The Functions of Form: Recent Architectural Aesthetics Author(s): Peregrine Horden Reviewed work(s): Source: Oxford Art Journal,

Vol. 5, No. 2, Architecture (1983), pp. 39-45 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360234 . Accessed: 10/04/2012 04:57
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The Functions of Form: recent architectural aesthetics

PEREGRINE HORDEN "Often I used to gloat over the beautiful buildings I could build", Frank Lloyd Wright once remarked, "if only it were unnecessary to cut windows in them". It is the supreme artist's prerogative to chafe under traditional constraints and dream their abolition. Wagner concealed his orchestra in the cavernous Bayreuth pit and then wished he could make the drama invisible too. Mallarme hoped to evolve a poetry of essences unsullied by meaning. Ambitions like these do not have to be taken entirely seriously - at least not as considered indictments of a whole art form. Wright's hostility to traditional patterns of fenestration is after all hardly unique. Le Corbusier was quite ready to deny his buildings windows when he felt it was justified. But the difference between the attitudes of these two architects reflects a deeper division: between the claims of beauty and the claims of reason. And it points to what is often taken as an affliction peculiar to the architect's endeavour and one which can supposedly emasculate him as a creative artist: the demands of utility. Partly for that reason, architecture has been poorly served by philosophical aesthetics. The eighteenth century, which invented both the category of 'the aesthetic' and the modern classification of the arts, was increasingly happy to transfer architecture from the ranks of the 'decorative' to those of the 'fine' arts. But the really significant philosophers of art - all in the German Idealist tradition - virtually reversed the alignment and emphasized architecture's infirmities. They operated with an impoverished notion of utility and had little to say specific to architecture that is now positively instructive. For Kant, with whose Critiqueof Judgementmodern philosophical aesthetics begins, architecture is, like horticulture, hardly a fine art at all. For one thing its beauty is of what he calls the "dependent" variety and aesthetic judgement of it is contaminated by our concept of its purpose. "Much", he notes (anticipating Wright), "might be added to a building that would immediately please the eye, were it not intended for a church...." And in his classification of the arts Kant included under the heading of architecture not only temples, houses, triumphal arches and mausoleums, but also household furniture, "on the ground that adaptation of the product to a particular use is the essential element in a work of architecture". That is the extent of his observations. In the philosophy of Hegel, whose preoccupation is with the process by which metaphysical Spirit or Idea arrives at self-consciousness, art's potential contribution to the development of human freedom is generally a very large one: art accomplishes a sensuTHE OXFORDARTJOURNAL 5:2 1983

ous embodiment of the Idea. Considerable space is given to the phases of architectural history in Hegel's Berlin lectures on aesthetics. Yet he finds architecture totally incapable of true expressiveness. Though it imposes order on the external world and may aspire to conspicuous beauty of form despite its utilitarian purpose, it is ultimately redeemed as a vehicle for the Idea only by being decked out with statuary. The philosophical system of Schopenhauer, the third of the great Idealists, is now probably even more remote from common understanding than Hegel's. But Schopenhauer's remarks in two sections of The World as Will and Representationperhaps get a little closer to an acceptable theory of architecture's character - and his principles and prejudices are at least conveyed in plain language. Like Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer had a low opinion of architecture. Nevertheless his attention to the aesthetic importance of the disposition of masses and of the play of light on a building, his severe functionalism, his stress on the visual intelligibility of a building as a criterion of its success, and his argument for the superiority of a particular style all find numerous echoes in more recent theories. Schopenhauer distinguishes the aesthetic and the utilitarian aspects of architecture even more sharply than Kant and Hegel do. But unlike them he also envisages a 'pure' aesthetic of architecture - an aesthetic of which his functionalism is paradoxically an intrinsic part. This is because he also distinguishes functionalism from social utility. The arbitrary practical demands society makes upon an architect (most numerous in cold climates) inevitably restrict the scope of architecture as an art form - though on the other hand "with the range and expense of its works and the narrow sphere of its aesthetic effect, it certainly could not maintain itself merely as a fine art unless it had at the same time, as