The Sense to Consider…
Co-Authors | Zhao WeiXin, Bailey Json
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Art, as reflection | Judgment
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The primary argument within this text is the recognition of architecture as ideas not objects. To this end I will attempt to frame a way of thinking about ‘free harmony’ according to Emmanuel Kant in the ‘Critique of Judgment’. What I would attempt in this essay is to show that architecture is an art form. The use of the terms art and form will be use relative to the terms core and form as expressed by Kenneth Frampton in “Bötticher, Semper and the Tectonic: Core Form and Art Form.”
I will use the term idea as constructed by Emmanuel Kant to mean “reflective judgment that establishes many or multiform that cannot be grounded in experience. Kant argues in the “Critique of Judgment” that ‘Ideas’ are differentiated by the possibility of experience. For Kant an idea is a reflective judgment while a concept is a determinant judgment. (Rogerson p.7-8) Through the use of the Kantian construct of free harmony we can begin to understand what constitutes an idea in the context of architecture. What we can learn from Kant’s critique is that judgment is an organizing mechanism that allows us to understand concepts and ideas. As understood by Kant, concepts and ideas are bound to the imagination, which is stated to mean sense particulars are phenomena – physical – or noumenal – mental. Concepts and ideas are bound to the imagination because concepts are schema of how perceptions are to be understood. The ability to know particular ideas relates concepts and ideas to “purpose” and/ or “end”. Concepts are easily understandable while ideas are based the potential of thought.
If “judgment is based on the imagination and how the imagination is organized and understood as concepts and/or ideas then we have a framework from which to understand ideas, buildings and or buildings as ideas. The basis for understanding ideas in the context Kantian language coupled with the art form/ core form contrast as constructed by Karl Bötticher.
Bötticher posits that art form is a parcel of the material essence of a construct. If Bötticher symbolic or art form is recognizable as a meaning structure then it can be easily understood as symbolic meaning not symbolic form via materials. This reading of art form allows for Bötticher’s reality of buildings as art form and building form. Building occupies the space of core form or that, which is bound to the realm represented by the necessities of buildings while the art-form is the literal form of the built object. (Bötticher p.138-52) Bötticher uses a simple binary recognizing difference establishes the grounds for the art form/ core form split. He grants privileged status to the core form while asserting art form is merely cladding or decoration. I assert that Bötticher is privileging the practice of building buildings not the core form. What Bötticher does is reinforce the notion that buildings are architecture, which are indifferent to ideas.
Though Bötticher was heavily influenced by philosophy his preoccupation with styles of architect may have rendered him shortsighted to the potential of his argument regarding what architecture is beyond merely stylistic. The systems of ornament and tradition that subsumed Bötticher’s thoughts are bound to meaning systems, which I situate as conceptual through my use of Kantian judgment. If Bötticher’s thoughts co-exist within Kant’s system of judgment then his notions of buildings can be recognized through Kant’s system of ‘harmony’.
The framework established core form as buildings objects bound to technique with concepts that are rules for schema. While the art form situates ornament or symbols as deferred content to phenomena or ideas regarding possibilities. From this arrangement we can now understand buildings as representational objects or the product of ideas. Objects, as buildings, are re-representations or imitations of the idea or symbol. The building can never be the idea because the ideas exist before as expressions through idea production. I assert buildings assembled in contemporary societies are in different to the ideas of architects who merely draw buildings.
Buildings are not ideas because designers who are engaged in the practice of producing ideas not the production of building. Laborers have virtually no comprehension of the ideas that the buildings they build are intended to represent. So what we have revealed is that we are dealing with ideas and the representation of ideas. If this is an accurate depiction of architecture then what is architecture? The academy is also as stated herein the site of the idea production that has to be that which is the product of the architects within the academy. If architects are recognized through the objects they produce and buildings are not the objects produced by architects in the academy then the drawing, models, writings and sketches are the schema through which architects ‘ideas’ and ‘concepts’ are recognized. This would appear to be an accurate reading of the identity of architects in that architects only exist through that which they produce. Architects in the practice of the academy or the profession exist through that which they do which is not to build but to actualize thoughts through a recognizable medium. The medium through which architects represent their thoughts is the document. In the professional practice of architect the document is a legal contract between architect and client. Within the academy no such legality exist but the use of the document exist as a derivative of the list. The list is an unspoken contract between the student and the professor to which the student is held accountable.
