Introduction

So common is the expression ‘art and architecture’ in discourse about the arts that its implications tend to slip by unnoticed. However, on our reading, ‘art and architecture’ tends to underline the externality, if not the exile, of architecture with respect to other art forms, indicating, perhaps, in its conjunction, a different kind of status from them. Certainly, within the arts, architecture is among those most connected with institutions and actions having little to do with the creative process. Like film, for example, it requires a large diversity of skills and abilities that must be carefully managed, and it sometimes involves dealings so complex—and at times so costly—that one can only marvel that some projects are completed at all. Architecture, for all its sometimes majesty, is a paradigm of a negotiated art, one that often involves significant compromise of artistic ideals. This complexity in the process of production and construction parallels the complex manner in which architecture is received. Unlike film, painting, or music, architecture is not—and should not be—experienced from a single static position. Moreover, unlike the other arts, it is best to experience architecture through a number of sense modalities simultaneously as one moves within and around its instances. The alleged uniqueness of architecture within the arts is sometimes thought to be the result of its need to serve various programmatic functions. This is made explicit in the troika of architectural values proposed by the Roman architect Vitruvius, namely, venustas (beauty), firmitas (structural strength), and utilitas (function), and in the modernist slogan of the American architect Louis Sullivan, “form ever follows function.” Here Sullivan highlights a central idea of modern architecture that, in the ideal case, function should determine the formal properties of a building. However, while modernism foregrounded function, function, unlike in many other arts, was privileged in architecture generally and was always a limiting factor in its design. Another reason given for why architecture might differ from the other fine arts is that, like many of the popular or low arts, it seems to be immersed in daily life. Consequently, as Roger Scruton, one philosopher who has written a great deal about architecture, puts it: One might say that, in proposing an aesthetics of architecture, the least one must be proposing is an aesthetics of everyday life. One has moved away from the realm of high art towards that of common practical wisdom. And here one might begin to see just how inappropriate is our post‐romantic conception of art to the description of normal aesthetic judgments of the normal man, and how obscure are all the concepts, such as the concept of expression, which have been used to elucidate it.1 Architecture, unlike other arts that demand to stand in the foreground (and be appraised as such), might best be understood as providing the necessary background to life (and sometimes to those other arts). It may well be that architecture's negotiated circumstance, its complexity of aesthetic experience, its need to meet a host of practical requirements, and its immersion in everyday life have led to a certain relative neglect among philosophers who seem to prefer to discuss arts that are less informed by mundane measures and are perhaps simpler, and so purer, and arguably more fundamental to understanding art. These same factors have contributed to the belief on the part of some philosophers, such as Schopenhauer and Kant, that architecture ranks below the other, purer art forms. This relative neglect on the part of philosophers can be contrasted with wide‐ranging theoretical work on the part of architects themselves as they seek to better understand the depth and limits of their practice and, we might add, its links with philosophy. To some degree, therefore, philosophers must play catch‐up. But in seeking to overcome this disadvantage, it is important that they maintain an open mind. “Architecture” should not be limited to the bold and the beautiful, to projects with spiraling budgets, to buildings designed by professional architects, or to “tasteful” buildings built for well‐to‐do patrons or prestigious corporations. Design is a matter of degree and circumstance. And design may differ in quality as well as quantity without lessening its importance for the culture and therefore its interest for aestheticians and philosophers generally. Like kitsch or horror movies, jokes or video games, architectural projects by anonymous initiators can produce vernacular structures of vast importance to philosophical insights in architecture or the arts generally. At times, construction outside the profession approaches professional work in its power and beauty, but even when it is “ugly and ordinary,” to use Robert Venturi's phrase, it may be ripe with interest for philosophers of art, as these buildings are part of the material manifestation of the culture. Architecture, in this broad sense of the term, may not be everyone's cup of tea, but we think it is useful to study the more humble constructs as well as the jewels of the field, the sometimes overlooked as well as the most famous buildings of our time. On this matter, we like what Geoffrey Makstutis says: Whether one likes or dislikes a particular building, public space, or room, the experience of interacting with it will forever be a part of oneself. Architecture can inspire or depress, uplift or