a useful and necessary profession, a firm and honourable place among man's occupations". Social utility apart, the architect's purpose is to "sound the bass notes of nature". This is Schopenhauer's 'pure' aesthetic, a version of classical rationalism. In providing a roof over our heads architecture reveals its essence: the relation of load and support, the conflict between gravity and rigidity as exemplified in column and entablature. The ideal is achieved when the building would collapse if any part were removed. And this equilibrium must be aesthetically apparent. A sloping roof, for example, is neither support nor load and cannot therefore be either functional or aesthetically intelligible: it is merely utilitarian. "Architecture has its existence primarily in our spatial perception", and must be

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easy to understand and appreciate. That last assertion has a more modern ring to it than Schopenhauer's rationalism. Just as he is probably still unrivalled as a philosopher of music, so his few pages on architecture have until recently been the last word on the philosophy of architecture. To say that is not to dismiss the protracted labours of aestheticians in a variety of schools of thought - empiricist, Idealist, phenomenological, Frankfurt School Marxist, and so on - even though it is hard to see what new clarity or certainty has been engendered by the brow furrowing. Nor is it to belittle the undoubted achievement of Geoffrey Scott's The Architecture of Humanism. But Scott was best at exposing fallacies. The humanist aesthetic he propounded - based on Lipps's notion of Einfihlung or empathy ("We transcribe architecture in terms of ourselves") - is much less compelling, and recent attempts to patch it up have only proved what an incomplete theory it is. The record is bleak: since Schopenhauer published the third edition of The Worldas Will and Representation in 1859, there has been hardly any discussion worth taking seriously of the philosophical problems architecture raises. Energies have gone into more general questions: about the definition of art and the 'aesthetic attitude' for example. There has been too much extrapolation from tentative solutions of the conceptual puzzles of painting. Music and literature have suffered worst from the narrowness of focus, with music becoming the prey of semiologists and information theorists, literature (or at least reading it) being pronounced impossible by the post-structuralists. And architecture? Condemned by general neglect. Does that matter? In support of the Idealists it might be argued that architecture does not really need an aesthetic of its own. There is no problem about its division between art and functionality. The functional aspects - whether social, psychological or mechanical - are best left to theorists from other departments. The artistic element falls under the heading of general aesthetics and, unlike music and literature, does not need special attention. To expect the philosophers to apply their findings to architecture is to impose an additional and quite unnecessary burden. What is left out of this account is the crucial area where art and function overlap; where neither can be explained except in terms of a form of life - to borrow - that is perhaps not reducible Wittgenstein's term to a theory of aesthetic appreciation and is only inadequately categorized as a human need. We easily recognize strictly functional buildings (Pevsner's bicycle shed), and we all at some time or another have to do with pieces of architecture whose utility is not so easily specified and whose claim to our attention is perhaps primarily aesthetic (Lincoln Cathedral). It is what the two extremes have in common, and what comes between them on the spectrum, that philosophers surely ought to be concerned with. Is the architect really a schizoid being animated by aesthetic impulse yet shackled by utilitarian necessity? Kant is to blame for that image, and later philosophers have 40

barely challenged it. Even Mrs Langer, whose Feeling and Form does have a section on architecture, fails to investigate the relation between the "actual values" of buildings (shelter, comfort, safekeeping) and the "illusions" of virtual space which buildings, according to her philosophy, create. Instead, she spends too much time quoting Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture. That book, however rhapsodically incoherent, is a piece of architectural theory. And in default of an acceptable philosophy of architecture, theory has certainly had its say, dogmatically telling us how to build but taking the criteria of success largely for granted. Theory's confused origins, limited scope and misapplication have been demonstrated (from somewhat differing points of view) by David Watkin, Reyner Banham, Peter Collins and others. The reaction against theory, which is almost the same as the reaction against Modernism, and the subsequent reassertion of its importance have of course both been much too strong. Thinking principally of