Reconsidering the Aesthetics of Architecture

Author(s): Allen Carlson

Source: The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 20, No. 4, 20th Anniversary Issue
(Winter, 1986), pp. 21-27
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3332592
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 Carlson: Aesthetics ofArchitecture 21

ground and validate a curriculum. A discipline, therefore, is a subject taught

to "discipline" thinking and feeling so that it qualifies as the product of
an educated mind. Whether or not a public school is commited to pro-
ducing educated minds is a subject for separate consideration.
These queries are relevant to justify art as a subject taught systematically
in the same fashion that the other subjects are taught. Classroom teachers
at the elementary level are not mathematicians, geographers, or historians,
yet are expected to teach these subjects. Secondary teachers are rarely art
historians, studio artists, or professional critics. Should they be? Can the
public schools afford such an array of specialists for the program? What
sort of pre-service and in-service instruction would make it possible for a
teaching staff to manage an arts curriculum from K through 12? Is there
a way of utilizing team teaching in the secondary school to cover the
various aspects of aesthetic education?
This putative colloquy illustrates the ties and tensions between theory
and practice, between educational theory and its academic foundations,
between the papers, books, courses, and journals dealing with aesthetics
and those dealing with aesthetic education. The likelihood that in this
scenario the participants will mention Kant, Schiller, Baumgarten, Croce,
Hanslick, Bell, Fry, and dozens of other famous names in aesthetics is not
very far above zero. Yet without implicit reference to aesthetic theory,
how would the advocates of arts education justify their answers to the
questions posed by the school authorities? The intrinsic and extrinsic
properties of the aesthetic experience and the construal of sensory images
that convey human import on their "face," so to speak, are the subject
matter of both formal aesthetics and our attempts to interpret the prob-
lems of art education.
The Journal of Aesthetic Education fills a need that neither publications
devoted to the study of aesthetics as such nor those preoccupied with arts
pedagogy by themselves quite satisfy. One can only hope that the journal's
efforts to bring a high level of scholarship to the task of their mediation
will enable it to record their effect on the public schools before another
twenty years elapse.

Reconsidering the Aesthetics of Architecture

Allen Carlson

The purpose of this discussion is twofold: first, to propose a somewhat

different approach to a traditional topic of aesthetic inquiry, the aesthetics
of architecture; second, to suggest, by means of the consideration of this
topic, some of the ways in which recent work in environmental aesthetics
may bring illumination to traditional areas of aesthetic interest and con-
cern. As background, it is initially useful to consider the typical manner of
approaching this topic.
Traditionally the aesthetics of architecture has been thought of as a
part of the aesthetics of art. Architecture itself has often been considered
a lesser art, but yet one which must find its proper place in a unified artis-

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winter 1986

?1986 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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22 Journal of Aesthetic Education

tic aesthetic. The aesthetic concepts and theories that serve in the analysis
of the fine or pure arts have been pressed into service for architecture as
well. Thus the aesthetics of architecture has concentrated on particular
structures that can be viewed as "works of architecture" comparable to
works of art and with features comparable to those we find aesthetically
interesting and pleasing in works of art. The concentration has been on
solitary, unique structures which have been carefully designed and cre-
ated by the architect as artist. If they are in certain ways work-of-art-like
or in particular sculpture-like, so much the better. In short, the focus has
been on individual, magnificent buildings-the works of one kind of
"artist."2
This traditional approach has certain difficulties. Even more so than the
concept 'work of art,' the concept 'work of architecture' is a curious
abstraction, and the class of works of architecture is a highly gerryman-
dered class. Even the paradigmatic works of architecture are unlike typical
works of art in a number of ways. For example, as buildings they have
functions and thus are intrinsically connected to the peoples and cultures
that use them. And as buildings they are also related to other buildings,
not only functionally related to those with similar uses, but structurally
related to those similarly designed and constructed and even physically
related to those adjacent to them. Moreover, as buildings they are built
in places and thus intimately tied not only to physically adjacent build-
ings, but to the cityscapes or landscapes within which they exist. Given
this web of interrelationships, it is difficult to ground the abstraction
"work of architecture" securely, and picking out the particular works of
architecture begins to look like a rather arbitrary process. In short, once
we start looking at and thinking about buildings, we realize that they do
not easily fit a concept analogous to the favored concept of a work of art,
that of a unique, functionless, and often portable object of aesthetic
appreciation.
It is in part this web of interrelationships that moves me toward what
may be called an ecological approach to the aesthetics of architecture. I
am also interested in the aesthetics of natural environments and think
there are resources in this area applicable to architecture.3 If architecture
exists in an "aesthetic no man's land" between art and nature, then instead
of the traditional advance from the art front, I suggest an advance from
the nature front.4 Such an advance is aptly termed an ecological approach
simply because of the central role ecological factors play in the aesthetic
appreciation of natural environments.5 Here, however, I stress ecological
factors only to the extent of considering works of architecture not as
analogous to works of art, but rather as integral parts of something like a
human ecosystem comparable to the ecosystems that make up the natural
environment.
To develop this comparison, we need to note initially that the natural
environment is composed of interlocking ecosystems characterized by a
feature I call functional fit. Each ecosystem itself must fit with various
other systems, and the constituents of any system must likewise fit within
it. At the level of the individual organism this is termed having an ecologi-
cal niche. The importance of such niches, and of functional fit in general,
has to do with survival. In this lies an ecological interpretation of the
biological principle of the survival of the fittest: without a fit neither indi-
vidual organisms nor ecosystems long survive. It is in this sense that the fit

