven, yet there is retribution for those that Through forceful means want to be equal to it; Often it is a surprise to the one To whom it has hardly ever come to mind before6 [17] And thus it remains premature, even on Hölderlin’s own behalf, to point to, let alone announce as having been uttered with any commitment, the saying “poetically man dwells on this earth”. If we were to mention “poetic dwelling,” the most we could reach by way of assertion at this point is: Man today dwells on this Earth, but not poetically. [18] [217] And what does that mean? Does Hölderlin even speak of it? Norbert von Hellingrath, under the section entitled “Fragments and Drafts,” presents us with a short text with the heading of “The Nearest Best.” It goes as follows: [O]pen are heaven’s windows And set free is the nocturnal spirit, Who in storming the heavens has our land Enticed, and, by having much to say, by being unpoetic, Has wallowed in the debris Up to this very hour. And yet what I yearn for, it will come, … .7 [19] Does “unpoetic,” as used here, mean the same thing as not poetic? In no way. Yet, if these terms are to connote different things, in what respects do they demand that we differentiate them? [20] There is an answer readily at hand. The difference lies in the 59 isparchitecture.com manner of negation. A triangle for example is not poetic, but it can never be unpoetic. For, to be that, it must have been able to be poetic – such that it could, in this regard, be lacking something, and fail to comply with the poetic. In the history of thinking, there has long been a distinction between mere negation and deprivation. It remains open to further consideration whether, this distinction in place (one that required Plato’s utmost intellectual efforts to disentangle in his Sophist), the question concerning the “not” has now been sufficiently settled. [21] We can only learn how to understand the “un” in “unpoetic” in the present case if we succeed in more precisely determining the “poetic”. Fortunately, Hölderlin himself provides the type of assistance we need. [22] The word “unpoetic” only occurs once in the preserved manuscripts of Hölderlin. Hellingrath’s “Appendix” (IV, 392) records the term’s variants, and comments: “just above the occurrence of unpoetic, the following variants are [218] listed on top of one another: infinite, unpeaceful, unbounded, unrestrained.” [23] How are we to understand the varying nature of these variants? Does one variant just go in place of another, with a preceding one extinguished by a subsequent one – such that only the final one remains valid for the text’s final form? [24] The Stuttgart edition (II, 868) sets down these variants as listed “one above the other,” but adopts “unrestrained,” (occurring in the list’s topmost position) instead of “unpoetic” as the text’s authoritative reading (II, 234 and 237). This might be true if we were adhering to a philological rule (see the Stuttgart Edition I, 319). But it is not ‘poetologically’ true; it does not reveal what the poet wants to say and record. [25] The variants show Hölderlin’s effort at determining the meaning of “poetic” in “unpoetic.” The “unpoetic” names the unessential of the Man today dwells on this Earth, but not poetically. “ ” AP . vol 1 . No 2 . 2015 60 CR UZ “poetic,” that which in it is uncanny or not “at home.” “Unpoetic” is the adjective used to qualify “having much to say,” to qualify how “the nocturnal spirit” speaks, “who has our land / Enticed,” – a spirit who is, “in storming the heavens,” hostile, even rebellious against the heavens. [26] In being “unpoetic” the “poetic” does not disappear, but rather the “finite” is dismissed, the “peaceful” troubled, the “bound” undone, the “restrained” wrongfully transforms into the “unleashed.” All this tells us: that which bestows measure is not admitted, the very reception of measure is suppressed. The region that would be so inclined is instead buried under debris. [27] What leaps to mind is how the quoted fragments mentioning the “unpoetic” – fragments certified in manuscript form – belong together with the apocryphal text of the saying, “poetically man dwells.” [28] Meanwhile, one difference between the two texts still remains. “The Nearest Best,” that fragment published by Hellingrath, does not speak of man’s dwelling. Or at least, so it seems. For exactly that impression is put to rest by that fragment’s text [219] variant entitled “draft hymn” offered by Friedrich Beissner in the Stuttgart edition. The three draft forms (II, 233-239) were brought together in a convincing manner “based on handwritten idiosyncrasies,” and are to be interpreted as poetry of the “Dawn of a newly realized age following the patriotic reversal” (II, 867 and following). This age, and the care by which we are to enter it, underscores Hölderlin’s poetry in the elegy “Homecoming.” (See my “Annotations to Hölderlin’s Poetry,” supplemented by the two lectures, “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven” and “The Poem” in: Collected Works, Volume 4, 5th edition.) [29] Hölderlin’s poetry persists in the care shown in the “Homecoming.” It is the care shown in establishing those places whereby man dwells poetically, and is shown in the patient waiting for salvation that is a part of this earthly sojourn. The draft “The Nearest Best” expresses this implicitly by referring to “having much to say” as “being unpoetic.” [30] Nonetheless, ever since Hölderlin poetized his hymns, it may have been all too clear: this poem says and waits in vain. The saying regarding man’s poetic dwelling remains unfulfilled, it remains just one great illusion. [31] Yet the question remains whether in light of this statement we will ever think through the poet’s message with sufficient patience. Man of the present age too dwells poetically in his own way, which is to say, assuming his way of being in name only, unpoetically.8 For the sake of his will to produce himself and [produce] reserves that can be cultivated, man seizes measure from an earth that his machinations leave disfigured. He lacks the ability to hear Hölderlin’s answer to the question: “Is there a measure upon earth? There is none.” 61 isparchitecture.com [32] “Having much to say,” what “entices our land,” are in reality only the monotony of language from which everything which is said lies flat: the computer’s language of informatics. The only measure for computing man is the quota. [33] Certainly Hölderlin had not foreseen or foretold the state of the world today. [220] Nevertheless there remains what his saying has established and left for us to keep in our thoughts. Much is left to consider, that is, to experience thoughtfully. Next for us to consider is: First of all, to think about the unpoetic aspects of our world sojourn as such, experiencing the mechanization of man as his fate instead of dismissing it as merely arbitrary and an infatuation. Further, it calls for us to realize that there is no measure on this earth, but rather that the earth can give no measure when it is quantified on a planetary scale, that the earth is carried away in the lack of measure. [34] In the midst of the unpoetic it is insufficient for the poetic to think of the way out in the apparently equalizing dialectics. [35] We still rush past the mystery of the “not” and of what is not. We do not yet experience clearly enough what is suggested to us in the withdrawal because we do not yet know the withdrawal itself. We do not yet know the poetic in the unpoetic. ENDNOTES 1. The copyright for the original German version of this text is held by Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 2002. This translation was very much a cumulative effort between the editorial staff and contributing colleagues of Architecture Philosophy, and myself. I would like especially to thank Tom Spector and Stefan Koller for their great help in proofreading, verifying, and editing this translation. 2. “Hölderlin’s saying”: Wort is translated in this In being “unpoetic” the “poetic” does not disappear, but rather the “finite” is dismissed, the “peaceful” troubled “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 62 CR UZ essay, of course, as “word,” but primarily as “saying” and “message,” as it refers both to the entire line “Full of merit…” and, as Heidegger sees it, the message inherent in Hölderlin’s poetry. 3. The translations of Hölderlin’s three poems quoted in this essay benefitted from consulting previously published translations of each. Nevertheless, the translations here are my own, as in each case there were enough differences, sometimes subtle but significant enough differences, that I could not use the previously published poems. For comparison of “Der Archipelagus” see Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1967), 212-215. 4. ‘Heavenly bodies’ (Himmelskörper): literally, celestial bodies (as in section 7). The translation preserves Heidegger’s referene to ‘the heavenly’ in Hölderlin’s poem (section 4) and his own Fourfold. 5. Heidegger writes “the region” (die Gegend) instead of “a region.” The latter is used here because he is referring to a kind of region or regioning, not a specific locality or place. Also, like sections 7 and 10, the present paragraph uses ‘poetize(d)’ to designate ‘dichten(d)’, the verb (and adjectival form of) ‘to make poetry’. Cf. Aurenque’s essay above, n. 8. 6. For comparison of “Die Wanderung” see Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Hölderlin: Hymns and Fragments, trans. Richard Sieburth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 66-67; Friedrich Hölderlin, Hölderlin: His Poems, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: The Harvill Press, 1952), 188-189; and Hölderlin, Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments, 398-399. 7. For comparison of “Das Nächste Beste” see Hölderlin, Friedrich Hölderlin: Hymns and Fragments, 174-175 and 274-275; and Hölderlin, Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments, 544-545. 8. “way of being”: the only use of Dasein in this essay. Literal translation: “Man of the present age too dwells poetically – namely, that is, as per (unter) the name of his Dasein, unpoetically.” isparchitecture.com ENIGMA AS MORAL REQUIREMENT IN THE WAKE OF LEDOUX’S WORK: AUTONOMY AND EXPRESSION IN ARCHITECTURE ALBERTO RUBIO GARRIDO Architecture’s alleged capacity to meet ever new cultural and social challenges raises the dilemma between considering architecture a modern art or a vehicle for the realization of social good. The nature of the dilemma and its potential resolution in favor of the preservation of architecture’s artistic autonomy are this paper’s two leading concerns. To pursue them we first need to get clearer what renders art ‘autonomous’. As a concept, autonomy defies easy definition. It acquired multiple meanings in the history of ideas and frequently appeared under various guises, especially throughout the nineteenth century. Purity, the absolute, perfection, freedom, self- determination, l’art pour l’art, futility, and more: such notions were, and continue to be, understood by reference to art’s struggle for autonomy. Yet our understanding of that struggle, indeed of art’s autonomy, remains contested.1 On the face of it, ‘autonomy’ designates a thing’s (or someone’s) independence when determining its own laws. Such laws, we shall see, can range over the ontological, the ethical, and even the aesthetic. Autonomy expresses the fundamental modern principle of something’s giving itself its own laws and setting its own ends. If this minimal gloss is correct, its application to architecture requires clarification and defense right away. Architecture as, or insofar as it is, a particular Purity, the absolute, perfection, [...] continue to be understood by reference to art’s struggle for autonomy. “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 64 R UB IO G A R R ID O art faces external constraints and limits on its autonomy; limits it cannot evade. Perhaps the most noticeable limitation arises from architecture’s having to fulfill a function. Insofar as the product of architecture has to satisfy this prerequisite, that product’s aesthetic form is already to some degree pre-determined. Recognition of this fact hardly necessitates subscription to the claim that form ‘follows’ (is conclusively and solely determined by) function. Yet that ‘fact’ may explain why functionalism (in this strong sense) remains autonomism’s bête noire in architecture. There are further (and just as obvious) limitations to architecture’s autonomy. Let me mention two. Firstly, architecture incorporates advances from other disciplines. Often, those disciplines and their advances have not previously responded to aesthetic motivation: why should they do so now? Secondly, architecture is a public art and as such resists being understood as the expression of individual will or as an isolated element alien to its socio-historical context. Such limitations notwithstanding, an architectural theory and practice was established during the twentieth century with a determined effort to reach autonomous architecture, or something very much like it, as its cornerstone. This ‘effort’ began with Emil Kaufmann’s 1933 founding manifesto From Ledoux to Le Corbusier: Origin and Development of Autonomous Architecture.2 Since then, others have deepened and multiplied, if hardly clarified, the meaning(s) of ‘autonomous architecture’. Indeed, the degree of consensus among later authors, authors as diverse as Johnson, Rossi, Eisenman, Hays, and Aureli (one could easily mention more), terminates at their referring to the same concept and laying claim to the same sources. That the semantic stability of the term autonomy might be an issue, it seems, is never contemplated. In order to clarify this situation and move the debate beyond a collision of idiolects,3 the present study postulates the need to recover the genuine sense of the concept of autonomy in its philosophical sources—and to (re-)introduce that concept to artistic and historical discussions of architecture only thereafter. To that end, the paper proceeds as follows. Sections 1 and 2 recover the Kantian concept of autonomy and explain its implications in architecture: among these implications, a ‘requirement of expression’ is shown to reign supreme by the end of section 2. Both sections discuss how this concept and its implications measure up against what Kaufmann considered to be the two main features of autonomy in architecture. Section 3 enlists Schiller’s interpretation of Kant’s autonomy to take into account the effective risks of autonomy in (and for) architecture. Section 4 draws on Adorno’s oeuvre to present an alternative to both Schiller and Kant. Section V deploys that ‘alternative’ to demonstrate autonomy as one of the greatest (and definitely ongoing) challenges modern architecture 65 isparchitecture.com has faced since the Enlightenment. Before we begin, a word of caution. Recognizing clear geo-historical differentiation, Kaufmann regarded ‘the Enlightenment’ as ideologically quite unified, certainly in relation to architecture. This paper follows suit (largely for the sake of argument) but acknowledges that more recent studies rightly urge us to regard the Enlightenment as considerably more pluralistic—especially in its relation to ‘the revolutionary’, a relation that strongly exercised Kaufmann.4 Regardless of whether or not there is one Enlightenment or multiple Enlightenments, my minimal reliance on the fate of this argument should leave the essence of what is proposed here intact. 