Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines what Immanuel Kant has to say about his eighteenth-century modernity. It situates Kant in relation to his now largely destroyed birthplace and life-long home, Königsberg. The book then examines his ideas about place, experience, knowledge and moral responsibility. It also examines how criterion of beauty in Kant's Critique of Judgement interferes with a notion of 'the good'. The book presents a series of challenges to any attempt to categorise architecture definitively either as 'proper' Fine Art, or as subsidiary art form principally concerned with functionality. It explores his ideas by means of a specific contemporary example, in order to raise issues about architecture's relation to commodity culture. The book considers the role architecture, nature and technology play in Kant's presentation of the sublime and critiques a version of sublime in relation to contemporary concerns about ecology and sustainable development.