oppress, and incite a myriad of other emotional responses. From the “primitive hut” of Abbé Laugier's writings to the “intelligent buildings” of the twenty‐first century, architecture plays a vital role in the way we express our personal beliefs and values, and those of our public and private institutions. Cathedral or mosque, terraced house or mansion, corner shop or shopping mall, architecture is the reflection of our cultural identity made manifest in the built environment.2 Formally and technically, the objects of architecture are as diverse as in any other art. Its instances, then, range from tombs and hospitals to city planning and landscaping, private homes and skyscrapers, Olympic stadia, museums, casinos, concert halls, luxury resorts, factories, and parking garages. So much a part of our form of life, architecture can have powerful effects on its audience. It is also important that architecture not be thought of solely as a public art. Scruton and others do think of architecture in this way, and there is good reason for doing so: for example, the visibility of architecture, its outdoor accessibility, its seeming openness to all. But this publicity must be taken with serious qualification. Even architectural icons like Philip Johnson's residence, the so‐called “Glass House” in New Canaan, or Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann home, the “Falling Water House” in Pennsylvania, were, at one time, off‐limits to a public acquainted with them only through pictures. Other seemingly public architectural works are experienced only from the outside. Most interiors are closed to all, while many are accessible to tourists only after significant travel and an often prohibitively costly entrance fee. We mention this because we think that understanding architecture as a public art betrays a tendency to see architecture as a formal object alone and from its exterior only, and that tendency is something to be avoided. With these thoughts in mind, we have included in this volume articles about different kinds of buildings: about movie theaters and mosques, mass‐produced new American housing developments, the traditional pre‐War shops and houses of Hanoi, as well as about museums designed by such “starchitects” as Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind. The issue also features articles that examine architectural spaces from the inside and buildings as background to everyday activities. Other articles consider the many ways that buildings affect us and the ways architecture can frame or ground our sense of being and reality. Still others examine the expressive character of buildings, while some look at the many connections between architecture and the other arts. Paul Guyer's article, “Kant and the Philosophy of Architecture,” examines the role Kant played in the development of the philosophy of architecture. Guyer argues that, despite the short and scattered nature of Kant's discussions of architecture, his work played a key part in transforming the philosophy of architecture from a discipline concerned only with the Vitruvian values of beauty and utility to a discipline concerned mainly with understanding architecture's expressive power. Kant's role in this transformation is obscured, in Guyer's view, by an overemphasis on his remarks in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” that focus on the way a building's function limits its potential for (free) beauty. Guyer argues, however, that greater attention should be paid to Kant's theory of fine art, where he claims that a beautiful work of art must have a “spirit” by means of which “aesthetic ideas” can be expressed. This argument makes plausible the historically important idea that architecture, like the other arts, has an expressive dimension. It has been said that museums are the new cathedrals—prize projects for architects building today—as they often afford opportunities for radical aesthetic imagination. Museums sometimes become part of the identity of the communities in which they are built and are centers of attraction even in large cities. The second and third articles in this volume, by Glenn Parsons and Larry Shiner, respectively, address controversies brought on by museums whose architects have taken advantage of the aesthetic freedom permitted by the civic desire for outstanding structures. One of the three Vitruvian values, “utility” or “function,” is the subject of Glenn Parsons’s article, “Fact and Function in Architectural Criticism.” Parsons uses the debate over Daniel Libeskind's 2007 extension to Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) to raise the question of the “proper function” of a building. Parsons notes that the debate over the extension to the ROM seems to turn on the question of function versus beauty: its critics argue that its dramatically sloping walls make it inappropriate for exhibitions, while its defenders argue in favor of the extension on the basis of its artistic qualities alone. However, Parsons argues that what is really at stake is the question of the “proper function” of an art museum in modern society, for example, as a new agora, and this raises the question of how “proper function” could be determined. After considering and rejecting a number of answers, Parsons suggests a solution inspired by Darwin's theory of evolution that grounds the attribution of functions to human artifacts on the notion of “selected effects.” He then uses this solution to defend Libeskind's extension. In “On Aesthetics and Function in Architecture: The Case of the ‘Spectacle’ Art Museum,” Larry Shiner also discusses attempts to evaluate some recently built, “spectacular” art museums, such as Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Libeskind's addition to the Denver Art Museum. Objecting to both the “separatism” of Roger Scruton and Edward Winters, which denies that functional judgments are relevant to aesthetic judgments, and to Glenn Parsons’s and Allen Carlson's views on “functional beauty,” which hold that aesthetic judgments of a building directly depend on its success in satisfying its proper function, Shiner proposes a “moderate functionalism” that he develops through a discussion of Kant's notion of dependent beauty. Shiner argues that functional failures in architecture do not necessarily imply negative aesthetic judgments, just as functional successes do not necessarily imply positive aesthetic judgments. Instead, according to Shiner, a building's aesthetic or symbolic virtues can compensate for its functional failures, as with the Bilbao Guggenheim, while in other cases functional failures can overwhelm aesthetic virtues, as with Libeskind's addition to the Denver Art Museum. Turning from the spectacular to the more mundane, Andrew Ballantyne takes to task what he calls a “tourists’ gaze” view of architecture: the reception of architecture from an exterior point of view. In his article, “Architecture, Life, and Habit,” Ballantyne suggests that rather than trying to appreciate architecture visually, we should understand it as the physical background for the habits that ground our lives and make possible our more human and creative endeavors. The connection between architecture and habit suggests for Ballantyne that the aesthetics of architecture must have an ethical dimension. He illustrates this point with a comparison between the works of Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier, each an important modernist architect and designer of furniture. According to Ballantyne, both understand that a house is a means for living and should be evaluated accordingly, but, while Le Corbusier's conception of life is based on an inappropriate engineering model, Gray's conception, based as it is on a more biological model, is more instructive. Hence, her buildings, while lacking perhaps the visual power of Le Corbusier's, show a greater understanding of the habitual dimensions of life and the connection between this dimension and more creative activities. In a wide‐ranging essay entitled “Fantastic Architecture: Lessons of Laputa and the Unbearable Lightness of Our Architecture,” Karsten Harries makes use of the imaginative satire of Jonathan Swift and Milan Kundera's now classic novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in order to criticize the pretensions of such “anarchitects” as Lebbeus Woods and Gordon Matta‐Clark. Suggesting that these avant‐garde architects share much of the same worldview held by modern architects to whose work they object, Harries argues that their common utopian approach is “unbearably light,”“abstract,” and disconnected from the everyday concerns of those who might inhabit their buildings. Harries suggests that such an approach to architecture, which seeks to transcend (or simply ignore) the body and its mundane affairs, is dangerous and calls for a less ideologically driven, more down‐to‐earth approach to architectural design. As if continuing some concerns of Harries, Edward Winters begins his article, “A Dance to the Music of Architecture,” with a discussion of “paper architecture,” that is, architectural drawings and plans for projects that may never, perhaps could never, be built. How, he asks, can this type of architecture be evaluated aesthetically? What can it tell us about the nature of the built environment? Some of the most important practitioners of this type of architecture were members of the British group “Archigram” that was active during the 1960s and 1970s. Winters examines a commercial photograph of an angler at a stream watching an early portable SONY television, a photograph that one of Archigram's founding members, David Greene, used in his teaching to problematize the notion of architecture. Winters’s discussion of this photograph leads him to suggest a Nietzschean account of the aesthetics of architecture that would have us evaluate architecture from both an Apollonian and a Dionysian perspective. While the former would stress the visual and the formal evaluation of buildings, the latter would take a less formal, proprioceptive approach. It is this second approach that interests Winters, who proposes that, from this perspective, architecture can be understood as “frozen music” within which “the dance of life” takes place. Thus, with Ballantyne, Winters believes that we should evaluate buildings according to how well they make possible desired forms of life. While coming from an entirely different direction, Travis T. Anderson, in his article “Complicating Heidegger and the Truth of Architecture,” arrives at conclusions that are remarkably similar to those defended by Winters and Ballantyne. The explicit purpose of Anderson's article, however, is to defend the claim that the work of architects, especially those of Antonio Gaudi and Frank Gehry, “unsettle” Heidegger's early ontological division of the world into three kinds of objects, namely, elemental objects, use‐objects, and works of art. 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