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 Carlson: Aesthetics of Architecture 23

is functional. Ecosystems and their components do not fit together as the

pieces of a puzzle, but rather as the parts of a machine. Each has a func-
tion, the performing of which helps to maintain not only the part itself,
but also the other components of the system, the system itself, and ulti-
mately the whole natural environment.
Once the importance of functional fit is realized, the concept easily
finds a place in our aesthetic appreciation of natural environments. When
aesthetically appreciated under this concept, nature can no longer be per-
ceived simply as a collection of individual, disjointed natural objects,
organisms, or landscapes. No such component of an ecosystem can be fully
appreciated in isolation, but must be perceived in terms of its fit with larger
wholes. Moreover, since the fit is functional, functional descriptions take
on new significance. Landscapes become habitats, ranges, and territories,
the dwelling, feeding, and surviving spaces and places of organisms. And
organisms themselves become players in a unified drama of life. Indeed,
the ecological concept of functional fit may be seen as analogous to the
aesthetic notion of organic unity, a notion imported from the appreciation
of nature and traditionally utilized as a fundamental concept in the aes-
thetic appreciation of works of art.6
Returning to architecture, an ecological approach involves perceiving
architecture in its broadest sense as our natural human environment, that
is, perceiving our created landscapes, cityscapes, and the buildings and
structures which comprise them as analogous to interlocking ecosystems,
with the notion of functional fit as the key to appreciating their creation,
development, and continued survival. When so perceived, natural human
environments display the kind of organic unity we aesthetically appre-
ciate in nature. In many cases a landscape or a cityscape or even a particu-
lar building has developed naturally over time-has as it were organically
grown-in response to human needs, interests, and concerns. It thus has a
fit which need not be the result of intentional design, but of those forces
that have shaped it such that a fit of the components occurs naturally.
Such fits are explicitly functional in that they accommodate the fulfill-
ing of various interrelated functions. Indeed, the fact that these functions
are fulfilled is the essence of the fit. We are perhaps most familiar with
such functional fits in rural landscapes, where certain kinds of buildings,
farms, and rural communities fit functionally together and into the land-
scape they occupy and help form.7 However, functional fits can also be
appreciated in the city, especially in older neighborhoods, ethnic districts,
and city market areas. When a functional fit has been achieved in such
places, there is an ambiance of everything being and looking as it should,
of being and looking right or appropriate-as if the whole were the result
of processes akin to the ecological and evolutionary forces that shape the
natural environment.
An ecological approach to the aesthetics of architecture which dictates
the appreciation of architecture under the concept of functional fit has a
number of immediate consequences. The first of these is an emphasis on
all buildings rather than simply on the magnificent or the especially de-
signed. The functional fit of the ecosystem gives importance to each of its
components. Thus in light of an ecological approach, structures such as the
gas station, the shopping center, and the factory are each as integral a part
of the natural human environment and as viable a candidate for aesthetic
appreciation as are the paradigmatic works of architecture. Related to this