1. KAUFMANN WITH KANT, ONE: AUTONOMY AS SELF-DETERMINATION Autonomy occupies a central position and gains new points of emphasis and relevance in philosophy from Kant’s time onward.5 Indeed, Kant himself places the concept of autonomy at the very center of his practical philosophy. He claims that human reason is an autonomous source of principles of conduct, both in its value determinations and its active decisions. Thus, human autonomy is both the highest value and the condition for all other values, with ‘autonomy of the will’ understood as the supreme principle of morality.6 In fact, Kant never spoke about the autonomy of art. So, in a ‘transcendental’ sense, autonomy in art belongs to a broader project of humans’ autonomy from both natural and social determinations. In Kant, autonomy implies the spontaneity of its powers given some formal exigencies, and it should be able to establish the laws governing the legitimation of their feasibility, scope, and limits. Therefore, if we can distinguish a specific kind, more or less independent, of autonomous power in the field of art, the first type of autonomy should be regarded as fundamentally linked to the autonomous function of the power of judgment as a faculty of the soul distinct from reason and understanding.7 This Kantian transcendental order is primarily That the semantic stability of the term autonomy might be an issue, it seems, is never contemplated. “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 66 R UB IO G A R R ID O determined by the subject who transcends; and who, in his experience of reality, allows the object to transcend insofar as it is conceived as that subject’s representation. The work of art should not be considered as an entity sufficient unto itself but as a representation connected with the individual subject. Pursuing Kant’s line of thought to its conclusion in the artistic field, autonomy turns out to be at first sight a power with no clear regulatory impact on either artistic or political practice. In From Ledoux, Kaufmann interpreted autonomy with explicit reference to Kant,8 and defined it as a form of self-determination that brooks no sociocultural constraint. Crucially, Kaufmann claimed that such autonomy is manifested in a pure abstraction of creative mechanisms in architecture. In that regard Kaufmann’s interpretation of the ‘transcendental’ version of autonomy in architecture might be accused of opening the way for isolating architecture from society. A typical case of this isolation might be, for instance, Kaufmann’s description of Ledoux’s project Retour de Chasse: At first glance, the [Ledoux’s] Hunting Lodge [...] seems to be Baroque in its general layout. But on closer view we note significant changes. The composition lacks in binding power. Although the building masses seem to be grouped in a manner very similar to Baroque disposition, and, although the main house rules over the outlying buildings, each block is independent from the other, and from its natural setting.9 In other baroque buildings types, such as a monastery or a palace—where differentiated volumes like the church, the cloister, or dependencies should be articulated—some correspondence between the parts was established, although they could be detached. On the contrary, for Kaufmann, Ledoux imposes in his projects a ‘repetition’ criterion: as we can see, the pavilion structure is repeated in the three volumes without any alteration, despite the additional volume overlapped onto the central pavilion. Supported by a rather idiosyncratic interpretation of Kant, Kaufmann emphasizes the exemplary nature of the Retour de Chasse (Figures 1 and 2) as an illustration of the transitional figure that Ledoux represents between pre-revolutionary and revolutionary architecture. From Ledoux, free association of independent elements (against Baroque unity) would become the ultimate compositional mechanism. This is what Kaufmann called the pavilion system or later the new individualism:10 a configuration where compositional mechanisms such as ‘repetition’, ‘antithesis’, and ‘multiple response’ dominate.11 In other terms, it is an abstract and supposedly autonomous mechanism insofar as for Kaufmann these compositional mechanisms emerged in architecture from an internal logic beyond sociocultural constraints. 67 isparchitecture.com FIGURE 1: Hunting lodge, perspective view. Vue perspective d’un Retour de Chasse, sheet 110 from Claude Nicolas Ledoux, L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurset de la législation (Paris: H. L. Perronneau, 1804). FIGURE 2: Hunting Lodge, elevation. Elévation d’un Retour de Chasse, sheet 111 from Claude Nicolas Ledoux, L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurset de la législation (Paris: H. L. Perronneau, 1804). AP . vol 1 . No 2 . 2015 68 R UB IO G A R R iD O 2. KANT AGAINST KAUFMANN, TWO: EXPRESSION AS A BOND WITH SOCIETY Architecture, however, holds an inner corrective mechanism against Kaufmann’s thesis. And, in fact, this resistance of architecture to ‘self- determination’ was explicitly referred to in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. Firstly, it is not true that Kant proposes a theory of art as disengaged from the social, as Kaufmann suggests, in its own interest.12 More precisely, for Kant, the underlying content of artistic experience is the relationship between fundamental ideas of metaphysics and morality—above all, the foundational notion that the will can be freely determined by the principle of morality.13 In addition, as Kant put it in his ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’, in the case of architecture a building’s suitability to its purpose is a preliminary condition to any subjective aesthetic judgment. Consequently, it is impossible to aesthetically appraise or ‘judge’ architecture without the intervention of reason to evaluate its suitability for purpose, which reveals an inherent and inevitable restriction of architecture’s autonomy. That is why Kant illustrated his conception of ‘adherent beauty’ with architectural examples: The beauty [...] of a building (such as a church, a palace, an arsenal, or a summer-house) presupposes a concept of the end that determines what the thing FIGURE 3: Pacifère, sheet 40 from Ledoux, L’architecture (1804). 69 isparchitecture.com should be, hence a concept of its perfection, and is thus merely adherent beauty [...]. One would be able to add much to a building that would be pleasing in the intuition of it if only it were not supposed to be a church.14 Hence, the expression of ‘aesthetic ideas’— as representations of the imagination that give cause for the free interplay of the powers of the soul—should be restricted to (or, at the very least, by) morally significant ideas as in any form of art. However, in architecture, these ‘aesthetic ideas’ must be compatible with the orientation of architecture towards an objective end.15 Since what might be called the ‘Kantian revolution’ in aesthetics of architecture, the combination of beauty and purpose remains influenced by the expression of moral ideas, taking the aesthetics of architecture beyond Classicist theories. With Kant, architecture’s primary task is no longer to imitate past perfections (as Classicist theories adduced) but its social comprehensibility, which is ultimately the measure of its inseparable bond with society. By ‘aesthetic idea’ Kant means: that representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible.—One readily sees that it is the counter-part (pendant) of an idea of reason, which is, conversely, a concept to which no intuition (representation of the imagination) can be adequate.16 If Boffrand and Blondel17 epitomized the vanguard of this shift, Ledoux constitutes a paradigmatic and especially elucidative case for the crudeness of tensions present in his work. And yet, when referring to Ledoux’s ‘revolution’ in architecture, did Kaufmann use a correct interpretation of Kant’s major claims isolated above? Did Kaufmann correctly assume (which is central here) Kant’s implied imperative of ‘comprehensibility’ in architecture, a cornerstone of Kant’s transcendental order applied to this discipline? Let us see what Kaufmann stated about (what one could call) ‘the For Kant, the underlying content of artistic experience is the relationship between [...] metaphysics and morality “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 70 R UB IO G A R R ID O requirement of expression’ in Ledoux’s work with another example, the Pacifère: The massive walls of Pacifère and Panarétéon do not even allow a guess at the disposition of the interior. The ideal of geometry has got the better of the Baroque principle of animation [...]. The exterior of the Baroque château clearly expresses the differentiation between the lordly grand salon, the private apartments, and the mezzanine of the servants. The blocks of the revolution are mute. As soon as the architects will renounce the petty devices of “Narrative” architecture, the purposes of their structures will no longer be reflected in the outside.18 This assumption of muteness in the Pacifère (Figure 3) is far from a minor premise in Kaufmann’s proposal, as we shall see immediately, although it clearly contrasts with what Ledoux himself wrote about the Pacifère: if the artists wished to follow the symbolic system that characterizes their production, they would acquire as much glory as the poets; they would elevate the ideas of those who consult them, and there would not be a stone in their works which would not speak to the eyes of persons passing by.19 Kaufmann justifies this symbolism in Ledoux (evident too in Maison des directeurs de la Loue or Maison des Cercles) by relying on two hypotheses: it should be understood as surrender to the rising Romanticism or—even worse—as the persistence of Baroque criteria. The new trend that can already be identified in Ledoux is the paucity of the discretion, in contrast to the Baroque culture or Romanticism, which led him to “show his feelings openly and often in excess”. For Kaufmann, then, expression in architecture is linked to both pre- and post-revolutionary narrative to the extent that “the purposes of their structure” (or construction) are reflected on the outside. Or, in other terms, the identity between the FIGURE 4: Prison in Aix-en-Proence. Extracted from Vues perspectives du Palais du Gouverneur et de la Prison, sheet 189 from Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Architecture de C.-N. Ledoux: Collection qui rassemble tous les genres de bâtiments employés dans l’ordre social, ed. Daniel Ramée (Lenoir éditeur, 5. Quai Malaquais. Paris, 1847). 71 isparchitecture.com internal narrative of this architecture with its outer appearance becomes the communicative value of that architecture, as opposed to examples from (in Kaufmann’s nomenclature) the revolutionary period, a period whose buildings in his view “are mute.” Evidently buildings’ muteness collides with Ledoux’s main purpose in developing a ‘symbolic architecture’, in which “there would be no stone in their works [artists’ whose works follow the symbolic system] which would not speak to the eyes of persons passing by.” 3. THE EMPIRE OF THE SYMBOL Apart from the fact that Kaufmann is demonstrably mistaken in refusing to attribute expressive content to Ledoux’s architecture, Kant’s ‘aesthetic ideas’ theory seems insufficient to take account of this particular interpretation of autonomy in Ledoux’s work. In point of fact, with Kant it is possible to explain the imperative of expression in architecture, but what is to be expressed remains indeterminate in his philosophy.20 This communicative motivation of art was recovered in the second sense of autonomy formulated by Schiller, which indirectly explains the drifting of the concept of autonomy in its reception in architecture. This second conceptualization counteracts the perception of human fragmentation that characterizes modernity. For Schiller, autonomy in art would be the precondition for establishing a new utopian alternative to an ailing society.21 This premise—distinct from what Kaufmann terms ‘the revolutionary’ and its ideas—focuses all its efforts on the transformation of the material conditions of society and inaugurates the critical aesthetic device based on a negative relationship between art and society. In this way, art is provided with both diagnostic and proactive capabilities based on Schiller’s concept of ‘heautonomy.’22 Similarly, Enlightenment critical rationality is transferred to architecture through a commitment to improving society. In France, such authors as Laugier, Boffrand, and Blondel put criticism into the prison in Aix-en-Provence [...] clearly transmits threat and ruthlessness. “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 72 R UB IO G A R R ID O action by adopting a firm attitude to intervene in artistic practices in order to promote certain social orientations. As Schiller made evident, this renewal should go hand-in-hand with the symbolic role of art through the identification of beauty and truth.23 Thus, a great deal of revolutionary efforts revolved around the elaboration of a discourse based in self- determination that could transmit an emancipatory message. The link between proportions and feelings or Blondel’s theory of caractère responds to the need to establish an identity between the created objects and creation as an autonomous action. Indeed, Ledoux establishes a symbolic expression inside the process of constitution of the form, with the particularity, unlike his contemporaries, that he moved towards a utopian creation of a new social order, like, for instance, in the prison in Aix-en- Provence (Figure 4), which clearly transmits threat and ruthlessness. The symbol in architecture thus acquires a role, which depends on the work’s functional orientation, beyond its former decorative or formal repertoire. In other words, an explicit function replaces the implicit one of symbolism in previous periods. In this regard, we can draw at least two major implications. Firstly, the attempt to create a utopia through figuration plunges the process into a deep paradox. On the one hand, the acknowledgment of the inadequacy of resources for the fulfillment of an ideally conceived future stimulates the utopia. But on the other hand, as in Ledoux’s architecture, the wish to present materially such an unattainable future at that very historical moment associates the ideal world with reality, and thus acquires an absolute character that ultimately overrides all alternatives. FIGURE 5: Vue perspective de la ville de Chaux, sheet 15 from Ledoux, L’architecture (1804). 73 isparchitecture.com These aspirations of universalism in Ledoux’s architecture are evident in the projects where future becomes a chimera (Figure 5). On the one hand then, this brand new expression of a utopia through architecture provides hope for a promised land, while on the other, assumes its unattainability. Secondly, precisely because of the legitimation of this universal value of architecture, nature acquires a redemptive character, though not in sense of Rousseau—whereby the immersion in the natural cycle would immunize humans against their inner corruption—but in the Kantian sense of autonomy. Therefore, the return to a mechanism of mimesis with regard to natural processes collides with the intent to break with tradition, launching a new type of determination. As a result of this process, the symbol in architecture was presented in a markedly closed nature, where the signifier (figuration) is identified with the signified (utopia), confirming the Enlightenment’s mechanism of particularizing abstract universals. Thus addressed, the attempt of reconciliation with society and nature reveals its ultimate reversal process of mythologization, bringing both society and nature back to the realm of what humanity can dominate and manipulate. This reactive movement can be seen in Jean- Nicolas-Louis Durand or Louis-Ambroise Dubut’s postulates, whose work once captivated Kaufmann. The naïve emancipatory impulse became mere ideology on which to support a no longer renovating program. The truth is that, specifically in architecture, the two necessary correctives that Schiller puts forward to protect Kant’s principle of autonomy from the functional orientation of art—that is, ‘immunity’ and ‘indifference’24—may not be present in a practice that is inseparable from society and its needs. Without these correctives, architecture acquires a hegemonic overtone in its messianic positioning, something evident in Ledoux’s architecture. As an internal corrective to the tendency to isolation of autonomous art, Kant showed what in Schiller [T]he symbol in architecture thus acquires a role [...] beyond its former decorative or formal repertoire. “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 74 R UB IO G A R R ID O summons the threat of the mystifying absoluteness, aggravated by the heteronomous nature of architecture, which brings closer (and even equates) morals and aesthetics, expression and utopia. Hence, Adorno’s critique of Schiller,25 perhaps precipitated in the exclusively aesthetic level, becomes extremely relevant in the case of architecture. 