Viollet-le-Duc, David Watkin writes of those "who see only two possible alternatives for architecture: either as capricious fashion, arbitrary and trivial, or as the expression of some external centre of gravity such as social and political ideals, technological necessity, or the spirit of the age". That is certainly how the battle lines are drawn in modern polemic: aesthetics against utility, humanism against Stalinism, imagination against reason. In an attempt to show how the debate might be more fruitfully conducted, I want to consider two theories from no-man's-land. Here first is the substance of a psychologist's account of a chair. It is Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair of 1929: two oblong cushions in a shiny metal frame whose front legs and back describe an arc of a circle and whose support and rear legs form a gentle S-curve. There is no attempt at an easy impression of stability, none of the unconpromising rectangularity of a Mies tower. The chair obviously encourages its user to recline comfortably. That is the effect of combining circle and S-curve. Its underlying firmness can be related to the contrast between thick studded cushions (which have an air of traditional plushness) and sleek metal frame; and also to the contrast between the frame's curvature and the imaginary square which can be seen in a diagram to contain the chair's profile and to determine some of its key aspects. The physical object is transformed into a constellation of forces. "The validity of the constellation goes far beyond the expression of the particular chair. It symbolizes a way of life, the cultural circumstances under which the object was conceived". Aesthetics and utility have merged. That application of the old doctrine that form should express function comes from Rudolf Arnheim's TheDynamicsof Architectural Form. Its publishers tell us that the sensory appearance of our man-made environment influences our way of life and our conduct of affairs "quite directly", and that any account of the "human needs" met by architecture is incomTHE OXFORD ARTJOURNAL 5:2 1983

plete unless its psychological qualities are recognized. Arnheim undertakes to examine these "psychological qualities" with "the principles of visual perception". Quite how these qualities and principles are to be conceived remains throughout a little obscure. But the phenomena Arnheim is concerned with are familiar enough. He begins with the way architecture apparently organizes space around and within itself. He then demonstrates the predominance of the vertical (which is why columns need bases and capitals) and the perceptual effects of gravity (which makes some buildings look as if they continue downwards into the ground). By the time we have moved through an analysis of solids and hollows, the relation of inside and outside, the nature of order and disorder, and the mental map we construct by moving around a building we are thoroughly prepared for a commentary on Cefalu Cathedral or Michelangelo's Porta Pia - in entirely traditional terms: "the rim serves as a ritardando; it provides a first contraction of the tower's bulk, before the pointed tops apply an ultimate squeeze, which sends the upward movement forth into the sky". Not quite poetry. But of such things as ultimate squeezes are visual dynamics made. It is they which determine the character of our response to a building. And since, Arnheim contends, all human thoughts must be worked out in the medium of perceptual space (language presumably being inadequate), visual dynamics inevitably bear architectural symbolism of the deepest human significance. It is vital to attend to them. This he does. The virtues of the book lie in its numerous - and not very well organized - descriptions of a wide range of architectural phenomena; in its conviction that buildings should be studied in relation to all aspects of their environment; and in its recognition that for most of the time we respond to buildings without really noticing them, and certainly without their becoming objects of aesthetic contemplation. Indeed, aesthetic matters do not as such trouble Arnheim. They are subsumed by his expanded (Corbusian) category of human needs: "the hunger, the chill and the fear are on an equal footing with the need for peace, privacy, space, harmony, order, or color". On the basis of this assumption he draws the reductionist conclusion typical of psychologists that all human needs are "matters of the mind". Arnheim's theoretical background is in the Gestalt psychology he put to more rigorous use in his Art and Visual Perception, in Lipps's notion of empathy (of which he offers only token criticisms), and in nineteenth-century functionalism. Neither the resulting mixture nor its constituents have much to commend them. It is not just that the force of the exposition is diminished by statements like "in our spatial system, the vertical direction defines the horizontal plane as the only one for which the vertical serves as an axis of symmetry", and heady passages on the "productive opposition of Being and Becoming".