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24 Journal of Aesthetic Education

consequent is an equal emphasis on nonbuildings-both other kinds of

structures and artifacts of the natural human environment as well as that
environment itself. Bridges, highways, and power lines become objects of
appreciation, as do the landscapes through which they pass. On an ecologi-
cal approach, then, architectural aesthetics becomes a subdivision within
landscape aesthetics. This consequent seems quite appropriate, for even
the paradigmatic objects of traditional architectural aesthetics, the espe-
cially designed and magnificent buildings, are each, after all, built in a
place. They are not portable as are typical works of art, and thus severing
their appreciation from that of the cityscapes or the landscapes in which
they exist seems at best highly artificial and at worst quite absurd. In this,
I suspect, lies part of the aesthetic absurdity of such cases as the moving of
London Bridge to Lake Havasu City, Arizona.8
The above remarks emphasize the significance which an ecological
approach gives to each of the various components of our natural human
environment. However, as the London Bridge example suggests, such an
approach also stresses the interrelationships among these components.
Given the importance of functional fit, the complexes in our human en-
vironments, like the ecosystems of natural environments, become focuses
of aesthetic appreciation. Rather than emphasizing this or that building,
appreciation shifts to, for example, the downtown, the banking district,
the neighborhood, and even the suburb. The fit within and between such
places and spaces, together with their ambiance and atmosphere, their
feel, take on greater aesthetic significance. Closely related to this, and ulti-
mately more important, is another set of relationships-those between any
human environment and the people whose environment it is. Buildings are
no more people and culture free than they are cityscape and landscape
free. There is a tradition of appreciating pure works of art as isolated,
people- and culture-free entities. This tradition is probably wrongheaded
even with respect to artworks, but it is clearly so with respect to buildings
and their environments. Thus on an ecological approach questions of how
buildings reflect, represent, and express peoples and their cultures acquire
new importance. They become a part of the essence of aesthetic appreci-
ation rather than a curious sideline of such appreciation. The aesthetic
absurdity of moving London Bridge lies not simply in moving it from one
landscape to another, but also in taking it, through space and time, from
one culture to another.9
A further consequent of an ecological approach is that functionalism
acquires renewed life. Given the importance of functional fit, buildings
must be appreciated in terms of the functions they perform, and, as in
nature appreciation, functional descriptions become more significant. In
the English language words for the parts of the human environment do not
always emphasize this significance. Those for the internal parts of one
small ecosystem-the house-certainly do; we refer to the living room, the
dining room, the bathroom. However, words such as "building," "house,"
and "church" are not as suggestive. Perhaps phrases such as "dwelling
place" or "place of worship" would be better. Consider the aesthetic
appreciation of churches under a description such as "place of worship."
Unlike the word "church," "place of worship" forces function to the fore-
front of our minds, and questions such as, "Is this place conducive to wor-
ship?" "Does it make one humble, or does it inspire awe or even fear?"
become a part of our appreciation of the structure. Functionalist appreci-

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 Carlson: Aesthetics of Architecture 25