4. ENIGMA AND SOCIAL COMMITMENT For Adorno, all references to the exteriority of art—such as its legitimacy through commitment to society or its compressibility—must be articulated from its immanence as an object. That is why he insists on the need for autonomy “as imprisonment of aesthetics to the realm of aesthetics.” This is, in fact, a requirement to make negative dialectics in art feasible. As opposed to sovereign aesthetics (Schiller’s proposal), he states that negativity beyond aesthetics is powerless against social conditions. The work of art must be autonomous to fulfill its function as social criticism. The autonomy of art must account for the status of aesthetics demanding its own rules without compromising its mission of transgressing its own limits, which would constrain its sovereignty. It is not only art that must meet the requirement of autonomy, but the work of art itself should also follow general discourse: “By crystallising in itself as something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as ‘socially useful’, it criticizes society by merely existing.”26 Derived from this antinomy of the autonomy in art with a critical purpose, one of the first renunciations that art—and architecture insofar it is a form of art—must accept is communication in its heteronomous sense. Adorno harshly criticized the alleged social role of art as communicability; namely, the thesis that art becomes social as soon as it provides an accessible meaning.27 In this there is an evident risk, Adorno claimed, for communicative art to grow ideological. Art cannot claim both its sovereignty in society and its autonomy. It must present itself as criticizing society by evidencing society’s contradictions. Its mere existence constitutes a critique of society by standing against the prevailing codes, instrumentalization being chief among them. Art should be art in itself and it should not depend on alien instances of legitimation to be autonomous. In turn, art must be autonomous to preserve in itself a remnant of its social nature. In short, Adorno considered autonomy and emancipation as two counteracting dialectical poles. And in this sense, he claimed the independence of all reality, which Kant had cast doubt on by placing art in a pre-rational place. Yet, at the same time Adorno vindicated the truthful content of the work of art, externalizing autonomy in the object: the work of art, then, opens a space of denial as long as it can be presented as another self, something outside historical constraints, providing an alternative in this regard. His aim is to prevent autonomy from becoming 75 isparchitecture.com an accomplice of instrumental rationality, as indeed is the case in Ledoux insofar as he sets a new utopia crystallized in his projects under the premises of “welfare” or “progress.” In this sense, the cornerstone of Adorno’s argumentation lies in the location of a space of freedom that simultaneously accounts for art’s renunciation of any external commitment and for its integration with reality. In an Adornian sense, the lack of functionality in art, alienated and insular, endows it with an internal consistency that, in its autonomy, manifests itself to reality as something impossible to be instrumentalized. Art has to pursue the restructuring of life without imposing any structures on that life. It intervenes as a reflection of society, projecting what is denied on who denies it, returning unacknowledged internal contradictions to the source of these contradictions. In this regard, with the theoretical support provided by Adorno, the enigma as an epistemological content—opposed to the truth understood as adaequatio—acquires an internal moral status which dissolves the aporia faced by aesthetic modernity and opens the way for the possibility of an autonomy in architecture without compromising architecture’s inherent nature. What explains this ‘inherent nature’? And what is its relation to the enigmatic? I will answer these questions in reverse order, effectively delegating treatment of the first question to section 5. Adorno refers to the epistemological status of the enigma in art in many passages of his Aesthetic Theory, due both to its importance and its complexity. For instance: [T]he need of artworks for interpretation, their need for the production of their truth content is the stigma of their constitutive deficiency. Artworks do not achieve what is objectively sought in them. The zone of indeterminacy between the unreachable and what has been realized constitutes their enigma. They have truth content and they do not have it.28 Art has its own truth content, but it does not pass through empirical verification, nor through realization of the concept in Hegelian sense, as Adorno’s critique of Schiller [...] becomes extremely relevant in the case of architecture. “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 76 R UB IO G A R R ID O both represent an identity theory. There is a truth of art that lies in the formal constitution of the work; that is, an autonomous truth. A recent study by Ferris, entitled “Politics and the Enigma of Art,” explains the passage’s likely intent as follows: [P]recisely because art does not affirm any meaning claimed on its behalf, it remains, in a word Adorno emphasizes, an enigma […]. This tendency of art to express its uncertainty by asserting a function that would seem to carry all the certainty of self-evidence becomes the sign of art’s inability to recognize its own inmost tendencies.29 Ferris highlights how Adorno’s stance of art as enigma30 effectively resists Kant’s obligation for comprehensibility. This, however, does not leave Adorno—or a philosophy of architecture built on his foundations— bereft of communicative potential: In the end, all roads lead to this enigma in Adorno. Why artworks have and do not have a truth content is because the enigmatic character of art, as Adorno defines it, requires that artworks ‘say something and in the same breath conceal it’. Their truth content is a saying that does not say what it says, but does say that it says. The content of the artwork is consequently tied to its form by this enigma. As a result, the enigmatic is what constitutes form as constitutive of art. What this means is that, if form is how art is mediated as art, form cannot represent an object. This is because art, for Adorno, resists objectification in its very concept. As a result, whatever content art has must be a content that takes away such an object even as it affirms it. This is the task of the enigmatic.31 As we can see here, understood aright, Adorno does not challenge so much as modify Kant’s obligation for art to be ‘comprehensible’: he alters the demands of what art needs to communicate, and how it does so, to enter meaningful relations with society without lapsing into an identity theory (for Adorno, the source of modern instrumentalization). And this, in turn, explains how we can endorse, as my argument urges we should, an analogous demand for art to be enigmatic (in Adorno’s sense) also in architecture. That Ledoux halfway meets Kant’s obligation in just this way was precisely argued above. Where this leaves architecture and autonomy more widely remains to be seen. To this we turn next. 5. AUTONOMY AND MODERNITY IN ARCHITECTURE Clearly, for Adorno the very possibility of art as enigma did not arrive in literary and musical composition until the avant-garde with Beckett and Schönberg. In fact, for Adorno a pure and rigorous concept of art should be just music32 and, in that sense, (especially) architecture assumes an inner limitation as a specific art: its dependence on function determines in some degree a dialectic between form and matter.33 Yet it is also true that Adorno never explicitly refused to include architecture among modern arts. Moreover, in his analysis of functionalism he assumes that 77 isparchitecture.com architecture and art in general share the same challenges, quoting Scharoun’s Philharmonic as an example of architecture’s capacity to overcome such challenges.34 Adorno’s insistence on the radical defense of the autonomy of art—a defense that motivates inquiry into the enigmatic in the first place—aspires to be an antidote against the specific totalitarian movements (whether from fascism or from the culture industry) that prevailed throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Persisting in the separation of spheres and avoiding absolutism is part of Adorno’s resistance against regression. This was under the premise of taking the unavoidability of modernity in its emancipatory impulse without thereby obviating the danger of radical isolation. Thus interpreted, the avant-gardes evince in their inner struggles the tension between the real and the loss of human identity. From within modernity and in their deepening in the criticism of modernity, the various avant-gardes provide the scale of the insufficiency of their internal project of emancipation. This liberating surge, even in a negative sense, is perhaps the most indelible contribution of the avant-gardes, to such an extent that not even the mannerisms of the 1960s and the attempts to overcome postmodernism have managed to unseat it. The successive crises of modernity merely confirm the relevance of modernity, to the extent that it appears as an unavoidable project.35 Even today—and probably more than ever—the recognition of dissatisfaction with what currently exists prevails to the extent that the project of modernity has not been reversed. Modernity leads to a perpetual attempt to establish a solid foundation despite the intimate awareness of its futility. This is the case of the avant- garde and it was also at the heart of Ledoux’s work. With the dissolution of the classical categories, architecture had to face the new dialectics between rational and sensitive, ideal and real, without any solid anchors. And it is precisely to the extent that architecture cannot abandon its commitment The impossibility of autonomy in architecture transforms its project into a paradigm of modernity. “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 78 R UB IO G A R R ID O to social needs, given its internal heteronomy, that it turns out to be prefigurative for the rest of the arts: in the movement toward the self- absorption of art that modernity brings with it, architecture paradoxically becomes a different social self. Internalizing the antinomy of Adorno’s autonomy in architecture, the impossibility of autonomy in architecture transforms its project of autonomy into a paradigm of modernity, which thus becomes exemplary for the other arts. The radical shift represented by the avant-gardes and, in particular, its problematization of the autonomy of art, soon revealed the reverse commitment in architecture, which could be illustrated in Ledoux’s work. Today, the avant-garde’s vindictive nature is perceived in a heteronomous sense: its integration into the canons of dominant logic invigorated its immunity and expanded its domain. Adorno retrieves this internal tearing of modernity and incorporates it into art through its negativity. Any attempt of positivity, either from social commitment or the defense of the ideal of progress, would precisely encourage the false expectation of its realization. Reconciliation is only possible by experiencing the impossibility of envisaging the way forward. Adorno channeled the aspirations of the Enlightenment towards confrontation with the world, and in that sense, art becomes indispensable. It is precisely because autonomy belongs to this modern movement that it holds the very paradox of modernity: the foundation of concepts, possibilities, promises, etc., encompasses the threat of their loss. Along with the idea of an autonomous architecture, the possibility of a struggle for emancipation and freedom vanishes, as so does the possibility of its total dissolution, as architecture may not find the way to become immediately social. Alienated from its original social function and provided with a critical role against society due to its autonomy, a sense of free humanity feeds architecture, while, by its own autonomy, architecture has to deny society the access to that refuge of humanity. Or, as Adorno would say, as an autonomous art, architecture has to negate society for the sake of a promise of a different society. But, as an intrinsically heteronomous art (as a functional art), architecture must serve society.36 In this sense, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s work may be seen to presage the antinomies of autonomy which architecture would face during the avant-garde: the paradox that architecture imposes on its social milieu a hegemonic order which ultimately leads it to abandon its social commitment. Although only intuitively, we can say that the situation of architecture during the nineteenth century with regard to the revolutionary period finds its parallel in its present situation since the avant-gardes. To find again its role in society, architecture should regain its social commitment with a new problematization of its autonomy in response to the actual changing paradigms (as could be the consolidation of globalization: there is nothing 79 isparchitecture.com outside modernity, the collapse of the Keynesian ideal, the problem of political representation, etc.). The capacity of architecture to meet new challenges involves the dilemma of whether architecture can actually still be considered a modern art—that is, an autonomous art—or whether, on the contrary, we should assume its pre-modern nature and embrace unproblematically the reconciling essentialist paradigms or even the explicitly reactionary ones, as the diatribe between Kaufmann and Sedlmayr illustrated.37 Since the Enlightenment, architecture has simultaneously experienced its period of greatest prominence in society and the intimate conviction that it can no longer change anything. Modernity bequeathed to architecture an uncertainty which remains unresolved. This uncertainty is likely to contain some modern values as long as it remains indefinite and calls us back to this kind of radical question. We either accept this, or accept that architecture is essentially a pre-modern art. ENDNOTES 1. The Historical Dictionary of Philosophy opens its entry on “Autonomie” with a warning of sorts, entitling its opening section “The Problematic History of the Concept.” See Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer, and Gottfried Gabriel, eds., ‘Autonomie’, Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schmabe, 2007), 431-479. 2. See Emil Kaufmann, Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier: Ursprung und Entwicklung der autonomen Architektur (Vienna: R. Passer, 1933). No English translation of this book exists, but fragments thereof surface in English translations of Walter Benjamin’s (nearly contemporaneous) Arcades Project. See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 3. A ‘collision’ well documented in the papers by Coleman, Owen, and others presented at the International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture conference in 2014, and now published in Architecture Philosophy. See Nathaniel Coleman, “The Myth of Autonomy,” Architecture Philosophy 1, no. 2 (2015): 157-178 and Graham Owen, “Whatever Happened to Semi- Autonomy,” ArchitecturePhilosophy 2, no 1. (2016): 6-20. 4. Cf. Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750-1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 5. See Ernst Feil, “Autonomie-Heteronomie,” in Antithetik neuzeitlicher Vernunft: “Autonomie-Heteronomie” und “rational-irrational” (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987). 6. In his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Kant formulates the moral law with the help of the concept of autonomy (the so called Formula of Autonomy): ‘‘the idea of the will of every rational being as a will giving universal law’’ (G 4:431; cf. G 4:432) or ‘‘Not to choose otherwise than so that the maxims of one’s choice are at the same time comprehended with AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 80 R UB IO G A R R ID O it in the same volition as universal law’’ (G 4:440; cf. G 4:432, 434, 438). See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002). 7. I follow here the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant and, more precisely, Paul Guyer’s edition of Critique of the Power of Judgment. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 8. Early in his monograph, Kaufmann draws a parallel between the autonomous morality established by Kant and the autonomous architecture he wants to defend in (that is, with respect to the work of) Ledoux. See Kaufmann, Von Ledoux, 12. 9. Emil Kaufmann, “Three Revolutionary Architects, Boullée, Ledoux, and Lequeu,” in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 42, no. 3 (1952): 525. 