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It is rather that Arnheim does not really havea theory of visual dynamics - except that, like needs, they are all in the mind. They are also allegedly universal, but children and artists are most responsive to them. (In most of us they are obliterated by the tunnel vision which is all that practical life in an atomistic society requires of us.) Given Arnheim's naive faith in the 'phenomenological' method of introspection (which he misconceives as a way of separating these visual universals from particular cultural accretions), it is hardly surprising that he has nothing very revealing to say about the nature of meaning and value in architecture. All he has to offer as a criterion of architectural success is that a building should be "visually efficient" in expressing its purpose and the spirit of the community it serves. It must therefore display its dynamic properties "uncluttered by accidentals". Quotations from Kant, Heidegger and Piaget only add to the confusion. We have still not arrived at a full understanding of how a chair might contribute to a style of life - how the aesthetics and utility of architecture might be related. A second voice, then, from no-man's-land, since the first has comparatively little to tell us. And to begin with, an example rather like the one Arnheim derives from the Mies chair. Visualize two forks, one contemporary in design (glossy surface, sleek lines), the other of the classical 'fiddle-pattern'. How will the functionalist appraise their relative merits? Suppose he says that he prefers the clean functional shape of the modern fork to the heavy ornate quality of the traditional one. It might be argued that his judgement is actually aesthetic rather than utilitarian. The modern fork only looks as if it makes bringing food to the mouth both easy and elegant. Its prongs are in fact too short and too wide apart to hold the food securely and its thin stem slips through the hand: in some respects it is about as functional as a Brancusi sculpture. The angular design of the traditional fork in contrast gives it all the virtues its modern counterpart lacks. It holds the food, balances comfortably in the hand, and will rest securely on the edge of a plate. But to say that is still to give too narrow an interpretation: "The classical fork, proportioned like a column, with base and capital, and with a frieze of prongs, partakes of a language rich in implications. There is no difficulty in repeating these forms, in finding knife and spoon to go with the fork, in integrating all three into a visual ideal of the covered table. The eye rests with satisfaction on the furled cusp of its handle; all its uses seem present in the form, and no hesitation can be felt in translating them into action. The two forks bear the insignia of contrasting life-styles."' Visual dynamics have nothing to do with it - nothing important that is. Roger Scruton's TheAesthetics of Architecture (from which the above description of the forks is adapted) shows less concern with alleged universals of perceptual psychology than with the nature of aesthetic reasoning and with its intimate relation to everyday practical wisdom and to morality. There is 41

no reliance on a facile notion of human needs. Instead, all the technical resources of contemporary philosophy of mind are brought to bear on the immensely difficult task of making the most important conclusions of the Idealist tradition in aesthetics once again vivid and compelling - and shorn of that unworkable distinction between aesthetics and utility. The comparison of the forks provides a useful way of introducing the argument; it also brings out some of its weaknesses. There is often a point in Scruton's philosophy at which reason gives way to dogma. "The search for a pure line, redolent of unfussy function", he writes of the modern fork, "leads to a childishness of outline, a streamlined, unstable fluidity of form, ill-adapted either to the uses of the table or to the demands of the aesthetic sense." That is questionable. So too is Scruton's subsequent implication that only the classical fork can be integrated into a visual ideal of the covered table and does not provoke hesitation in its user. Surely the only significant difference between the styles of life to which the two forks must be referred is that one of them rates functionality more highly than the other does. But Scruton will not have that: he wants us to share his hostility to nearly all forms of Modernism (the architecture of Mies being honourably excepted). His preference for the classical and his veneration of Lutyens - now de - apparently mark rigeur among anti-Modernists him out as an ally of David Watkin. And when The Aestheticsof Architecture appeared it was lambasted by the pundits chiefly for that reason. It delighted them that Scruton should, for example, describe Wright's Johnson Wax building as a wax factory: he therefore disqualified himself as a critic of Modernism. The book was ignorantly dismissed in Architectural Design as "a threnody for that romantic age when what a building looked like was a matter of style alone." However, unlike Watkin, Scruton does not defend the autonomy of aesthetic values and traditions. (See his review of Watkin reprinted in The Politics of Culture.) His aesthetic bias is an aspect of his political conviction; and his politics certainly lead him to uphold tradition (in architecture and in culture generally), but as something necessarily prior to "the individual talent" and