ation under functional descriptions can also be extended to larger com-

plexes. As noted, many human environments have developed naturally
over time so as to achieve a functional fit, and others have been expressly
designed to fit together in a functional manner. These explictly functional
complexes are appropriately appreciated as such.
Functionalism, of course, is an important theme in twentieth-century
architecture; architects like Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter
Gropius, Louis Kahn, and others have stressed it.1o However, the empha-
sis has often been on the functions of individual structures and the prob-
lems of designing them to suit these functions. An ecological approach
emphasizes not only the functions of particular buildings, but the func-
tional fit of the particular into the whole of its environment. Moreover,
this functionalist tradition by and large eschews the utilization of orna-
mentation in architectural design.' 1 However, as is realized by many post-
modern architects, ornamentation is an important means of achieving
another kind of fit of the particular into the whole. This fit is not in essence
functional, but only apparently so. The fit yields the look and feel, the
ambiance, of a functional fit without necessarily achieving it. Indeed, the
fact that we perceive this kind of fit as a fit at all underscores the impor-
tance of the functional fit, for the fitness is typically only a matter of sug-
gesting a functional fit by means of ornamentation.12 In the most obvious
cases, it amounts to no more than making a building blend with its imme-
diate spatial surroundings-a new building in an older section may be given
some of the frills of buildings typical of that area. However, in more subtle
cases it can involve an apparent functional fit not simply with the spatial
environment, but rather with what might be called the temporal environ-
ment. Ornamentation can give an ambiance of fit with the cultural history
of a place and its peoples and even perhaps with their vision of the future.
And even though the fit achieved is not a real functional fit, it is yet an
important way in which designed architecture can reflect, represent, and
express people and their cultures and is thus a significant element in our
aesthetic appreciation of human environments.
In this discussion I emphasize the notion of fit because I think it is
the key to the aesthetic appreciation of architecture in the broadest sense.
An ecological approach to architectural aesthetics brings this out by the
analogy to natural ecosystems in which functional fit is always a reality.
In our human environments, however, functional fit is in some cases a
reality, but in others only the appearance of such a fit. Nonetheless, aes-
thetic appreciation deals with appearance as well as with reality. Thus with
respect to such appreciation a key lesson given by an ecological approach
is that nothing in our human environments, as in natural environments,
can be fully appreciated in isolation. Each building, cityscape, or land-
scape must rather be appreciated in virtue of the fit that exists within it
and with its larger environment. To fail to do so is often to miss much
that is of aesthetic interest and merit. Keeping with an ecological approach,
we may emphasize this point by remembering that natural environments
work on the principle of the survival of the fittest and that ecologically
interpreted this principle can be taken to mean the survival of that which
best fits with its environment. For the aesthetic appreciation of our
natural human environments, and of architecture in particular, perhaps a
comparable principle suggests that we may find the greatest aesthetic
interest and merit in the fittest.

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26 Journal of Aesthetic Education
NOTES

1. The place of architecture in the systems of Hegel and Schopenhauer illustra

this point. Schopenhauer, for example, puts architecture in his hierarchy of
arts, but at the lowest possible level, expressing only "those ideas that are t
lowest grades of the will's objectivity." See The World as Will and Represen
tion, 2nd ed., trans. E. F. J. Payne (1844; New York: Dover, 1966), p. 214. Fo
a critique of Hegel's attempt to integrate architecture into his system, s
Stephen Bungay, Beauty and Truth: A Study of Hegel's Aesthetics (New Yor
Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 99-108.
2. The concentration on unique, sculpturelike "works" of the architect as ar
is ubiquitous. For example, Bungay claims of Hegel, who calls one type of arc
tecture "unorganische Skulptur," that "most of the examples he gives are n
works of architecture at all, but statues" (Beauty and Truth, p. 102). The tre
is similar in contemporary philosophy. In the "Foundations of Philosoph
volume on aesthetics, Virgil Aldrich discusses sculpture and architecture und
a single heading, treating the architect as an artist. See Philosophy of Art (Engl
wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 56-60. Works on criticism al
emphasize the unique, individual creations of "artists." For example, one stu
of function and twentieth-century architectural criticism is based entirely
thirteen "key twentieth-century architectural monuments." See Larry L. Lig
The Concept of Function in Twentieth-Century Architectural Criticism (An
Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Research Press, 1984), pp. 3-4.
3. See Allen Carlson, "Appreciation and the Natural Environment," Journa
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37, no. 3 (1979): 267-75; and "Nature, Aesthetic
Judgment, and Objectivity," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 40, no
(1981): 15-27.
4. For an example of the advance from the art front, see F. David Martin, "Archi-
tecture and the Aesthetic Appreciation of the Natural Environment," Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38, no. 2 (1979): 189-90. Martin suggests an
"architectural model" for the aesthetic appreciation of nature.
5. See Allen Carlson, "Nature and Positive Aesthetics," Environmental Ethics 6,
no. 1 (1984): 5-34.
6. Harold Osborne traces the tradition to Plato and Aristotle and in particular to
a passage in the Phaedrus (264c), although he adds that the passage "may not
warrant the burden of significance which has in later ages been read into it."
See Aesthetics and Art Theory: An Historical Introduction (New York: Dutton,
1980), pp. 284-93. John Hospers summarizes the concept as indicating "the
kind of unity that is present in a living organism." See Understanding the Arts
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982), p. 104.
7. I develop this point more fully in "On Appreciating Agricultural Landscapes,"
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, no. 3 (1985): 301-12.
8. The 1,005-foot, 137-year-old London Bridge was dismantled at its Thames River
site in 1967-68 and its 10,000-ton granite facing shipped, block by block, to
Lake Havasu City, Arizona. There it was reassembled over a mile-long artificial
waterway called the Little Thames. It is now the second most popular tourist
attraction in Arizona-surpassed only by the Grand Canyon. See Peter Jackson,
London Bridge (London: Cassell, 1971); for a shorter discussion, see David
Scott and Alden P. Armagnac, "London Bridge Comes to America," Popular
Science, September 1968, pp. 68-71.
9. The appreciative emphasis suggested in this and the preceding paragraph has
received some attention within one tradition in geography; see, for example,
the essays collected in D. W. Meinig, ed., The Interpretation of Ordinary Land-
scapes: Geographic Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); and in
B. Sadler and A. Carlson, eds., Environmental Aesthetics: Essays in Interpreta-
tion (Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria Press, 1982). The writings of J. B.
Jackson are also noteworthy; see, for example, J. B. Jackson, The Necessity of