10. The evolution of these terms is clearly explained in Detlef Mertins, “System and Freedom: Sigfried Giedion, Emil Kaufmann, and the Constitution of Architectural Modernity,” in Modernity and Ideology, 212- 231. Despite this, it is possible to identify even in Kaufmann’s later works the same interpretation of autonomy as a formal configuration (which section I identified as central). 11. As Kaufmann states in Architecture in the Age of Reason: Baroque and Postbaroque in England, Italy, and France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955). 12. Recall from section I that Kaufmann uses Kant’s concept of autonomy in order to justify a new architecture, that of abstract mechanisms that operate autonomously, regardless of any sociocultural constraint. In that sense, this interpretation of the transcendental version of autonomy might have been accused of paving the way for the isolation of architecture from society. 13. See Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 60-227 and Paul Guyer, “The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited,” in Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 77-109. 14. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §16, 114-115. 15. Function and form in a successful architecture intensify each other more than being just added. See Paul Guyer, “Free and Adherent Beauty: A Modest Proposal,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 42, no. 4 (2002): 357- 366. 16. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §49, 192. 17. Throughout this paper, I intend the ‘younger’ of the two Blondels, Jacques-François (1705-1774). 18. Kaufmann, “Three Revolutionary Architects,” 520. 19. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des 81 isparchitecture.com moeurset de la législation (Paris: H. L. Perronneau, 1804), 115. The original French reads: “si les artistes vouloient suivre le système symbolique qui caractérise chaque production, ils acquéreroient autant de gloire que les poètes; ils éléveroient les idées de ceux qui les consultent, et il n’y auroit pas une pierre qui, dans leurs ouvrages, ne parlât aux yeux des passants.” 20. This is the main thesis of Paul Guyer, “Kant and the Philosophy of Architecture,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69, no. 1 (2011): 7-19. 21. Friedrich Schiller, Kallias, oder, Über die Schönheit: Fragment aus dem Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Koerner; Über Anmut und Würde (Stuttgart: P. Reclam., 1971), letters V-VI. 22. Against what he stated in Kallias, in Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller disclaims nature as a source of artistic impulse in order to link autonomy of art with a utopian reconciliation. In order to establish an “ästhetischen Staat,” Schiller undertakes a project of objectification of the concept of beauty and finds its ontological foundation—and the foundation of aesthetical autonomy—in appearance and play. See Friedrich Schiller, Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004). 23. See Luigi Pareyson, Etica ed estetica in Schiller (Milan: Mursia, 1983), 60- 70. 24. See Schiller, Letters, letters 9 and 26. 25. Adorno rejects tout court Schiller’s impulse towards the transcendence of art beyond its aesthetic realm. The identification of an area of freedom in art, thus legitimizing its existence through commitment to society counterfeits a totality unreachable from its singular rationality. The idea of freedom, akin to aesthetic autonomy, was shaped by domination, which it universalized. This holds true as well for artworks. The more they freed themselves from external goals, the more completely they determined themselves as their own masters. Because, however, artworks always tum one side toward society, the domination they internalized also radiated externally. See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone, 1997), 17-18. 26. Ibid., 229. 27. See the example of Van Gogh’s paintings as the end of identity between narrative content and meaning in artworks. For more details, see the sections entitled “Enigmaticalness, Truth Content, Metaphysics” and “Coherence and Meaning,” in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Ibid., 118-162. 28. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 128. 29. David S. Ferris, “Politics and the Enigma of Art: The Meaning of Modernism for Adorno,” Modernist Cultures 1.2 (2005): 192-208: here 195. 30. Adorno’s German term is ‘Rätsel’ and designates for instance the type of riddle the Sphinx used in its attempt to snare Odysseus. The meaning and intent of her riddles are, to the discerning eye, both opaque and visible. AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 82 R UB IO G A R R ID O 31. Ferris, “Politics,” 204. The quotation within the quotation is to Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 120. 32. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2005), §143. 33. This is why, for instance, Hilde Heynen has argued that Adorno ultimately regarded architecture to be unsuitable for entry into modernity and modern art. See Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 198-200. 34. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 44. 35. In this sense, Kaufmann’s most significant contribution may be the hypothesis of continuity between the Enlightenment and modern architecture, thus taking a broad sense of modernity. See Kaufmann, Architecture in the Age of Reason. Most pressingly, Ledoux raises the issue of how we date the entry point of modernity in architecture itself, but I leave this matter for elsewhere. For discussion, see not only Kaufmann’s works cited earlier, but also Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983). 36. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Functionalism Today”, Oppositions 17 (1979): 31-41. 37. See Sedlmayr’s assessment of Kaufmann’s From Ledoux in: Hans Sedl- mayr, Verlust der Mitte: Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit (Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1951). Sedlmayr located precisely in the French Revolution’s visionary architecture the origin of the lack of rootedness and authenticity in modern architecture. Following his analysis, architecture had reached its autonomous status with Loos and Le Corbusier at the cost of losing its sense of responsibility with the culture and society, and reduced to an empty ideal geometric formal suit. isparchitecture.com An Aesthetic Deontology: Accessible Beauty as a Fundamental Obligation of Architecture 1 Christian Illies and Nicholas Ray Introduction Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the intersection of ethics and aesthetics, especially pertaining to literature, cinema, and now architecture. The idea of an ‘intersection’, especially when construed as ranging over ‘values’, while fruitful, has perhaps limited the field. This paper presents an alternative view, grounded in the idea of a general deontology, with moral and aesthetic duties forming discrete but interconnected parts of such a deontology. More concretely, we argue for an “Obligation to Accessible Beauty.” After having clarified what architectural beauty amounts to (section 1), we will outline the argument for such an obligation (section 2). It will be based upon the moral demand to respect human beings and thus to serve their basic needs, and the need for beauty is one of them. The obligation is strengthened further by the fact that architecture is in the public realm (and therefore unavoidable for people). The notorious subjectivity of beauty does not count against this argument because it is agnostic towards any one ideal of what a beautiful building consists in. It only requires that the architect give beauty due consideration in her design deliberations. While the Obligation to Accessible Beauty is universal to humanity, its satisfaction can be local for any culture. To conclude, we will discuss how this aesthetic While the Obligation to Accessible Beauty is universal to humanity, its satisfaction can be local for any culture “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 64 IL LI ES & R A Y obligation can be compared and weighed against other moral demands (section 3). Obviously, the suggested Obligation to Accessible Beauty is not a recipe for the avoidance of moral conflict. But by seeing this aesthetic demand to be commensurate with other moral demands, the design problem becomes more tractable. We conclude that apparently irreconcilable demands have to be resolved by appeal to aesthetic solutions. A building’s design is always a synthetic response to varying requirements. Thus, when it comes to reconciling conflicting moral and practical demands in architecture, beauty, not morality has the last word. We explore further architectural consequences of this view in our recent work, The Philosophy of Architecture.2 Here, however, our concern is primarily with solidifying the philosophical foundation of this project. 1. The Beauty of Buildings 1.1 Beauty as the Prime Distinction of Architectural Design We begin with a claim that what distinguishes architecture from mere building is an intention to go beyond meeting a functional brief or solving a problem. Nikolaus Pevsner famously declared that a bicycle shed was a building, whereas Lincoln Cathedral was a work of architecture, which implies that a mundane building could not be beautiful, or, beautiful in the same sense as a cathedral.3 Against Pevsner, we agree with the generally held view that a distinction should not be based on scale, or on the modesty of a building’s purpose. Whenever the craftsperson makes something with especial care, we claim, there is and should be an intention, even if unacknowledged consciously, to make something that others can recognize as beautiful.4 There are several kinds of beauty in architecture, and a simple utilitarian building might well share some, though not all, qualities with much more elaborate and considered structures. An over- riding task of the act of building with this particular care might be described as that of enabling people to feel ‘at home in the world’. This might entail a careful consideration of the nature of the context of a building—its setting in a landscape, or in an existing village, town, or city. We are simply not satisfied with mere functionality; we expect architecture to aim at ‘more’. And it seems that fulfilling exactly this task, if this is accepted, is the underlying purpose behind the various types of beauty, described below, which we regard as the aims of architecture. 1.2 Varieties of Beauty in Architecture When we talk about “beauty” in architecture, we must be aware of its complexity—there are different varieties of beauty one can legitimately attribute to or expect of architecture. We make no pretense to replicate the enormous literature that has accrued on those varieties: our purpose is to build the basis for a larger argument.5 65 isparchitecture.com For convenience we might distinguish the following five types. There is formal beauty which accounts for what moves us when architects manipulate volumes to create memorable spaces—such as the Pantheon in Rome, which is based on a sphere, and which few visitors are unaffected by. Related notions of architecture as a spatial art, or as primarily the plastic manipulation of form (as Le Corbusier sometimes claimed), and the careful articulation of surfaces enter here.6 Formal, or compositional, beauty can be found in other works of art, such as sculptures and pictures, but functional beauty is a quality found in the design of useful products, such as implements, and architecture. Such objects, and those of (engineering) design, sometimes have a beauty inherent in their efficient workings.7 When buildings and urban spaces serve functional criteria in elegant ways (such as the beautiful drainage system in St Mark’s Square in Venice), they give a particular satisfaction not achieved by purely decorative objects devoid of use. Formal and functional beauty can be found in many non-architectural artifacts. But architecture is almost always related to a particular location: it is situated in a context, which renders it capable of exhibiting contextual beauty. Architecture theorists speak of the “murmur of a site,”8 of architecture as an ‘art of the ensemble’, and more. The ways that effective architecture relates to its setting, whether urban or rural, and whether by seeking to blend in with it or stand out from it, is one of its most obvious characteristics, and most often a cause of criticism when people feel a wrong decision has been made. Put positively, contextual fit (especially with regard to cultural context) can co-account for a building’s beauty.9 There is also time related beauty. Given the endurance of much architecture, the way in which a building succeeds in doing so can be a factor in the satisfaction it gives. Its age can bestow aesthetic pleasures; materials may display weathering effects When it comes to reconciling conflicting moral and practical demands in architecture, beauty, not morality, has the last word. “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 66 IL LI ES & R A Y in pleasing ways, and so on.10 Finally, there is intellectual beauty. Just as elegant solutions are accomplished in mathematics or in the fugues of J.S. Bach, architecture can give rise to aesthetic pleasure because it exhibits the solution to a complex set of technical problems. This also pertains to the considered deployment of proportional systems, as in Lutyens’s Liverpool Cathedral and war memorials.11 Buildings are complicated artifacts, and some of them can be admired as intellectual achievements over and above their formal beauty. Furthermore, some would claim the Pantheon is an aesthetically moving work of architecture not just on account of its satisfactory form, as noted above, or its intellectually satisfying geometry, but because as a work it reflects deep trans-cultural meanings: the building’s volume represents the world. This is perhaps a spiritual rather than intellectual type of beauty.12 The different types of beauty can be in correspondence, but they also create a tension. It would seem that it is quite possible to have a formal beauty that is not functional, or particularly rigorous intellectually: this would be evident in a sculpturally compelling structure that was maybe not very useful, such as Zaha Hadid’s fire station for the Vitra organization. Buildings can also be formally beautiful, and work well, without being particularly satisfying in the third way: these might be “romantic” works, such as Neuschwanstein, the castle built by Ludwig II, that depend to a certain extent on the associations that are summoned up. But a building such as Neuschwanstein can be criticized if it is not also skilfully composed— in such cases, it degenerates into mere kitsch. And a laboratory building that was rigorously worked through as a design, and also functioned well, would not necessarily be beautiful formally, even though at various periods architects have argued that we ought to find such buildings beautiful. Any building aspiring to beauty must represent some kind of reconciliation of these different types of beauty. This aspiration to beauty is what architects should aim at, or so we will argue. 2. Aesthetic Deontology 2.1 The Obligation to Beauty We began by claiming that the intention to make something beautiful is what distinguishes architecture from mere building, even though some have argued that aesthetics should have nothing to do with architecture. Hannes Meyer, who succeeded Gropius as the director of the Bauhaus, famously stated that architecture is a “technical, not an aesthetic process.”13 According to Meyer, architecture can do without beauty: its essence is the creation of a functional space, its worth is merely ‘what it does’ and how well it does that. Here, beauty is a luxury, not a demand. Alternatively, beauty might arise naturally, or even necessarily, as Functionalists claimed, if the functional aspects are satisfied. 