What is the student accountable for? The student is held accountable to present ones ideas through the production of drawings, models, writings, sketches or recognized documents. The document represents the ‘concepts’ and ‘ideas’ of the architects in the academy therefore the documents are the architecture not buildings. “By the work; for to say that the work does credit to the master means that it is the work that first lets the artist emerge as a master of his art. The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other.” (Heidegger p.17) The document is the architect and the architect is the document. The documents produced are the ‘concept’ or past based on Kant’s conceptual determinate judgment that is Heidegger’s ‘work’. The documents produced are the ‘idea’ or future possibility based on Kant’s conceptual reflective judgment. And the documents produced are the imaginary or sense particular based on Kant’s concept aesthetic judgment. If the documents of architects are the idea, the concept and the judgment then the documents are a measure of time as well as being the text.
Apparently we do not read which is before us because architecture is not particularly about buildings. One could contend that buildings are architecture, which as been the task of history and many would agree. I would assert that all are mistaken in that architecture as accepted is not architecture and that the ‘texts’ or documents of architects are the medium upon which architecture exist. Architects, like Baudelaire, use text-based correspondences to create an imaginary sensory response. Architects such as Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa, and peter Zumthor use their judgments of space and material to construct ideas about place and represent these ideas using their text. These designers along with others imagine surface (material) potential based on meaning structures that are known or conceptual to them. Because they cannot image beyond that which is know to them at a particular moment they are imagining within both species of Kantian judgment (determinate and reflective judgment).
Art, as a Sense | Aesthetics
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“A form is beautiful, one might say, if it demands no explanation, or if it explains itself without a concept” (Schiller p.155)
It is not poetics or music that I seek to define, I would like to establish how architecture, as practice of idea production could be further understood through Hegel’s philosophies locating the totality of ideas. I would assert that the art form of architecture is only poetry when architects recognize music as the ideal form of art. Hegel asserts that music achieves ideal form in that it achieves a semblance of freedom.
I have use the terms of ‘concept’, ‘idea’, ‘imagination’ and ‘freedom’ based on the writings of Emmanuel Kant. These notions allow me to construct a framework through which architecture can be understood as an art form. This framework of judgment can allow for a better understanding architecture as a product that is and produces reality. As asserted by Hegel in his lectures on aesthetics a work of art can only become as a reality of the concept, “Art, in Hegel’s view, involves the concept—reality—Idea schema in several ways. A work of art is itself an Idea, an articulated whole that realizes its concept.” (Hegel p. XXI) Hegel’s established framework of situating concept, reality and idea allow for an understanding of architecture as situated herein as the ‘idea.’ This structure also allows for the realization of architecture as a text.
The ‘reality’ as postulated by Hegel contains both the concept and the idea conflated into that which is the idea, which is the whole. If this is a legitimate structure for understanding the reality of works of art then we can situate the ‘work’ of the architect as the reality of architecture ideas. Because Hegel locates the reality of the concept as the idea then the drawing, models, writings and sketches that are the schema are the totality of the idea.
Through the use of Hegel’s notion of ‘totality’ regarding idea art forms we can begin to understand architecture in the context of music. If we are to speak of a totality of form then music, for Hegel, is the epitome of the arts. Music unlike other art forms achieves a liberation or negation of form or matter that no other art for can achieve. By excluding or cancelling of space music is the totality of form because in itself it is the work, the concept and the idea and can only be recognized as Kant’s sense particulars not bound to experience but emotion.
Poetry is different from music in that it is recognized through the sign of the idea, which is the text of poetry that has an inherent intellectual intuition. Hegel asserts that poetry can express all that is imaginable because it is not limited to the material domain of all others arts except music. What poetry lacks that music does not is the ability to escape the realm of concepts as posited by Kant. Because poetry is recognized as a determinate judgment it is and can only be experience as the thing for it-self.
If music is the epitome of art forms then architecture should strive to image that which is beyond poetic for that which is poetic is bound to the material realm. I would assert that architects such as Holl, Pallasmaa and Zumthor recognize the phenomenal world in order to achieve an imagined poetic. The noumenon world as postulated by Kant perhaps could allow architecture to achieve a semblance of the imaginable. If architecture is the drawings, models, writings and sketches that are the interpretation of ideas then it would be bound to the imagination. Architecture as such would eclipse the bounds of the material world of buildings, which limit to the physical.
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Work Cited |
Rogerson, Kenneth. “The Problem of Free Harmony in Kant’s Aesthetics.” New York City: State University Press, 2008. p. 7-8. Print.
Karl Heinrich von Boetticher, see Kenneth Frampton, Boetticher, Semper and the Tectonic: Core Form and Art Form‘, what in What is Architecture, edited by Andrew Ballantyne (London: Routledge, 2002), pp.138-52. Print.
Heidegger, Martin. “Poetry, Language, Though: The Origin of the Work of Art.”” New York: HarperCollins, 2001. p. 17. Print.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. “Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics”: London: Penguin, 2004. p. XX. Print.