without which any sort of individuality is quite impossible. In his essay in political dogmatics, The Meaning of Conservatism,he set down a vision of society as a unitary organism; as a collectivity rather like that of the family with a personality and will of its own, in which individual rights, "the contagion of democracy", and governmental programmes of social amelioration should all be of less concern than the preservation of what is 'given', the fabric of social relations. "In sixteenth-century Venice the very pattern on the prow of a gondola was determined by law". That, for Scruton, is as it should be. Visual continuity and cohesion is as important as any other aspect of culture. (Hence his fondness for the classical fork.) And it is culture which educates us as rational beings, which makes us into moral persons. "High culture" may embody a shared moral 42

experience and a sense of the past. "Common culture" - construed in its widest, anthropological sense - educates us in what to do and what to feel: it intimates to us the ends of conduct, not just the means to achieve them. So to reject the formative potential of culture in the name of some untried abstraction like 'authenticity' is to succumb to a disease. For it means rejecting the possibility of happiness and fulfilment and limiting oneself to the mindless gratification of base desires: in a very real and damaging sense, it is to lack a self. In Scruton's political philosophy (and a fortiori in his aesthetics) selfhood and the means to its realization are of the utmost importance. The individual finds himself, not by retreating from the world but by engaging in it. I cannot know myself through introspective observation of the stream of consciousness, Kant argued against Descartes. Selfhood is a necessary presupposition of such awareness, not its outcome. Knowledgeof self, on the other hand, arises only in the sequence of actions for which I take responsibility. The self is thus a social artifact: it is developed in the individual's life-long encounter with what is - and that ought, for Scruton, to include "given" objects of aesthetic contemplation. His reasoning comes in at least three different versions during the but I quote a course of The Aestheticsof Architecture; useful epitome from a review-article on Alberti (reprinted in The Politics of Culture): "To understand Alberti's view involves understanding the place of aesthetic reasoning in the activity of design (where design includes anything from the arranging of a dinner-table to the building of a town). Despite the enthusiastic propaganda of utilitarian and functionalist architects, most people recognize that only a very small fragment of practical thought is concerned with function. All our choices are extracted from a chaos of functionally equivalent alternatives, and in all choices which affect, not just present purposes, but also distant aspirations, it is the non-utilitarian residue that is paramount. To build well is to find the appropriate form, and that means the form which answers to what endures, not to what expires. The appropriate form ministers not just to present purposes, but to a sense of ourselves as creatures with identities transcending the sum of present purpose and desire. To find the appropriate form we must look beyond function, to some intimation of long-term satisfactions. And it is arguable that we can find that intimation only in the search for an appropriate and symbolic appearance. The pursuit of such appearances is the pursuit of a certain style of life; it is the pursuit of fulfilment not just for this or that desire, but for the self which survives them. Aesthetic education is therefore unavoidable: for it is the means to transform functional calculation into rational choice." As with forks, so with architecture. It is not just that aesthetic objects symbolize pre-existing forms of life: rather that they help to createthem. Now - as befits a conservative - Scruton's thinking here is
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Alberti in discussing the question of how to build. not entirely original. Which is not to say that it reAesthetics must however also consider art as it flects Alberti's thought either. Alberti had much to already is, not only as it ought to be. A fork that I say about what is "appropriate" in a building (and to have bought, or a door-frame whose design I have that extent Scruton owes him much). But the nature chosen from leafing through Serlio, may indeed miniof the self was not his concern. Scruton is remaking ster to my growing self-awareness through their symhimself as he in an idealist him, admits, chiefly image. bolic overtones. But St Paul's Cathedral or, indeed, The view of the self as something known in action goes most of the illustrations in Scruton's book? It is not back to Kant, although it is given a currently more clear how the theory accommodates choices that others influential grounding in the later philosophy of Witthave made, and on a rather grander scale. genstein. The political philosophy which goes with I do not think that is a problem Scruton adequately this view is Hegelian. And it is partly from Hegel resolves. The Aesthetics of Architecture contains that Scruton takes the notion of art as a means of self-realization, partly from Schiller's Letters on the numerous, often densely philosophical arguments AestheticEducation of Man (the influence of which on (most of which I cannot here adequately summarize, let alone appraise); and they seem divided in their The