Generally speaking, writers on aesthetics have been noticeably reluctant to use architectural examples in support of speculations as to the nature of their general theories, but references to buildings have been used in most “philosophies of art” ever since the German philosophers Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel first popularized the philosophical discipline. Kant, in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790; Eng. trans., Critique of Judgment, 1951), distinguished between what he termed free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) and dependent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). He classified architecture as dependent beauty, saying that in a thing that is possible only by means of design (Absicht)—a building or even an animal—the regularity consisting in symmetry must express the unity of the intuition that accompanies the concept of purpose (Zweck), and this regularity belongs to cognition. Nevertheless, he claimed that a flower should be classified as free beauty (where the judgment of taste is “pure”) “because hardly anyone but a botanist knows what sort of thing a flower ought to be; and even he, though recognizing in the flower the reproductive organ of the plant, pays no regard to this natural purpose if he is passing judgment on the flower by taste.” What Kant’s reaction would have been to a modern plastic imitation flower is impossible to guess, but it will readily be perceived (1) why those who, in the 19th century, accepted the notion that beauty in architecture is pulchritudo adhaerens felt such antipathy toward “shams,” (2) how the distinction between “pure art” and “functional art” (Zweckkunst) became confused, and (3) why there arose a tendency to pursue definitions of “pure beauty” or “pure art” without specifically referring to the function and structure of any particular class of beautiful or artistic objects, such as buildings.
This latter tendency was reinforced when the French philosopher Victor Cousin, writing in 1835, classified the history of philosophy under three distinct headings: the true, the beautiful, and the good. The ensuing acceptance of the idea that beauty was to be studied independently of truth and goodness produced a tendency not merely to regard beauty as something added to a building (rather than conceptually inseparable from the truth and goodness of its structure and function) but to regard beauty as limited to visual and emotional qualities.
In the first half of the 20th century, philosophers grew less dogmatic about aesthetics. But its influence on theories of architecture became stronger because of the popular view that sculpture was essentially nonrepresentational. Thus, although the assertion that “aesthetically, architecture is the creation of sculpture big enough to walk about inside” was meaningful in the 20th century, it would have seemed nonsensical to any architectural theorist living before 1900, when sculpture was invariably thought of either as representational or as a carved refinement of load-bearing wood or stone. Functionalism
The notion of functional art, most actively promoted by German writers and termed by them Zweckkunst, is most appropriately related to architectural theory under three headings, namely (1) the idea that no building is beautiful unless it properly fulfills its function, (2) the idea that if a building fulfills its function it is ipso facto beautiful, and (3) the idea that, since form relates to function, all artifacts, including buildings, are a species of industrial, or applied, art (known in German as Kunstgewerbe).
The first proposition will be dealt with later under the heading utilitas. The second proposition, though widely popularized through the publication of the French architect Jean-Nicholas-Louis Durand’s lectures delivered during the economic depression of the beginning of the 19th century, has had little influence except during similar periods of economic depression. The third proposition has, however, had a wide influence, since, unlike the second proposition, it is closely akin to (rather than antagonistic toward) the theory of aesthetics, in that it regards all the visual arts as generically related.
This last theory seems to have been popularized, if not originated, by Gottfried Semper, an architect from Dresden who, after finding political asylum in England (where he then helped to organize the Great Exhibition of 1851), published a book in German on arts and crafts that seems to have been influential not only in Germany but also in areas of the United States heavily populated by German-speaking immigrants, such as Chicago. Later, in 20th-century Germany, the Bauhaus (officially Hochschule für Gestaltung; Academy for Form Giving) was ostensibly intended to train students in separate creative disciplines, but its didactic method was based on the assumption—implied by the general introductory courses—that, if one could design anything, one could design everything. In the explanatory words of its founder, the architect Walter Gropius, “The approach to any kind of design—a chair, a building, a whole town or a regional plan—should be essentially identical.” The art of building
The notion that architecture is the art of building was implied by Alberti" class="md-crosslink">Leon Battista Alberti in the first published treatise on the theory of architecture, De re aedificatoria (1485; Eng. trans., Ten Books on Architecture, 1955); although he was a layman writing for other lay scholars, he rejected, by his title, the idea that architecture was simply applied mathematics, as had been claimed by Vitruvius. The specific denotation of architecture as “the art of building,” however, seems to be a French tradition, deriving perhaps from the medieval status of master masons, as understood by the 16th-century architect Philibert Delorme. This definition occurs in most French treatises published before 1750, and, although the humanistic and antiquarian aspects of fine building were rarely questioned after the Renaissance, the distinction between “architecture” and “building” never had any appreciable significance before Renaissance ideas succumbed to the combined assault of “aesthetics” and the Gothic Revival movement.
Before the 18th century it was generally accepted that the theory of architecture was concerned mainly with important private or civic buildings such as palaces, mansions, churches, and monasteries. Buildings such as these required the superior skill that only book learning could provide, and so relatively little attention was given, in theoretical writings, to simple and straightforward buildings that could be competently built in accordance with local traditions by unlettered craftsmen. But, with the expansion of the architectural profession, with the perversion of the idea that social prestige was symbolized by ornamentation, with the wider distribution of wealth, and with the growing urge toward individualism in an increasingly egalitarian society, the real distinction between these two kinds of buildings was obscured, and in its place was substituted an antithesis. Henceforth, “building” was associated with the notion of cheapness, whereas “architecture” was associated with what John Ruskin would have called “sacrifice” (but which his antagonists would have called conspicuous waste). A distinction was made between the respective attitudes of “art architects” and practical-minded civil engineers. This distinction persisted because of the different methods of training candidates for the two professions. Whereas a fledgling engineering student is seldom asked to design a whole structure (such as a bridge), architectural students begin by designing whole structures and proceed with structures of increasing size and complexity, either graphically or by means of small-scale models.