Aesthetic Investigations

Growing Up with Mies and Saarinen

Paul Guyer — 2023-08-30

Paul Guyer interviews his cousin Laure van Heijenoort, who as a teenager lived for several years with her parents in one of Mies van der Rohe's Lafayette Park townhouses in Detroit and attended school at Eliel Saarinen's Cranbrook campus. She reports on her experiences of living and study in both, experiences still vivid to her and now to a broader audience.

Tourism & the Built Environment

Sue Spaid — 2023-08-30

This paper explores the differences in ‘affect’ between Gehry’s blossoming beacons, whose visibility in the landscape lends them the role of beckoning flowers and the comparable invisibility of Floriade Expo 2022, whose horizontality granted it a subtlety that has thus far failed to elicit any of the thrill associated with the 'Bilbao Effect', even though it proffers an unparalleled botanical paradise. Thus far, it seems that people find biodiverse parks less impressive than buildings, even though thousands of people have worked tirelessly to ensure its viability. One year later, however, people are revaluating flower shows' ecological costs.

Taking up space

Rossen Ventzislavov — 2023-08-30

One of the many innovations with which performance art can be credited is its revolutionary approach to space-making and inhabitation. Its reanimation of objects, events and bodies takes up space as a material presence, which incidentally engenders a conceptual problem. Philosophical aesthetics has had a lot to say about our relationship with the built form, but this work has not been brought to bear on performance art and the ways this artform complicates such relationships. This paper addresses this void by exploring two dimensions of what architect Daniel Libeskind has called ‘the space of encounter’—the physical and the ethical.

Oana Șerban, After Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Aesthetic Revolutions (2023)

Sue Spaid — 2023-08-30

N/A

Introduction to the Special Issue on Philosophy and Architecture

Paul Guyer — 2023-08-30

(This is the Guest Editor's introduction)

Urban Ruins and the Neo -Picturesque Landscape

Elizabeth Scarbrough — 2023-09-01

While classical ruins are seen as tourist destinations, contemporary or industrial ruins are dismissed as disused sites. In this paper I argue for the preservation of urban (or contemporary) ruins. I focus on one specific case, that of the Miami Marine Stadium in Miami, Florida USA. Since the 1990s the stadium has been derelict, a canvas for graffiti artists and a home to skateboarders. In 2018 the City of Miami decided to revamp the stadium and reopen it as a concert and sporting venue. The current design-development plan has sanitized this urban ruin, robbing it of its past. I will situate the debate about rehabbing contemporary ruins within the growing literature of the neo-picturesque, specifically neo-picturesque landscape design. I believe that urban ruins such as these have a place in the modern city and will suggest some paths forward for these neo-picturesque ruin beauties.

Architecture, Buildings, and Political Ends

Saul Fisher — 2023-09-01

It is not infrequently heard in architectural circles that architecture is an inherently political enterprise and pursuit, such that build structures are, correspondingly, inherently political objects. But does architecture, by its nature as practice or artifact, universally serve political ends? Taking ends of something X to be political iff X serves the projection of power by state or government, or advances policy-making, ideologies, or the body politic, it may be thought that

AP1. Architecture, in its products, always serves political ends.

on the grounds that, roughly speaking, wherever one looks, one finds cases providing evidence that

AP2. Buildings (built structures, generally) always serve political ends, and

AP3. Buildings (built structures) are the only products of architecture.

On the supposition that this fairly tracks the common view, I take for granted that the argument goes through if the premises are defensible. I propose, though, that neither AP2 nor AP3 are defensible, at least in the grand, universal fashion that they are offered.

Surplus of Form

Joerg Gleiter — 2023-08-30

Excess of matter in form designates the principle that underlies architecture. The surplus of form contains not only a constructive principle, but also an aesthetic principle that enables sensual experience. In the coupling of construction and sensual experience, the basic prerequisites for the aesthetics of architecture are thus named, but at the same time also the difficulties with which architecture is confronted within philosophical aesthetics. For Kant, it was precisely the object character that stood in the way of an architectural aesthetics as part of a general aesthetics. For him, only the architectural drawing, because detached from matter, construction, and function, could meet the criteria of the beautiful, and that only as a façade view and not as a ground plan or sectional drawing. With reference to Aristotle, Kant and Schopenhauer and an outlook on contemporary architecture, the essay outlines the principles of an aesthetics of architecture as it is to be developed out of the specific material conditions of architecture and has its starting point in the surplus of form.

Susanne Langer on Architecture

Paul Guyer — 2023-08-30

That human thought is essentially symbolic was Susanne Langer’s “new key” to philosophy. No approach might seem less promising for understanding our experience of architecture: apart from a few academics who have confused architectural drawing with architecture itself, most people think of architecture as comprising three-dimensional, physical objects built of wood, stone, steel, glass, and all sorts of contemporary composites, as real rather than symbolic as it can get. We should begin where she did, namely, by distinguishing what she called “discursive” and “presentational” symbolism. Langer’s main point is not merely that architecture provides ethnic domains, but that it provides images of ethnic domains

Architecture is Not Public Art

Rob van Gerwen — 2023-08-30

In this ‘Editor’s column’, I question whether architecture is what we have come to call Public Art. It seems nonsense to say that architecture is not an art, when it is obviously something that people make for audiences, i.e. for other people who admire it. Moreover, architecture steers and influences people. Evidently, all of culture is by and for people and influences people. But when is culture art? Is design an art – is architecture?

Haunted houses

Clinton Peter Verdonschot — 2023-08-30

Corrigendum

Clinton Peter Verdonschot — 2023-08-30