67 isparchitecture.com In contrast to either of these two positions, we argue that beauty, in the senses described above, is the prime goal and obligation of architectural design. We shall refer to this claim, and the moral obligation behind it, as the ‘Obligation to Beauty.’14 There are different ways to argue for this claim, depending on the kind of ethical theory one presupposes. In Aristotelian mode, any human practice aims at some result, this being the implicit goal of the activity. We practice the flute in order to play it better; we make each sculpture not only for itself, but also in order to improve as sculptors. Similarly, the result of good artistic practice, that is to say the practice of the art or craft of being an architect, will be a product with aesthetic quality. And if it is the aim of architects to practice their craft to the highest standard they are able to achieve, then architects must strive for aesthetic quality. Otherwise it would remain opaque as to why we should regard an aesthetically successful building as ‘good architecture’ in a wider sense. But the Obligation to Beauty can also be supported by a moral argument of a different variety, one motivated by a concern for human well-being. If we (morally) must promote human well-being, then this includes all human needs and desires.15 After all, that is why buildings should be functional— because as vulnerable, dependent animals, we need a safe and warm and healthy place to live. But we need more: we also have a fundamental need for a pleasing place where we can happily live. As the 20th century Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck put it: “Architecture need do no more, nor should it ever do less, than assist man’s homecoming...”16 While it is conventionally thought of as supplemental, beauty is (on this view) actually essential to human well- being, for our emotions and our feeling at home, otherwise it would be inexplicable why most people spend so much time and money decorating their homes. The simplistic anthropology of an architect like Hannes Meyer, with his list of ‘motives’ from 1928, is ludicrously reductive.17 Humans need Humans need more: they deeply long for beauty. “ ” AP . vol 1 . No 2 . 2015 68 IL LI ES & R A Y more: they deeply long for beauty, a desire that is probably genetically embedded.18 Any appropriate notion of well-being will therefore support the claim of beauty being a necessary goal of architecture. 2.2 The Obligation to Accessible Beauty If we endorse this second moral argument, and if the aesthetic quality, or beauty, of a building responds to a moral requirement for promoting well-being, then something important follows: the beauty that the architect must strive for must be accessible. Not only do people have strong views about building, they also articulate them forcibly, and this gives us reason to believe that they understand what it is that they object to and what they enjoy.19 Architecture’s status as a public art entails moral requirements not adherent to other art forms. Whereas we do not have to pick up a prize-winning novel, or listen to a highly-praised piece of music, it is impossible to avoid the buildings all around us. Thus people will always be confronted by architecture and their desire for beauty will be frustrated if the architecture they experience is banal or ugly. (To be sure, there are many ways of satisfying the human need for beauty but because architecture is in an important way inescapable, any ugly architecture will be a frustration of this need, whether or not we are able to experience beauty in other areas.) There is therefore an onus on architecture to communicate in a way that, while it may be appreciated on many levels, is accessible, rather than conceived in a private language that only the cognoscenti can appreciate. Architects frequently tend towards forming sub-cultures that find certain forms and materials (like bare concrete) beautiful, which the general public may find ugly and unfriendly. But to the extent that buildings are a form of public art, used and seen by many, they must also be capable of satisfying the aesthetic desires of many. An exclusively elitist concept of beauty would not do so and is thus not the morally required beauty. As Fontaine’s fable tells us, we need to ensure that people with a variety of capabilities can enjoy the good food we prepare.20 Yet, such accessibility needs a pinch of salt. What is accessible is not simply given. It often seems that it is a part of architects’ Obligation to Beauty to expand the aesthetic expectations of their clients. If they did not do so, people could be condemned to a banal repetition of conventional buildings. Thus the best architecture might well assist in a re-definition of what we generally call the beautiful. The idea of an accessible beauty can therefore be seen as a dialogue between the architect, or her building, and the public: whilst it is arrogant for architects to say that people must learn to understand their buildings, it is clear that public taste develops and moves on, so that inspiring works of architecture broaden the area of acceptability for the general public. It is a principal moral task for 69 isparchitecture.com architects, therefore, to judge carefully the aesthetic accessibility of the buildings they propose, and this is applicable for each of the five different types of beauty we identified above. 2.3 Challenging the Obligation to Beauty Is there really an aesthetic obligation of the variety we propose? Some would claim that the requirement that architects should create aesthetic quality (let alone beauty) in their designs is pointless, impossible, or even dangerous. Here are four objections. Firstly, one might object that our characterization too easily subscribes to the formalist conception of the aesthetic sense and does not accurately record how people experience a building. Much of the way we experience architecture is intuitive. We are “enveloped” in the experience of a work of architecture, as Walter Benjamin observed21; we do not usually stand in front of it analyzing its divisions into coherent and incoherent parts. In this sense, experiencing a group of buildings is like a walk through a forest, or the exploration of a cave, and could more readily be subjected to psychological analysis than conventional aesthetic descriptions. Secondly, even if there can be some objectivity in the differing experiences people have of buildings, the way buildings are appreciated is inevitably culturally conditioned: members of certain castes in India may be more likely to enjoy the rich texture and overwhelming detail of a Hindu temple, whereas Europeans of an analogous class prefer the plain abstraction of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. The attempt to find universal qualities of beauty (desirable intricacy, or perfection of proportion) would therefore be quite futile. Thirdly, our appreciation is not only conditioned by cultural origin, but also by time. As our technology progresses, forms which were previously impossible or uneconomic to construct become possible. In the past, for example, only limited spans were achievable, so intermediary columns were necessary, and it was natural to adopt some It is a principal moral task for architects [...] to judge carefully the aesthetic accessibility of [their] buildings. “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 70 IL LI ES & R A Y conventions to decorate them. But now, we might not need columns (in a traditional sense) at all. Structures could arise, and warp and twist like a piece of landscape, and the conventions of architectural form are revealed for what they always were—products of the technological limitations of their time. We can also, fourthly, raise the more fundamental objection whether we should aspire to make beautiful buildings at all. Isn’t cultural beauty a dangerous camouflage of a rather grim reality? It might be more truthful to the purposes that they serve, and the conditions of their production, that buildings should be ugly. In his analysis of the relationship between aesthetics and political interests, Theodor Adorno argued that all cultural products, including architecture, were extended instruments of capitalism, necessarily putting those who experience them into the position of passive consumers. “Beauty” in this reading is particularly dangerous, because it obscures the brutal face of reality, that is a system of capitalist exploitation and instrumentalization. “Ugly” art, in contrast, will be a more truthful revelation of the real conditions of society. His observations of 1944 anticipate the feelings of many in the last seventy years.22 These objections are paradigmatic for the aesthetic debate on architecture and aesthetics. They correspond to fundamental philosophical theories: aesthetic subjectivism would claim that any aesthetic experience remains subjective and no general judgements can be made about aesthetic qualities. Aesthetic culturalism is the basis for the second and third objection; it sees aesthetic judgements as being cultural in origin and shaped by an epoch or time. Again, any promotion of beauty seems futile from this perspective, at least if it aims at more than the preferences of a group at a certain time. The fourth critique is a variation of ‘ideology-critique’ that the Frankfurt School developed; here theories are debunked according to the motives or interests that they serve implicitly or explicitly. Let us turn to the first objection. It is obvious that a universal demand for architectural beauty like the one above only makes sense if a generally shared understanding of what beauty amounts to is possible.23 Thus at least a mild form of aesthetic objectivism is presupposed by our argument. Following Kant, we hold that “judgements of taste” can make a claim to general (Kant would say “universal”) acceptance—in face of a building like the Pantheon, we consider some aesthetic judgements as the ones everyone should make.24 This objectivism seems to go hand in hand with an aesthetic cognitivism, i.e., the view that aesthetic judgements can be (more or less) correct or wrong and that we can meaningfully reason about whether they are. After all, even an analysis of types of beauty as suggested above only makes sense if the aesthetic is not entirely outside the reach of reason. However, this does not mean that aesthetic judgments are entirely independent from the subject and its way of experiencing the 71 isparchitecture.com world. In his defence of objectivism, Frank Sibley25 rightly points out that aesthetic judgements cannot be inferred directly from non-aesthetic features of an object, but require response-dependent features, that is properties which need the response of the experiencing subjects for being instantiated: “taste, perceptiveness, or sensitivity, of aesthetic discrimination or appreciation” lie at the heart of aesthetic judgments.26 For example, we cannot talk meaningfully about the ‘harmonious proportions of the Pantheon (or its color) without some experience of this harmony (or color). We will therefore base our argument on a moderate objectivism that includes the foundational role of experiences. Following Elisabeth Schellekens’s distinction between an aesthetic perception and an aesthetic judgement, we presuppose that aesthetic perceptions provide “the experiential grounding of an aesthetic judgement,” but that aesthetic judgements are the result of a “rational process” which “relies on the possibility of appealing to an object’s salient features in order to check whether our aesthetic perception is well grounded.”27 The essential role of the subject’s experience explains why aesthetic subjectivism and the reference to individual intuitions will always have a strong appeal. Aesthetic subjectivism is right in emphasizing the possibility of irreducibly subjective aesthetic experiences or intuitions—we only have to remember Peter Eisenman’s notable dislike of Chartres Cathedral28—but regarding aesthetic judgements merely as subjective expressions of preferences explains too little. Aesthetic subjectivism leaves many aspects of these judgements, like the striking convergence of aesthetic judgements over time and between cultures, underdetermined. A “reasonable objectivism” (to use Schellekens’s term) will have to allow for subjective perceptions and even for impenetrable idiosyncrasies. But it will also acknowledge (at least some) aesthetic features of buildings and other artifacts that more generally evoke aesthetic appreciation. Furthermore, reasonable objectivism finds empirical support by Isn’t cultural beauty a dangerous camouflage of a rather grim reality? “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 72 IL LI ES & R A Y many psychological experiments that contradict the strong subjectivist claims. There seem, for example, to be hard-wired preferences for certain facial features. There is also a striking cross-cultural agreement (at least amongst so-called “informed” and “educated” people) about the aesthetic quality of many artworks or buildings. To be sure, any reasonable objectivism has to account for a great variety of aesthetic preferences— but it will do so within a framework of generally acknowledged aesthetic qualities. And it is these qualities, their analysis and promotion, with which we are concerned. The second and third objections are based upon the observation that the understanding of beauty is neither homogenous amongst people nor unchanging over time. In Renaissance times, Medieval architecture was derogatorily baptized “Gothic” by classicizing Italians who blamed Gothic tribes for having sacked Rome and having created a barbarian style of building—while A.W.N. Pugin and other Romanticists of the 19th century celebrated its beauty and dreamt of a (Neo)Gothic world. If ‘beauty’ is an ever-changing concept, does it make sense to demand the design of ‘beautiful’ buildings? Indeed it does, and the arguments above support the demand to strive for architectural beauty within the given cultural context. This culturally specific notion of beauty is implied by a practice which is always part of a cultural context (like building a railway station for a society with a certain infrastructure, tradition, life-form, etc.). Similarly, when we ground the demand for beauty on the promotion of human well-being, the aesthetic experiences of a culture and time must be taken into account; it is an essential part of people’s identity, and thus well-being, to be situated in a certain culture and tradition. That is why we specified the aim as an accessible beauty. In other words: the demand indicates an ideal whose realisation can look rather different in different situations. Some features of a building will be required in most contexts (such as a careful design of details), others will be specific for a certain culture and time (such as the use of a certain style), and others can be highly specific to the situation (the “murmur of the site”). The demand to strive for beauty does not come with an elaborated list of forms that must be globally applied, but asks for sensitive artistic reflection about what constitutes beauty in a particular case. This will include an anticipation of the aesthetic responses of the beholders. But because of the (intended) survival of most buildings over time, the architect should aim at those forms that transcend the fashions of the day and are likely to be accessible for users and beholders of generations yet to come.29 (Not an easy task, but then, good architecture is a demanding art and not a simple craft.) Let us turn to Adorno’s objection. Is there something vicious about creating beauty in an ultimately ugly world? Obviously, one might question his Marxist absolutism about capitalism and doubt whether we can simply 73 isparchitecture.com identify the free market as inherently evil (especially if we cannot easily point to a compellingly successful alternative). But we can accept his political analysis here, for the sake of argument, and look at his fundamental thesis about the intention behind the creation of beauty and about the way the experience of beauty affects us. Both seem highly speculative. There’s evidence that even in the most straightened circumstances people aspire to decorate their dwellings. If the lights of (Robert Venturi’s) Las Vegas, as much as the skyline of Beijing, were created to manipulate people’s feelings, it is by no means obvious why beauty must always be a strategic move to deceive others. But although there are situations in which it serves to encourage the acceptance of an unjust political situation, aesthetic experiences can equally well produce an increased level of awareness or sensibility to the world and, for example, its fragility. It can thereby increase our ability to change it for the better. Friedrich Schiller famously argued that art and the aesthetic impulse allow the individual to transcend inner and outer constraints, thus increasing his or her freedom. There is no compelling reason why we should let Adorno’s single-sided ‘ideology-critique’ delegitimate the desire for beauty. In summary, these more general objections, according to which an Obligation to Beauty presupposes a questionable aesthetic objectivism, or even promotes a dangerous ideology, do not seem to carry much weight. The subjective/ objective debate is only a marginal concern to the aesthetic deontology that is outlined in this paper. Most importantly, the Obligation to Beauty is not committed to a single version of beauty—even as a universal imperative it allows us to embrace some particularist insights. 