ABSTRACT
Talking about art is always difficult, as demonstrated not only by the sorry state of catalog essays and art criticism but also by the fact that two whole disciplines must be enlisted in that discourse: aesthetics and art history, whose social function is to overcome the speechlessness of beholders by way of professionals who furnish the relevant categories of discussion. Talking about architecture seems an even more troubled practice, at least when architecture is treated as art – that is, when a building is not only functional but has a surplus of some kind, as Adorno puts it, providing speechlessness its specific occasion. It is especially difficult to talk about architecture by relying upon classical aesthetics, according to which buildings should, at one and the same time, be functional and, as works of art, be functional without possessing a function. This contradiction, or rather the dialectic that it generates, was boldly exploited by Hegel to posit a three-phase history of architecture since antiquity.1 Presuming that it is correct to argue that the architect – quite unlike artists of other genres – creates a work of art that must couple the artistic with the useful, then one is naturally tempted to interpret the artistic character of architecture by borrowing from other arts and drawing comparisons with sculpture, painting, literature, and music. A building is like a sculpture; the architect proceeds in his sketches like this or that painter; a space speaks a poetic language; a construction has a structure like a Bach fugue. Such talk is, of course, meant as applause, and yet one wonders if it is not simply the product of discomfiture or even condescension. Does architecture really have nothing to call its own? The affinity and the exchange between the arts are no doubt both important
and noteworthy. But the disposition to speak about architecture in a way derived from the other arts is not only detrimental to the reception of architecture, because it obscures its own genuine concerns in a fog of metaphors; it is also a danger to architects. It leads them astray with a borrowed self-image; it beguiles them into basing their work on an understanding of the artistic that has been lifted from other arts. Having come full circle, the discourse now coheres: one architect designs his buildings like sculptures, another tries a
painterly approach, a third wants buildings to be like texts, and a fourth like music. And why not? Why shouldn’t the drawing of such relationships be a fruitful heuristic procedure for the architect and an enlightening metaphor for the beholder? They are. But they could also be excuses – a means of sidestepping what really counts in architecture. So, what does really count? If we briefly review the basic implications of the
comparison with other arts – form and content, expression, meaning, harmony – then sculpture seems to be the closest to architecture. Don’t the two fields, inasmuch as they both shape matter, work in the domain of the visible? At which point the architect, by working for visibility and treating design as lending form to mass, has already succumbed to the seduction of the arts. But, then, is seeing really the truest means of perceiving architecture? Do we not feel it even more? And what does architecture actually shape – matter or should we say space?