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 Clark: Teaching Creativity 27

Ruins and Other Topics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980); and
E. H. Zube, ed., Landscapes: Selected Writings of J. B. Jackson (Amherst: Uni-
versity of Massachusetts Press, 1970). Within the philosophical tradition, Arnold
Berleant stresses related themes; see "Aesthetic Paradigms for an Urban Ecol-
ogy," Diogenes 103, no. 3 (1978): 1-28; and "Aesthetic Participation and the
Urban Environment," Urban Resources 1, no. 4 (1984): 37-41.
10. The theme is often articulated with the "form follows function" slogan typi-
cally attributed to Sullivan. One of Sullivan's stronger statements of the idea is
found in "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," Kindergarten Chats
and Other Writings (1918; New York: Dover, 1979), p. 208.
11. Both the affinity of the functionalist tradition with some of the themes of the
ecological approach and its disdain for certain kinds of ornamentation are
evident in the following quote from Walter Gropius: "We want to create a clear,
organic architecture, whose inner logic will be radiant and naked, unencumbered
by lying facades and trickeries; we want. . . an architecture whose function is
clearly recognizable in the relation of its forms." See "First Proclamation of the
Weimar Bauhaus," in Bauhaus: 1919-1928, ed. Herbert Bayer (New York: Mu-
seum of Modern Art, 1938), as reprinted in Ligo, Concept of Function, p. 12.
On these two issues and their somewhat complex relationship, see also Louis
Sullivan, "Ornament in Architecture," in Kindergarten Chats, pp. 187-90.
12. Architect Richard Neutra explicitly, if ambivalently, relates ornamentation to
the suggestion of function in Survival through Design (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1969), pp. 101-6.

Earlier versions of this essay were presented to the Forty-Third Annual Meeting of
the American Society for Aesthetics at the University of Louisville, October 1985,
and to the Institute for Comparative Literature, Aesthetics, and Theatre Research of
the University of Helsinki, May 1986. I thank those present for useful comments.

Some Thoughts on Teaching Creativity

Walter H. Clark, Jr.

Acts we consider creative have at least two characteristics. On the one

hand they are novel, either as not having been produced before or as fitting
into things in a new way. On the other hand, they are judged desirable by
society. Another way to put this would be to say that the word 'creative'
has both descriptive and evaluative functions. The question naturally arises
as to whether the characteristic of novelty is sufficient in itself to make an
act creative. I hope to show that it is not. The evaluative aspect of the
word leads me to ask whether we would label acts "creative" which, while
satisfying the criterion of novelty, etc., were socially undesirable. I think
not, unless one were to adopt the perspective of an antisocial subgroup.
On the whole, acts considered "creative" in other contexts are not held
to be so when executed by those such as burglars or tax evaders.
We may further note that, inasmuch as standards of value change
through time, judgments about creativity may be subject to retroactive
change. This is particularly true in the case of acts, formerly not held to
be creative, which are reevaluated or newly evaluated. We are familiar with
the example of writers such as Dickinson, Hopkins, and Melville, whom a

ournal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winter 1986

1986 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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