3. In Search of a Prime Imperative of Architecture If beauty is one moral obligation for architects, we can certainly identify others: we briefly turn to this expanded field of moral duty, before examining deontic conflicts (that is, conflict among the The demand to strive for beauty does not come with an elaborated list of forms that must be globally applied “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 74 IL LI ES & R A Y ‘expanded field’ of moral and aesthetic duties for architecture) and their possible resolutions. We will end this section by searching for a prime imperative of architecture that might help to solve these conflicts. 3.1 Moral Obligations and Conflicts Building entails a complex set of activities, involving many agents and artifacts, and ranges from design and construction to a completed edifice that may remain as continuous reality. Without any claim to finality, this creates (at least) the following reasonable moral demands30: (1) Duties arising from professional behavior; (2) Duties arising from what a building is (designed) for, and pertain to its use, good architecture, independently from the moral discourse31; (3) Moral duties pertaining to the impact of the building on individual users: their health, safety, and general well-being, including their psychological well-being; (4) Moral duties arising from the impact of the building on the natural (non-man made) environment; (5) Moral duties pertaining to the influence on human behavior, individually and collectively; (6) The cultural or symbolic meaning that buildings express and communicate, by means of choices in form, materials, colors, aesthetic style, and the like. To this we would add (7) moral imagination—that is the faculty which anticipates moral answers to complex challenges by portraying a possible and better life-form, society, or world. Moral imagination requires an abstraction from one’s particular situation, an awareness of the values and principles on which one currently acts—as much as an openness to change and the anticipation of different and new ways to deal with current and upcoming challenges (e.g., a library that suggests an ideal of scholarship, a chamber for debate which supposes a society to which we aspire).32 This demand is different from the others in that it is not an obligation but, rather, a luxury (or technically supererogatory): although not all buildings need to inspire our moral imagination, some buildings must do so. Again, buildings might satisfy some, and not all, of these moral demands, and often the satisfaction of one moral demand will be in conflict with another. To give an example: environmental concerns or even safety can clash with the cultural meaning of a building.33 This typology might make it easier to analyze questions (and demands) of moral relevance; however, for several reasons things are more complicated. First, things are more complicated because we have to distinguish between what is objectively good or bad and what is subjectively moral or immoral. The first relates something to a universal ethical standard; in this sense slavery was always as wrong as it is now. When we talk about the subjective morality of the agent, however, we contextualize his or her knowledge of norms and values. Even an antique slave-owner could then have been a subjectively moral person, simply because he could not have known better 75 isparchitecture.com at the time. That difference is relevant for both the brief and design areas: we can ask whether a brief is acceptable (objectively right) and also whether the architect was justified (subjectively moral) in accepting it. As we have illustrated above, we can ask the same question in the area of design. The answers in both cases can be different and the historical context will become relevant in helping come to appropriate judgements. Secondly, things are so complicated because clashes often occur between different types of demands, like aesthetic, moral or functional ones. They sometimes cohere without conflict (it is, for example, as much a moral, a legal, and a functional requirement that engineers design structurally stable buildings). But often they pull in different directions. For example: we might ask whether the gates between the first, second, and third class passengers on the Titanic were morally acceptable, though they were demanded by the etiquette of its time. It is therefore no surprise that some of the finest buildings (that respect the Obligation to Beauty) are erected by blatantly ignoring some fundamental moral demands. 3.2 The Difficulty of a Reconciliation A well-known difficulty of any clash of normative demands is that there are quantitative issues, which are calculable with reasonable precision, and qualitative issues, which are not amenable to the same kind of measurement. How these demands should be balanced against each other is hard to decide, in particular if the very idea of “balancing” is biased towards quantifiable issues. This is a general problem, but is endemic for architecture because it is partially an art form and partially a functional thing—which makes it particularly open to expectations from both the measurable and the unmeasurable sides. And even within the same type of demand, for example the aesthetic one, we have measurable and unmeasurable components. Whereas visual comfort, or the use of materials that are warm to the touch, may be matters that can moral imagination [...] anticipates moral answers to complex challenges “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 76 IL LI ES & R A Y be quantified, whether the aesthetic quality of a conjunction of particular sets of forms is quantifiable remains questionable.34 In a similar way, we could say that it is easy to measure whether we have or have not met some ethical demands; but there are others that are less objectively measurable. We are therefore faced with a complex of categorically different criteria even within the same type of demands. These demands are not hierarchically ordered in an obvious way: we cannot simply argue that only those buildings that perform satisfactorily in all measurable ways get themselves into the category where they can be judged in incommensurable ways, because we can all think of buildings that fail in some measurable way, but are nevertheless highly regarded for good reasons.35 That a building is successful technically, on the other hand, is no guarantee that it is going to be of a high architectural standard. What makes things even more complicated is that there can be conflicting demands of other types. We have seen that the Obligation to Beauty is a moral demand, but morality demands a respect for multiple demands. Budgetary prudence, for example, could be a reasonable criterion for a client commissioning architects, and the constraints that lead to that demand could be quite precisely measured—if the client is a charity, say, with a limited budget. To complicate matters even more, full moral obeisance is not guaranteed to be the best course of action. At least in hindsight, we know that many acknowledged masterpieces were only achieved because architects were in some sense irresponsible with their client’s money in the service of a greater ideal—namely creating a work of architecture that transcended its immediate context—which we would find hard to quantify. So the resulting picture is highly complex: we have tensions between different types of demands (moral, aesthetic, economic) and between the quantifiable and unquantifiable. Because the different demands are deeply interwoven, we cannot even have a trade off on the level of quantifiable demands, because there can be (more or less) quantifiable moral demands to obey unquantifiable normative demands of other types (e.g., to be economically responsible)—and unquantifiable moral demands to obey quantifiable demands of other types (e.g., for flexible buildings). Architecture has not come up with a timeless solution to the tensions between different demands and their clash seems an ongoing theme of architectural self-reflection.36 Few areas of human activity face so many and such different demands—and that is possibly the reason it is particularly hard in the case of architecture to find truly unifying, well- balanced reconciliations rather than biased compromises that give too much weight to some demands at the expense of others. 77 isparchitecture.com 3.3 In Search of a Prime Obligation for Architecture If ethics can neither reconcile different demands a priori, nor hope for an objectifiable trade-off, what could do this work? It is tempting to attempt to prioritize the different types of demands. What, in the end, is the highest obligation? One the one hand, it seems that much, or even all demands have a moral basis. Remember that the strongest argument for the architect’s obligation to create beauty is itself a moral reason. And moral demands can also be seen as grounding other types of requirements, for example functional ones: to build efficiently, safely, and economically is also a way of respecting other humans, their resources (or the resources of future generations), and so forth. However, it is not clear what exactly follows for this priority in time; in particular, it does not imply that the Obligation to Beauty must, in the end, be sacrificed for other moral demands. On the other hand, architecture can be regarded as a way of overcoming normative tensions by suggesting an ultimately aesthetic solution. It must always result in a particular design that in some way or other bridges between conflicting demands. And a successful resolution to conflicting duties will be, as stated in the beginning, an intellectual achievement that can give (intellectual) beauty to a building. Thus, when it comes to reconciling conflicting demands in a building, beauty, not morality, seems always have the last word. To put it another way, apparently irreconcilable demands have to be resolved by appeal to aesthetic solutions. The purpose of this essay has been to identify accessible beauty as a fundamental obligation of architecture. Our argument could point towards the stronger thesis that this is in some way the prime obligation of architecture. Though we would not claim to have reached that conclusion, which would require much more than this paper can contain; nevertheless, we hope to have indicated its possibility. architecture can be regarded as a way of overcoming normative tensions “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 78 IL LI ES & R A Y ENDNOTES 1. This paper is a revised and condensed version of our “Why Architects should design beautiful buildings,” in The Design Turn in Applied Ethics, eds. Thomas Pogge, Jeroen van den Hoven, and Seumas Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012/2016), and builds on Christian Illies, “Schön ist gut! Ästhetisches Bauen als ethische Forderung,” (presentation, Symposium, Basel, Switzerland, March 7, 2013). We are grateful to Stefan Koller and Tom Spector for very helpful comments. 2. Christian Illies and Nicholas Ray, The Philosophy of Architecture (London: Cambridge Architectural Press, 2014). Reviewed by Stefan Koller and Tom Spector below. 3. Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture (London: Penguin, 1943). 4. By this phraseology, we recognize that, though this is a common and perfectly proper approach, it is not necessary to believe in “beauty” as an essence, or some kind of Platonic ideal. We can equally well say, in a somewhat Aristotelian mode, that the product of good architectural practice should be buildings that people would conventionally find beautiful. 5. For an introduction to those issues, see Graham Gordon, “Architecture,” in Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 561-569. See also Saul Fisher, “Philosophy of Architecture,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, September 9, 2015, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/architecture. 6. Goethe, who was acutely sensitive to architecture, emphasized its haptic nature in a conversation with Humboldt. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche. Bd 22 (Goethes Gespräche), ed. Ernst Beutler (Frankfurt: Artemis, 1964), 241. The classic text exploring the various ways in which architecture can affect us is Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1959). 7. See David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design (Oxford: Berg 3PL, 2002) for a full discussion of functional beauty in product design. 8. See Rafael Moneo (presentation, Anywhere Conference, Yufuin, Japan, 1992). Re-printed in El Croquis 20/64/98: Rafael Moneo 1967-2004 (2004): 635-641. See also Francisco González de Canales and Nicholas Ray, Rafael Moneo: Building Teaching Writing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). 9. How contextual fit (and its relation to architectural beauty) is to be spelled out precisely is an open question. For a spirited defense of a highly partisan position, see Roger Scruton, Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8-14. 10. See Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow, On Weathering: The 79 isparchitecture.com Life of Buildings in Time (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993). 11. See Dennis Radford, and Douglas Cawthorne, “Unlocking Lutyens: A Gateway to the Hidden Legacy of John Pell and Sir Christopher Wren” in Architecture Research Quarterly 12, no.1 (2008): 69-85. 12.This could therefore constitute a further category. Others would claim this is an overarching category transcending aesthetics, within which every other category is subsumed. The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and the hermeneutic approach of Gadamer can be read in this way. See Kenneth Frampton, A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form, ed. Ashley Simone (Zurich: Lars Muller, 2015), 18- 27. 13. Hannes Meyer, Bauen und Gesellschaft: Schriften, Briefe, Projekte (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1980). 14. For a similar argument for beauty as a moral obligation see Martin Düchs, Architektur für ein gutes Leben: Über Verantwortung, Moral und Ethik des Architekten (Münster: Waxmann, 2011), 232-235. 15. Given such an inclusivist delineation of ‘well-being’, this proposal differs from the first one, which (at most) relates to Aristotle’s more specific notion of human well-being or ‘flourishing’ (eudaimonia). That said, the present argument could be reformulated for that restricted notion, though we do not pursue this eudaimonistic variant here. 16. Aldo van Eyck quoted in Herman Hertzberger, Aldo van Eyck, eds. Addie van Roijen-Wortmann and Francis Strauven (Amsterdam: Stichting Wonen, 1982). 17. Meyer’s list is as follows: pure construction is the basis and the characteristics of the new world of forms. 1. sex life 2. sleeping habits 3. pets 4. gardening 5. personal hygiene 6. weather protection 7. hygiene in the home 8. car maintenance 9. cooking 10. heating 11. exposure to the sun 12. services these are the only motives when building a house. Meyer was quite optimistic that this would allow for a scientific process of design: this functional, biological interpretation of architecture as giving shape to the functions of life, logically leads to pure construction: this world of constructive forms knows no native country. it is the expression of an international attitude in architecture. internationality is a privilege of the period. […] we examine the daily routine of everyone who lives in the house and this gives us the functional diagram – the functional diagram and the economic programme are the determining principles of the building project. For Meyer’s list and commentary, see Hannes Meyer, “Building,” Bauhaus Year 2, no. 4, quoted in Programs and manifestos on 20th-century architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads, trans. Michael Bullock (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1975), 119. 