Aesthetics of Architectureis pervasive yet barely allegiance. One theme of the book is that architecacknowledged). ture is par excellence the vernacular art, the one that It is legitimate to ask how far Scruton has succeeded in translating the arguments of the Idealists into nearly all of us encounter most frequently, in all acceptable contemporary terms. (Certainly there is a moods and states of awareness. It is therefore radically different from the other arts and needs a theory good deal in the Hegelian philosophy of the self which of its own which will show the particular contribuapparently cannot survive reformulation, particularly tion that "the aesthetics of everyday life" can make to the theory that selfhood may be partial.) For it is clear from the paragraph I quoted above that, although he the moral education of rational beings. A second theme concerns the nature of our experience and may have found a way to break down the Kantian distinction between aesthetic and practical choice, he judgement of architecture; and despite strong critihas erected other distinctions in its place. There is an cism of the mandarin aestheticism implicit in so many rival theories of 'the aesthetic attitude', the place of all-or-nothing character to Scruton's social philothis sort of aesthetic experience in practical life sophy, a black-and-white moral vision which refuses to consider the possibility that there might be some remains a little obscure. (There is some point to the tenable position between the extremes with which it is criticism, recorded in a recent volume of History Worklimited to operating. shop, that Scruton's ideal spectator is "none other than Scruton on holiday in Italy".) Thirdly, although That the self must be discovered in the world does not mean that it can only be discovered in the customarchitecture is supposed to need its own theory, Scruton's analysis of aesthetic experience in fact reary behaviour of a settled organic society. Why may I not come to know myself through membership of a presents a condensation and, in part, a refinement of the general theory he proposed in Art and Imagination revolutionary proletariat? Even proletarians could know how to lay a table using sleek modern cutlery. and there applied to all the arts. So may the functionalists and utilitarians whom One way to resolve these contradictions (echoing Scruton castigates in the passage on Alberti. Are their the Wagnerian arrogance of Pevsner's introduction to calculations really only concerned with the immediate his Outline)would be to assert that since architecture is a Gesamtkunstwerk of 'pure' and 'applied' art, it gratification of ephemeral desires? The latest critique and refinement of the theory, Utilitarianismand Beyond, needs all the three kinds of aesthetic that Scruton in edited by Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, sug- the end allows it. But that is not Scruton's own gests they are not. They too can operate with longapproach. The book is in a sense deceptively enterm and 'second-order' desires. They can take into titled. It does not set out to give us The Aesthetics- all account the values that permeate a society; and they possible approaches - in text-book fashion, but display no great fondness for the empiricist view of rather An Aesthetic, as part of a comprehensive theory the individual self which Scruton attributes to them. of rationality. That is, they are not just devoted to saving BenthaIndeed, where rival theories are considered they are mite man from the "chaos of functionally equivalent usually put into the mouths of straw men - that they alternatives" (are they generally so numerous?) into may be more convincingly demolished. One section of which his overwhelming urges hurl him. the book is devoted to refuting Freudian, Marxist and A less black-and-white account of the place of semiological theories of how the meaning of a buildaesthetic reasoning in the activity of design would ing may be 'deciphered'. Was it worth the effort? These schools have produced no accounts of architeccertainly embrace the weighing of values, future ture that merit being taken seriously. Adrian Stokes's aims, and unspecifiable goals. It would accord aesthetic choices high priority, and it would not be content application of the psychoanalysis of Melanie Klein with a plan that failed to make itself intelligible to, remains an eccentric curiosity. Manfredo Tafuri's Theories and History of Architecture (which Scruton and to satisfy, a rational member of civil society. But it is still hard to see how this could be made the basis caustically reviews in The Politics of Culture)is not menof a complete architectural aesthetic. Scruton follows tioned in The Aestheticsof Architecture and would not in
