ABSTRACT
Recent developments in philosophy and the aesthetic appreciation of nature in particular present a number of key issues. 'Appreciating architecture as nature' may sound oxymoronic at first. Buildings are decidedly man-made objects. Architecture almost unquestionably has been compared to painting and sculpture. Immanuel Kant considered nature as an exemplary object of aesthetic experience. The British philosopher, Malcolm Budd, observes, nature is not limited to individual living organisms such as plants and animals, but includes lifeless substances such as minerals and unsubstantial entities such as climates. It also includes inanimate objects produced by living organisms, like beaver dams. The question of happenstance is a reasonable one and needs to be addressed. In other words, the architect after all has little involvement in making happen a piece of incomplete, imperfect, and impermanent architecture. Under the paradigm of complete architecture, the control that the architect exercises over the piece to maintain the optimum state of the piece is necessarily important.