18. Christian Illies, “The Evolution of Autonomous Beauty. Sexual AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 80 IL LI ES & R A Y Selection versus Natural Selection,” in The Many Faces of Beauty, ed. Vittorio Hösle (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2013), 133-168. 19. In technical terms this presupposes an “internalist” position for people’s belief formation and justification. Subscription to “acceptance internalism” would seem a relevant position to hold where the judgment of a ‘public art’ like architecture is concerned. This question could be examined in greater detail, no doubt, as Stefan Koller has pointed out to us. 20. Vicious Mister Fox’ serves a delicious soup on a flat plate to Miss Stork. And though she is hungry, she cannot eat it with her long beak. 21. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999). 22. Including Nathaniel Coleman, “Is Beauty Still Relevant? Is Art? Is Architecture?,” Architecture Philosophy 1, no. 1 (2014): 81-95. For Adorno, see Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Marxists Internet Archive, last modified February 2005, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm. 23. Here we get close to, without endorsing, an analogue in the aesthetic domain to a ‘categorical’ imperative in the moral domain. (On the difficulty of pushing such an analogy too far, Bernard Williams, Philippa Foot, and John McDowell have written eloquently.) But as we now go on to explain, we steer clear of brute categorization by recognizing cultural context. Contextualization to cultural specifics also endows a principled deontological framework with the means to absorb some of the explanatory appeal of what is presently known as moral ‘particularism’. 24. For a thorough discussion of Kant’s aesthetics, see Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 25. F. N. Sibley and Michael Tanner, “Symposium: Objectivity and Aesthetic,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 42 (1968): 31-54. 26. Frank Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” Philosophical Review 68, no. 4 (1959): 421. 27. Elisabeth Schellekens, “Towards a reasonable objectivism for aesthetic judgements,” British Journal of Aesthetics 46, no. 2 (2006): 175. 28. Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman, “Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture,” Lotus International 40 (1983): 60-68. 29. We say ‘most’ because many forms of architecture—paper architecture and exhibition architecture like the Weissenhofsiedlung—can legitimately evade any obligation to enduring aesthetic relevance. 30. Most of these categories are worked out in more detail in Illies and Ray, The Philosophy of Architecture. The seventh category is a new addition. 81 isparchitecture.com For categories of moral relevance see also Warwick A. Fox, “Architecture Ethics,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology, eds. Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen, Stig Andur Pedersen, and Vincent F. Hendricks (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 387-391. 31. It should be added that the intended function does not have to be the function that the building realizes; see Don Ihde, “The Designer Fallacy and Technological Imagination”, in Defining Technological Literacy: Towards an Epistemological Framework, ed. John R. Dakers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 32. For the importance of moral imagination see Melissa Lane, Eco- Republic: Ancient Thinking for a Green Age (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2011). See also Jane Collier, “Moral Imagination and the Practice of Architecture,” in Architecture and its Ethical Dilemmas, ed. Nicholas Ray (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2005). 33. See Nicholas Ray, “The Cambridge History Faculty Building: a case study in ethical dilemmas in the twentieth century” in Architecture and its Ethical Dilemmas, ed. Nicholas Ray (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2005). 34. For a discussion of proportional systems, which sometimes make this claim, see P. H. Scholfield, The Theory of Proportion in Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958). The Finnish architect Alvar Aalto said his wooden furniture was more functional than the furniture designed by his contemporaries in the Bauhaus, which was metal-framed and cold to the touch. But he acknowledged that scientific analysis “gave out” at some point: “The demands that the chair failed to meet – excessive reflection of sound and light, high thermal conductivity – are actually merely the scientific names of the elements that together make up the mysterious concept of ‘comfort’.” See Alvar Aalto, “Rationalismen och manniskän” (presentation, annual meeting of the Swedish Society of Industrial Design, May 9, 1935), reprinted in Alvar Aalto, Alvar Aalto in his own words, ed. Goran Schildt (New York: Rizzoli International, 1998). 35. Le Corbusier’s famous Villa Savoye would be an example: it is impossible to waterproof it. 36. Taylor and Levine for example, claim that the study of the intersection of architecture and ethics enables one to “achieve a more comprehensive understanding of architecture and ethics than traditionally conceived by either moral philosophers or architectural theorists (particularly phenomenologists) alone.” The authors want to see aesthetic issues as an integral part of the function of a building: it would be impossible therefore to design a war memorial that was aesthetically successful if it could also be seen as endorsing an immoral politics. But as we have observed there are well-known instances of (what most people would consider to be) significant works of architecture that were designed to serve autocratic regimes, or contain uses that we would hardly sanction today: the Alhambra, AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 82 IL LI ES & R A Y or the Coliseum, or Terragni’s Casa del Fascio at Como. According to the authors, the prospects for philosophical investigation are limited, in any case, since they “question the effectiveness of philosophical enquiry, as commonly practised, for understanding moral values in relation to the built environment.” See William M. Taylor & Michael P. Levine, Prospects for an Ethics of Architecture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 78. isparchitecture.com BOOK REVIEW PHILOSOPHY OF ARCHITECTURE, BY CHRISTIAN ILLIES & NICHOLAS RAY LONDON: CAMBRIDGE ARCHITECTURAL PRESS, 2014. ISBN: 978-0993053009 PRICE: $20.99 REVIEWED BY STEFAN KOLLER & TOM SPECTOR Most readers of this journal have probably experienced skeptical responses when trying to explain their interest in the philosophy of architecture. What could such a field consist in? Why does architecture need philosophy? Why does philosophy need architecture? What are the field’s main topics? If only a brief overview of the field existed (is it a field yet?), then we could hand our interlocutors the book secure in the knowledge that, yes architecture philosophy is a field, it has definable boundaries, and contains distinct subject matter. While we would be justified in doubting whether an overview of the subject is achievable, particularly one that confronts outsiders’ skepticism head on, Christian Illies and Nicholas Ray have assembled, in their words, a “little handbook.” The primary task of such a project is always to balance the need for brevity while still doing justice to the subject matter. It is a balancing act Illies and Ray have accomplished with considerable elegance. Philosophy of Architecture weighs-in at a right-sized 161 pages (including bibliography) for a handbook. It consists of four chapters plus a lengthy introduction that is divided into three overarching sections: an introductory section surveys the ways in which architecture theory has appropriated “Philosophical Ideas and World Views,” the central section discusses how applied ethics and aesthetics have been harnessed to explicate architectural topics, and the final section delineates “Philosophical Positions Illustrated in Architectural Practice.” While this last section may be of use to philosophers seeking to better understand how to engage architecture to their areas of AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 84 BO OK R EV IE W interest, it is fair to say that the bulk of the book is aimed at delineating philosophical positions to an architectural audience. The first chapter begins with Plato’s theory of forms and its influence on Renaissance thinking. This focus on absolutes gives way in the eighteenth century to a more historically-aware philosophy informed by Kant and Hegel which in turn opens the door for the relativism of Nietzsche. On the heels of Nietzsche, Heidegger’s influence on such late-modern thinkers as Christian Norberg-Schulz, Karsten Harries, and Juhani Pallasmaa is traced up to the start of the “post-metaphysical age” exemplified in the cultivation of irony found in architectural post- modernism. The second chapter, on ethics, usefully categorizes and discusses six distinct ways in which the study of ethics and architecture is approached: as professional ethics, as a response to a building’s function, its impact on the natural environment, its impact on humans’ physical well- being and on their psychological flourishing, and architecture’s symbolic or cultural role. In the third chapter, the classic problems of aesthetics— beauty’s subjective nature, problems of judgment, questions of artworks’ cognitive content—are discussed in relation to the aesthetic appreciation of architecture. Topics of crucial import for architects concerning the implicit conflicts between aesthetics and function and between aesthetics and ethics are introduced so that the novice can grasp the essence of these complex issues. The chapter concludes in a well-rounded discussion of modernism’s ambivalence towards the goal of beauty. In the final chapter, the philosophical commitments of architects Louis Kahn, Rem Koolhaas, and Alvar Aalto are discussed to introduce the more general idea that philosophical positions can have both implicit and explicit components relevant to architectural practice. While the philosophical areas Illies and Ray’s book most heavily focuses on—ethics and aesthetics—are certainly two bedrock (and intertwining) fields of interest for architecture, the liability of balancing brevity and comprehensiveness is such that, inevitably, some philosophical fields of interest to architects will be left out. We could ask, for example, what of phenomenology? Sure it has been in retreat lately, but it has certainly been a subject of some interest. Environmental ethics has been such a richly developing area in recent decades that, especially considering the urgency of the situation, it probably merits more than a page and a half. Feminism gets no mention at all. Philosophy of media is similarly absent. Even within analytic philosophy (the authors’ allegiance likely falls here) core areas—like metaphysics and epistemology—with some relevance to architectural questions are left for others to address. In this sense, the book serves as a perfect complement to Saul Fisher’s recent overview to analytic philosophy of architecture in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Fisher shines in areas where the book is terse, and vice versa. Between the two, 85 isparchitecture.com neophytes to analytic philosophy of architecture could hardly wish for easier initiation. Hence, for an overview of the more longstanding areas of philosophical interest, as well as some introduction to recent events in those areas, Philosophy of Architecture does what a good “little handbook” should do: it presents the fields in such a way that a reader with a budding interest in these matters can delve into them further with the confidence that there is, in fact, a field to delve into. The book avoids idiosyncratic readings of historical key figures and unsubstantiated claims of where contemporary philosophy is, and where it ought to be heading—factors that occasionally tempered the credibility and neutrality of a comparable title, Branko Mitrovic’s Philosophy for Architects (Princeton 2011). Given the introductory nature of both books, all three authors feel compelled to largely privilege the (historical) exposition of philosophical views over these views’ philosophical examination. While natural, this choice rings odd when both books proclaim that examination of arguments (pro and contra) for given views characterizes contemporary philosophical practice at its very best. In fairness, initiating an architectural audience into philosophical practice—or indeed a philosophical one to architectural practice—might well be an unrealistic expectation for a 160-page “handbook”. Still, as these books have set our expectations otherwise, a sense of lost opportunity lingers. For all its commendable neutrality, a book such as Illies and Ray’s cannot completely eschew a philosophical stance—and it is here that the book would have most benefited from some real argumentation. Towards the end of the book, the authors propose a view that philosophical puzzles on architecture—especially puzzles arising from conflicting theoretic demands leveled at architecture—must come to an end: only the architectural design can effectively ‘synthesize’ and (to varying degrees of success) integrate or harmonize such theoretic tensions. While it may [the] Authors privilege the historical exposition of philosophical views over these views’ philosophical examination. “ ” AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 86 BO OK R EV IE W seem plausible to posit that architecture is uniquely positioned to render moot philosophical puzzles about architecture, the authors’ suggestion is actually stronger than this. With design positioned as “the core human discipline, being the only activity that properly involves the imaginative conception of ideas, leading to artifacts that are realized as actual construction in the world” (145) the authors want to claim the further step that architecture can help resolve philosophical problems in general. One is reminded of Wittgenstein’s saying that “Explanations come to an end somewhere.”1 However, where Wittgenstein envisaged mystical silence or therapeutic expulsion of cravings for explanation, Illies and Ray intend for design solutions to fill this gap. This is a tall order for architecture to fill—can it deliver? The authors appear confident on this point; indeed, they herald their book’s achievements in exactly those colors on the back cover. Such a proposal raises a host of issues, some of which are broached in their new paper in this issue. One, for this provocative reversal of the age old thesis of philosophy as ‘first science’ (Aristotle) or ‘handmaiden’ to the theoretic and applied sciences (Locke) to attain credibility, readers will eventually want to see an illustration of the thesis, in a concrete building project from commission to execution. How exactly does such a project, especially at execution stage, synthesize and solve philosophical conundrums? What is more, can such a solution receive articulation in anything other than built form (say, in an architect’s report about her building’s achievements to an absentee client)? If it cannot, and especially cannot receive articulation in verbal form (written or spoken), how can we ascertain that a solution has been found? How, in other words, does the authors’ cryptic proposal at this point not collapse into Wittgenstein’s early view on ‘the aesthetic’ as being something that cannot be (meaningfully, determinately) spoken of, but rather demands that philosophy instead become the silent one? If the view does so collapse, how do synthesis and silence coincide? What would constitute acceptable evidence that they do coincide?2 The book, then, ends on a highly intriguing note ripe for future investigation. Its final proposal allocates to architecture a much greater role in framing and deciding philosophical questions than any (certainly recent) philosophers have been willing to accord it. Architects will likely welcome this recognition of their discipline’s contribution to philosophical dialogue. Indeed, it can be reasonably hoped that architects, not philosophers, will develop and substantiate the book’s conclusion towards a more satisfactory and compelling stage. Philosophy of Architecture thus illustrates, rather than anticipates the end of, the many surprising turns philosophy can take: that even in a “little handbook,” fresh questions emerge; questions liable to stimulate future discussion for quite some time. 87 isparchitecture.com ENDNOTES 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by Elizabeth Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell: 1953), §1. 