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any case have supplied a Marxist account of aesthetic experience open to rational criticism. And finally, between semiological theories of meaning and English analytical philosophy of language, there are simply no points of contact that would make a debate fruitful. Scruton could more profitably have engaged with convincing and influential accounts of the alleged language of art, such as those by Nelson Goodman and Susanne Langer. This part of his book ends with a dismissal of the possibility of representation in architecture - a dismissal based on a strange definition of representation in art as being necessarily propositional or narrative in character. And so only 'expression' is left as a concept which can adequately capture the experience of architecture, and which Scruton needs to develop his notion that architecture symbolically intimates our long-term satisfactions. Is he then giving us a more fastidious version of Sullivan's doctrine that form expresses function? Functionalism's merits are surveyed in another (perhaps superfluous) section of the book. It is one of a set of theories Scruton somewhat artificially groups together as attempts to articulate the essence of what we appreciate in architecture (space, proportion, the Zeitgeist, and so on). He naturally has no difficulty in showing the limitations of the doctrine as it is conventionally stated. But what then of the relation of aesthetics to utility? Scruton will hope to persuade us that utility and long-term satisfactions are both essential aspects of architecture, but that the proper experience of a building is an imaginative apprehension of it as an organic whole - in which the important distinction is actually the one between 'pure' architecture and inessential decoration. The demands of utility and function, we are told at the outset, qualify every aspect of the architect's task: a certain form is imposed by the needs and desires that the building is designed to fulfil, and there can be no true understanding of a building that ignores its functional side. Yet when it comes to showing how function qualifies the experience of the onlooker, rather than the task of the architect, Scruton resorts to Susanne Langer's (and Schopenhauer's) idea of "virtual function" and in fact goes on to analyse "virtual structure" - apparent, but not necessarily real. He deals, that is, with mechanical function rather than social utility: needs and desires are cursorily treated in his philosophy. There is an escape clause. "An essential property"
here utility "may not suffice to define the

nature of the thing that possesses it." It is an essential property of a Schubert song, Scruton reminds us, that it is a musical setting of a poem. But it does not follow that our experience of a song is nothing more than an experience of words uttered in musical form, or that a song is beautiful to the extent that it expresses the meaning of the words. We might appreciate the melody in complete ignorance of the poem set. Tell that to Fischer-Dieskau. In so far as the analogy does not merely restate the problem in different 44

terms, it only reinforces those arguments which relate to architecture as high art; it does not shed much light on how utility modifies aesthetics in architecture. The stance adopted elsewhere in the book is, as indicated, rather different. Scruton's first chapter stresses indeed, surely overstresses - the asymmetry of architecture with other art forms and the impossibility of applying normal aesthetic standards to it. Architecture is not a quasi-sculptural medium of personal expression (here a predictable stab at Gaudi - and the merest mention of the counter-example provided by Michelangelo). It is "an art of the ensemble" with respect both to environment and to interior decoration, "and often the ambition of the architect resides not in individuality of form, but rather in the preservation of an order that preexists his own activity". Hence architecture is incapable of that self-conscious pursuit of modernity which has been characteristic of twentieth-century music and painting: it is a conservative art form, naturally prone to revivals. (That the Modern Movement in architecture set out to accomplish what Scruton takes to be impossible is presumably a sufficient explanation of its failure.) "Architecture is simply one application of what 'fits' which governs every aspect of daily existence."' This seems an extraordinarily humbling definition of the architect's endeavour. But, as his discussion of Alberti has already implied, Scruton needs it to show the inevitability of aesthetic choice in the activity of design. It is the prelude to his transformation of the functionalist doctrine. For him, even the most perfect "solution" conceivable to an architectural "problem" - one which took account of all relevant human desires and needs - could still hardly be a genuine solution. It would not, it seems, necessarily be intelligible to the rational beings for whom architecture is conceived. Nor would it meet the demands of their dual nature. Rational beings have values as well as needs. The latter merely reflect their animal natures. But values exist on a superior plane that places them quite beyond the reach of functional calculation. Scruton gives a somewhat Kantian definition of values as "one special case of ends of conduct". They order our world for us and delimit our future aims in advance of our being able to specify (except intuitively) what those aims might be. Now there are many contexts in which this account of values and needs will seem attractive. But when it is incorporated into an analysis of what necessarily happens when we rationally choose, say, a denim suit, it seems less plausible. Unlike the classical fork, which both exemplified and expressed a civilized functionality, the purportedly functional denim suit is, Scruton thinks, not really functional at all (except in the general sense of covering and warming the body). "The aims which might actually be offered for the purchase of a denim suit are not, then, the full reason for its acquisition. They must remain subordinate to something else, which is not so much an aim in itself as a sense of the accommodation of the suit to all present and future aims, whatever they chance to be."
