Harry Drummond builds a case.
What is the meaning of life? Does God exist? How ought I treat another person? What are the conditions of knowledge acquisition? Engaging, fundamental, and worthy – these sorts of questions are the typical buildings blocks of conversation when a philosopher is asked ‘What do you do?’. What is the nature of building? How can a building influence my life? In what style should we build? These are not the sort of questions it is worth placing money on hearing in the same situation.
Yet the philosophy of architecture has attracted some high-profile philosophers. Martin Heidegger, for example, delivered a lecture entitled ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, which proposed the ability of buildings to disclose new worlds to a person (or to Dasein, to use his term). Likewise, the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, who was appointed Chair of the UK’s ‘Building Better, Building Beautiful’ commission striving against architectural ugliness and failure, devoted an entire tome to the Aesthetics of Architecture (1979). Other prolific architecturally-inclined philosophers include Professor Andy Hamilton at Durham University, Gordon Graham of Princeton, and the late Norwegian architect Christian Norberg-Schulz. Given all this intellectual fire-power, why then is it that the philosophy of architecture does not appear alongside epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics in the centre of our philosophical discourse?
One reason might be that it is a derivative topic within aesthetics. This makes a difference for two reasons. Firstly, being a topic-within-a-topic in philosophy makes it extra difficult to make headlines. Secondly, we aestheticians remain, rather unfortunately, near the bottom end of the philosophical hierarchy. In addition, architecture seemingly does not warrant the philosophical attention we give to other areas. It’s a case of asymmetry. As I noted, the apparent worthiness and fundamentality of the questions involved in other fields of philosophical debate far surpass that of the questions of building. Much more attractive, both for the general public and, significantly, for research councils (which decide whose research to fund), are answers to whether we can obtain truth, or whether time really exists – as opposed to questions of, say, how a building contributes to my sense of community.
So, why should we care about the philosophy of architecture?
The most significant reasons arise from an identification of one of the characteristics of architecture that Scruton gives in his aforementioned book. Architecture is the most public of the arts. Buildings are entities we come across everyday. This is especially important when architecture is also fundamentally and irrevocably publicly heteronomous, meaning, it must answer to the taste of the ordinary person in the street. Furthermore, unlike music, painting, sculpture, and film, architecture cannot be considered socially autonomous, that is to say, distanced from its social function. Whilst these other arts have developed from and transcended their social roots, as say, accompaniments to religious ceremonies, displays of wealth on the staircase of one’s mansion, or popular diversions, architecture is necessarily social. This is in two senses. There is, of course, the sense that architecture needs to be nice to look at (this references the public heteronomy I mentioned). Secondly, there is the fact that buildings must facilitate some goings-on: you need to be able to do stuff in them. Architecture, furthermore, is entirely intersubjective in its nature. Any building entails our relationship with others, insofar as it was designed by someone else, built by someone else, is occupied by someone else, or is destroyed by someone else. It is increasingly important to us that we have buildings that satisfy both our needs and our perceptual wants.
There are numerous narratives within architecture that need to be explored philosophically. We come across questions of purpose: why did the architect build it in this way and not that? Or questions of ethics: how should I act given what occurred in this building before its use by me? Can you morally turn an abattoir into a vegan restaurant (or vice versa), for example? Questions in the intersubjective realm include: given how this building came about, the preceding narratives, its location and facilitation of function both inside and out, how does this building contribute to my sense of being-with-others?