2. Such questions were raised, and debated in considerable depth, at the 2015 ISPA symposium at the Wittgenstein house – though not in response to Illies and Ray’s work, but in relation to Wittgenstein’s own purported ‘quietism’ with respect to the aesthetics of, but not only of, architecture. Readers interested in, or finding themselves at the receiving end of, such questions are invited to peruse a selection of that symposium’s contributions in the next issue of Architecture Philosophy, edited by Carolyn Fahey. isparchitecture.com CALL FOR PAPERS The Human in Architecture and Philosophy: Towards an Architectural Anthropology 20 July – 23 July 2015 Bamberg, Germany Human beings normally live in buildings – structures built specifically for this function. This raises interesting questions. Why do we build dwellings (such as the ones we do)? And for whom do architects build houses? These questions view the same phenomenon from two different perspectives: architecture can tell us something about the human condition (in general or in a particular culture) and we can derive insights about architecture from our understanding of human beings. This topic is inspired by two observations and two related questions: 1) Many architects, contemporary and historical, claim to focus on the needs of human beings. The resulting architecture, however, often does not meet the needs and desires of the people who live there. For whom should architecture actually build? 2) Architecture, traditionally, has played a negligible role in our philosophical understanding of human beings (as also for our sociological, psychological, and other anthropological analyses). Although it has always been generally acknowledged that human beings need built dwelling places, more careful analysis of this need is surely necessary. What does it say about human beings that they depend upon the buildings they construct for their own habitation? These observations point to a deficit both in philosophical analysis and in the practical application of philosophy of architecture. A more systematic analysis of both areas could contribute to a better understanding of human beings and to future architectural endeavour better satisfying the needs and wishes of human beings. AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 90 CA LL F OR P A PE R S The 3rd International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture International Conference seeks to answers these questions (and to pose some new ones) by bringing together architecture and philosophy with a variety of other disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, civil engineering, design, law, and psychology. Philosophers are far from having reached a consensus about the question as to what human beings are. Kant thought this the philosophical question par excellence and that upon which all other questions hang. Philosophers do not even agree on how to put this question. Are questions about human beings not already presupposing an outdated essentialism? Whatever one’s metaphysical position might be, it does seem that this obstinate philosophical-anthropological question remains. Even rejecting the question is, in a way, to acknowledge that it is a philosophical problem. Human beings normally spend a significant proportion of their lives in buildings. Architecture, and the built environment in a wider sense, is therefore of great importance in any adequate philosophical anthropology. When we look at the history of architecture, we find very different (and often fascinating) answers to Kant’s question; answers that are implicitly given by the way in which architects and non-architects build or have built. They present an ‘architectural anthropology’ often containing insights beyond philosophy. It is also remarkable how dramatically much architecture often fails to provide an adequate architectural anthropology. Very basic needs and desires of inhabitants have not always been satisfied. Some architects and builders seem to ignore what human beings are really like. Although architects are generally aware of this challenge, and many claim to pay much attention to the needs of the human being, there are hardly any practical systematic endeavors aimed at finding out what these human needs are. Most architects operate with a rather vague anthropology and few have attempted to articulate their position within their own writings. To overcome the problem of unsubstantiated, and possibly incorrect, assumptions about human needs, and in order that architecture might relate the better to the human being, we need a developed and theoretically self-aware architectural anthropology. That there has been little in the way of cross-disciplinary encounter between philosophy and architecture is part of the problem. Such encounter would contribute to architecture and urban planning better adapted to human beings and would also deepen our understanding of ourselves as beings who build. The built environment is of great importance for the well-being both of the individual and of society. This conference addresses the challenge of this encounter in seeking a 91 isparchitecture.com mutual answer, or at least approach, to the questions of for whom we build and what it is we should be building. Prospects We aim to attract architects and philosophers. It is envisaged that architecture be approached through the means, methods, and models of analytical (Western) philosophy with a particular focus on (philosophical) anthropology. Scholars from across the humanities and social sciences (including, but not limited to, sociology, psychology, anthropology, civil engineering, theology, art history, and design) who are interested in the topic are also welcome. Possible topics which papers might address: I. Implicit and explicit architectural anthropologies: • What are the implicit or explicit assumptions about the human being inherent in buildings or architectural styles? (eg: van Eyck’s Orphanage, Koolhaas CCTV-Tower, Zumthors thermal bath, etc.) • Comparison of the architectural anthropology of different buildings, styles, and cultures • What are, or were, the range of expectations (needs and desires) of human beings with regard to architecture: synchronically through history and diachronically in different cultural settings? • Can philosophy assist in the development of a better architectural anthropology? • Would architects build differently if they changed their assumptions about what humans are? • The effect of digital architecture on implicit anthropology. II. Cultural differences and their anthropological relevance: • The architectural anthropology of cultures without dwellings (such as nomadic societies) • Architectural anthropology in art, literature, and film (for example, the architecture of different species in The Lord of the Rings) AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 92 CA LL F OR P A PE R S III. Classic texts revisited: • What assumptions about the human being can be found in the classic texts on architecture (for example Alberti, Semper, Koolhaas, etc.)? • What have philosophers of anthropology written about architecture? • Building and planning regulations and their implicit assumptions about humans. IV. Architecture as a source of philosophical knowledge of human beings: • Do architects know anything about human beings which philosophy should take more seriously? • Can philosophy find new insights into the human condition through buildings (both internationally notable and otherwise)? • What does the fact that human beings have to live with and within architecture mean for them? • Can building be regarded as a primary activity of human beings? • Evolutionary perspectives on architecture and its interdependence on human beings. V. Ideology and architecture: • Politics and architecture (e.g. the MoMa exhibition ‘small scale – big change’ presented ‘New Architectures of Social Engagement’. What about ‘human scale – big change?’) (e.g. implicit racism or discrimination in architecture). • Architecture creating new types of human being (e.g. Bauhaus and the ‘new human being’ (der neue Mensch)). • Would architects build differently if they changed their assumptions about the human being? Submission The 2016 conference of the International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture invites papers which probe these questions, re-draw the assumptions behind them or ask new ones. It welcomes architects and philosophers willing to scrutinize extant (inter)disciplinary boundaries and consensus on these questions and issues. The conference celebrates 93 isparchitecture.com attempts to operate at the intersection of both disciplines, and promotes work ready to give philosophical anthropology and concrete architect(ure)s serious consideration alike. Authors are invited to submit a 250-300 word abstract by Monday February 1, 2016. Please submit your abstract to isparchitecture@gmail.com. The abstract should be prepared for blind review and formatted as a RTF file. Please also provide a short CV. Submissions should be in English, and presentations will be held in English. A selection of papers will be published in Architecture Philosophy. Date and Location • 9am Wednesday 20 July to 9pm Friday 22 July + day trip on Saturday 23 July • City of Bamberg, Bavaria, Germany is a world-heritage site located near to Nuremberg and home to the University of Bamberg and the Villa Concordia Künstlerhaus. Timetable Monday 1 February: deadline for abstracts Thursday 31 March: notice of acceptance May: circulation of conference program Organising Committee Professor Christian Illies Philosopher, University of Bamberg christian.illies@uni-bamberg.de Dr. Martin Düchs Architect and Philosopher, University of Bamberg martin.duechs@uni-bamberg.de AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 94 CA LL F OR P A PE R S 95 isparchitecture.com How can architecture be both immortalized and ordinary? “ ” Wittgenstein famously argues against metaphysical claims, or those explanations he describes as having gone beyond both the limits of language and of our ability to comprehend. The boundaries of architecture’s language, typically set by our historians, theorists, and practitioners, would by extension also teeter into the non-sensical on crossing the threshold of comprehension. Given the possibility of non-sense in architecture discourse, this call for papers asks that architecture’s language be scrutinized according to the loosely analytic method of later Wittgenstein. For many lay person, perhaps even lay architect, would claim there is discourse that is either setting new limits to our language surrounding building or falling into non-sense. Perhaps there is value in delineating what the boundaries of sense in architecture are? The position against metaphysics, often referred to in the standard reading as the anti-metaphysical critique, suggests that Wittgenstein would reject all of architecture theory. Yet, a sweeping rejection seems too drastic, even for Wittgenstein. Given that theoretical work has successfully resonated with us, its audience, evidenced by the fact that we in turn shape building informed by theoretical work, not all theoretical reflection would appear to be meaningless. On closer reading, it is clear that Wittgenstein suggests that some forms of reflection do fall outside of his metaphysical critique, suggesting further still that only some forms of theory are contested by his non-sense claim. Compounding the matter within the case of architecture, Wittgenstein defines architecture in such a manner as to suggest that it is defined beyond its physical reality, or metaphysically. He states, AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 96 CA LL F OR P A PE R S “architecture immortalizes and glorifies.” Precisely what is immortalized and glorified is necessarily an idea about a thing, or a notion attributed to the building, as opposed to a physical characteristic embodied within it. Assuming there is no contradiction with Wittgenstein’s anti-metaphysical critique and architecture theory broadly speaking, the paradox of Wittgenstein’s writing and his definition of architecture becomes clear. His anti-metaphysical critique values the immediacy of the present and the tangibility of what is physically verifiable, yet he defines architecture as immortalizing and glorifying. How can we understand architecture as both ordinary and immortal? How can architecture maintain its understandings and narratives with the everyday while simultaneously reaching a status of immortality and glorification? The two-day symposium set at the Wittgenstein House in Vienna looks to bring to architects and designers’ attention the potential significance of Wittgenstein’s method of investigation to their work, in terms of both understanding architecture and excelling at its practice. The possibilities for explanation are broad and interdisciplinary, and as such, participants are asked only to narrow their focus to the building, the city, or tectonic exercises. Participants are also asked not to limit their discussion to either aesthetics or to ethics, as for Wittgenstein, “aesthetics and ethics are one and the same.” Organized by Dr. Carolyn A. Fahey. For any questions regarding the call for papers, event, or post-event publication, please email the organizer at carfahey[at]gmail.com. Abstracts are due by 01 April 2016 to isparchitecture[at]gmail.com. Abstracts should be no less than 200 words and no more than 500 words. Authors of accepted abstract submissions will be notified by 01 May 2015 for participation in the symposium. Symposium participants are then invited to submit full papers for a special issue of Architecture Philosophy. Full paper submissions will be double-blind peer reviewed and, if accepted, published in the special issue. isparchitecture.com About the Authors Diana Aurenque is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Santiago. Cesar A. Cruz is a doctoral candidate at the School of Architecture at the Universi- ty of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Christian Illies is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bamberg. Pauline Lefebvre is Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique Research fellow and Doc- toral Candidate at the Faculty of Architecture at the Free University of Brussels. Graham Owen is Associate Professor of Architecture at Tulane University. Nicholas Ray is Reader Emeritus in Architecture at the University of Cambridge and Visiting Professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Liver- pool. Alberto Rubio-Garrido is affiliated researcher at the Departament de Metafísica i Teoria del Coneixement, University of Valencia. He was previously Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Valencia, and Associate Professor of Architecture at Universitat Politècnica de València. Image Credits Cover photo: Tom Spector From “Autonomy to Pragmatism: Objects Made Moral” Figures 1 and 4 by Pauline LeFebvre. Figures 2 and 3 courtesy of Ron Witte and Sarah Whiting; Figure 3 has been acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. From “Enigma as Moral Requirement in the Wake of Ledoux’s work: Autonomy and Expression in Architecture” Figures 1, 2, 3 and 5 courtesy of © Bibliothèque Nationnale de France, Claude- Nicolas Ledoux, L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs et de la législation (Paris, 1804). Figure 4 courtesy of © Bibliothèque Nationnale de France, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Architecture de C.-N. Ledoux: Collection qui rassemble tous les genres de bâtiments employés dans l’ordre social, ed. Daniel Ramée (Paris, 1847). AP . vol 2 . No 1 . 2016 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 All papers should be submitted through the online journal portal found on the society webpage. Please direct all 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 with a 200-300 word abstract, response pieces should be 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 RTF documents, 12 point font, Times New Roman, double- spaced, and with no additional or otherwise unique formatting. References should be manually placed in brackets (e.g. [1], [2], and so on) with full citation information placed in the references section at the end of the document. 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 1-Editorial 2-Owen _GoBack 3-Lefebvre _GoBack 4-Aurenque 5-Cruz 6-Rubio _GoBack 7-Illies & Ray 8-Book Review _GoBack 9-CfP 10-Back Matter