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At first sight that is a tall order - particularly since Scruton implies that a rational being really cannot have too clear an idea of his future. The point is, however, that the allegedly functional denim suit is chosen because it symbolizes the values of the people who will wear it; it heralds "the nature they wish to claim as their own". And according to Scruton's definition, symbolizing values enables the wearers to assess the "appropriateness" of their clothes in advance of any purpose for which they may wear them. For the crude psychology of the functionalist Scruton has substituted a somewhat schematic philosophical psychology of his own, one in which symbolically represented values (in buildings as much as in clothes) become essential as "means" to future ends. But why should symbolizing a value bring an end closer to fulfilment? There are, after all, on Scruton's definition, ends that are not values. Not all values can find their aesthetic embodiment. And pursuing a style of life requires more than the appropriate appearances. Against the functionalist, Scruton argues that "there is no clear distinction between 'the way it looks', 'what it means' and 'what it does"'. Yet the examples of the denims and the modern fork (as well as many of the architectural analogues Scruton adduces) shows that there is; that the use of terms borrowed from moral and practical life in aesthetic description conceals a possible gap between being functional and expressing functionality. To close the gap would require a more patient analysis of needs, desires, function and utility than Scruton is prepared for; a scrutiny of the contribution 'the way it looks' can make at the ordinary, 'sub-

aesthetic' level of practical perception (Arnheim's domain), and a less doctrinaire approach to the place of expressive visual qualities in architectural choice. To the extent that the gap remains, Scruton's "aesthetics of everyday life" is incomplete. And to the same extent, there is a weakness in his concluding argument that aesthetic education is indispensable to the projection of the self onto a public world (an argument which leads him to the suggestion, also made in The Politics of Culture, that buildings should have strongly vertical facades to mirror the human self that stands before them). It is a theory which contains too many stipulative, counter-intuitive definitions to be an entirely credible version of the relation between aesthetic choice and practical decision. Something of the naive openness of interpretation that characterizes Arnheim's description of the Mies chair is missing here. Arnheim has no real theory at all; Scruton perhaps theorizes too much. The most powerful chapters of The Aesthetics of Architecture are those which depend least on his philosophy of the self. There is an analysis of aesthetic experience as "the imaginative contemplation of an object for its own sake" (where the only defect lies in its account of "literal" perception with which "imaginative" perception has to be contrasted); a powerful defence of objectivity in aesthetic judgement, and a superbly Ruskinian plea for the importance of detail in architecture ("God is in the details", as Mies said). For this alone the book would be a major contribution. That the overall philosophy remains debatable should be taken as a measure of its scope and interest. It is something which aligns Scruton's work with that of the Idealists on whose shoulders he sits.

BibliographicalNote The Idealist tradition: Kant's Critiqueof Judgement, translated by James Creed Meredith (Oxford, 1952), on which Roger Scruton has some useful pages in his Kant (Past Masters, Oxford, 1982); Hegel's Aesthetics,translated by T.M.Knox (2 vols. Oxford, 1975), with the 'Interpretative Essay' by Charles Karelis preceding the to 'Aesthetics'(Oxford, 1979); separate edition of Hegel's Introduction and Schopenhauer's The Worldas Will and Representation, translated by E.F.J.Payne (2 vols. New York, 1966). The 'analytical' tradition: Susanne K. Laner, Feeling and Form. A Theory of Art (1953); Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (1969). A The psychologists: Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: Psychology of the Creative Eye, The New Version (Berkely and Los Angeles, 1974), and The Dynamics of ArchitecturalForm (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977. There are some implied criticisms of Arnheim's approach in the works of E.H.Gombrich, including Art and Illusion, fifth edition (1977), and The Perception of Order(1979). See also E.H.Gombrich, Julian Hochberg and Max Black, Art, and Reality (Baltimore and London, 1972). Perception Works by Roger Scruton: Art and Imagination(2nd corrected ed. 1982); The Aesthetics of Architecture(1979); The Meaning of Conservatism (Harmondsworth, 1980); The Politics of Culture(1981); 'The Significance of Common Culture', in Philosophy, vol. 54 (1979), - 5:2 1983 THEOXFORD ARTJOURNAL

revised as 'Emotion, Practical Knowledge and Common Culture', in Explaining Emotions, ed. Amelie Rorty (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980). See also the report of a symposium on 'The New Right and Architectural Aesthetics' in History Workshop(Autumn 1981), and David Dunster's review of The Aestheticsof Architecture in Architectural Design, vol. 49, December (1979), p.327. The 'background' to Scruton: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M.Anscombe (Oxford, 1972), and Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford 1978); Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford, 1967), on which see the essay by Patrick Gardiner, 'Freedom as an Aesthetic Idea', in The Ideas of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, ed. Alan Ryan (Oxford, 1979); and Hegel's Phenomenologyof Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller (Oxford, 1977). Other works cited: Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism (1980 ed.) with foreword by David Watkin; David Watkin, Morality and Architecture (Oxford, 1977); Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (Cambridge, 1982); Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture(Granada, 1980).

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