Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
The Need for Architecture
Karsten Harries
Harries is Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. His writings and ideas have played a major role in architectural phenomenology. His books include: The Meaning of Modern Art (Northwestern Univ. Press, 1968); The Bavarian Rococo Church (Yale Univ. Press, 1983); The Ethical Function of Architecture (MIT Press, 1997); and Infinity and Perspective (MIT Press, 2001). The following essay was originally published in Architecture: Celebrating the Past, Designing the Future, Nancy B. Solomon, ed. (NY: AIA/Visual Reference Publications, 2008). This volume was commissioned by the American Institute of Architects for its 150th anniversary. We thank Nancy Solomon, Janet Rumbarger, and the AIA for permission to reprint Harries’ essay here. karsten.harries@yale.edu. © 2008 American Institute of Architects. Originally published in Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, vol. 20, issue 3 (fall 2009), pp. 11-18.
“Architecture” names, first of all, the art of building and, second, any structure raised in accordance with the rules of that art. Figuratively, it also refers to anything that has been set on a firm foundation and well constructed.
Philosophers, especially, have found it useful to invoke architectural metaphors, and no one more so than the Frenchman Rene Descartes, who, convinced that reason was sufficient to raise a conceptual edifice that would allow human beings to understand the world and their place in it, compared his method to that used by architects.
But if the edifice his reason raised—his “spiritual architecture,” if you will—remains a presupposition of the science and technology that have shaped our modern world, including our built architecture, his expectation that the progress of reason would provide human beings not only with physical but also spiritual shelter went disappointed. The conviction of the Enlightenment and of its heir, Modernism, that reason would lead humanity toward an ever-brighter future, has been shattered by the horrors of holocaust, war, terror, and environmental catastrophes.
Architecture, too, is caught up in such disenchantment. Do we still expect it to build an environment that will provide not just the body but also the spirit with adequate shelter? How will the world look as our children and grandchildren make their way? No doubt, buildings will still be part of that world: We would have to rid ourselves of our bodies to eliminate the need for physical shelter. But will there still be a need for architecture? Just what task remains for architecture today?
Even to ask that question is to presuppose that “architecture” is not to be equated with “building.” To be sure, every work of architecture is also a building, but it is more, How is this “more” to be understood? A first answer is suggested by the traditional understanding of architecture as one of the arts. In The Ten Books on Architecture, the first and still most famous treatise on architecture, the Roman architect Vitruvius demanded that the architect build “with due reference to durability, convenience, and beauty.” [1]. Ever since, thinking about architecture has tended to take this demand pretty much for granted.
Dreams of
Beauty
Consider, for example, the
way in which architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner begins his
influential An Outline of European Architecture with the
seemingly self-evident observation: “A bicycle shed is a building;
Lincoln Cathedral
is a piece of architecture.” What distinguishes works of
architecture from mere buildings, according to Pevsner, is that
they are “designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.”
In the light of that distinction, our initial question could be rephrased: What need will there be for functional buildings that also succeed as aesthetic objects? For many, this revised question is answered by the very conception of the aesthetic object as that which gives pleasure simply because it is what it is, not because it is good for anything. Prize-winning writer, critic, and philosopher William Gass illustrated this point of view when he celebrated the way one of Peter Eisenman’s houses turns its back on the world and the everyday cares and concerns of individuals:
Thank God, I thought. This house has no concern for me and mine, over which it has no rights, but displays in every aspect and angle and fall of light the concern for the nature and beauty of building that is the architect’s trust and obligation [2].
But does such an aesthetic response provide us with a key to the responsibility of the architect or do justice to either beauty or architecture? Human beings have always dreamed of a more beautiful world. The urge to decorate dwellings and tools—indeed the human body—is as old as humanity. But the goal was rarely to create beauty for beauty’s sake. Across centuries and cultures, human beings have yearned to experience the presence of spirit in the things that surrounded them in order to feel at home in the world. Ornament had an animating function. When experienced as just an aesthetic addendum, decoration loses this aura.
The aura that gives a building such as England’s Lincoln Cathedral its special weight is threatened as soon as architects take their primary responsibility to be the creation of aesthetic objects. For what is “aura”? German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin understood the experience of aura as an experience of spirit incarnate in matter. The observer’s identification with something, say a coconut with the look of a human face, gives it a special aura, lets it appear as more than just mute matter. But is this ever more than an appearance, an illusion, read into things by the observer?
Is the experience of aura then, at bottom, self-deception? A child may experience rocks and animals as animate, endowed with the power of speech, and fairy tales preserve traces of an older magical experience of the aura of all things. But the commitment to objectivity that is a presupposition of our science and technology banishes spirit from matter. To us moderns, things do not speak, except perhaps as echoes of our own voice. Such echoes leave us alone and homeless. Has what we today call “beauty” not lost the aura beauty once possessed? Our answer depends on how much we allow our commitment to objectivity to limit our understanding of what deserves to be called “real.”
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s answer to the question “What is the beauty of a building today?” speaks to this threatened loss: “The same as the beautiful face of a woman lacking spirit: something mask-like.” His metaphor helps us better understand his distinction between two different kinds of beauty: When the subject is a human being, we can more readily distinguish a beauty that is still experienced as the incarnation of spirit in matter from a made-up, mask-like beauty—even if this latter beauty may be more “perfect” in its presentation.
Crucial here are the different ways that beauty relates to what is beautiful. The first beauty invites the metaphor of a veil that conceals even as it calls attention to what lies beneath, be it face, body, or something sacred. Such a veil does not want to be appreciated for its own sake but as a boundary and a bond with what remains concealed—a threshold both separating and linking the sacred and the profane, the inner and the outer, the spiritual and the material. The second beauty would have us forget what is beneath. Such superficial beauty gains special importance in a world in which all too much invites such forgetting. This beauty offers an escape from reality into a world of simulacra.
Returning to our example of Lincoln Cathedral, do we capture its special aura when we understand it as a functional building overlaid with aesthetic intentions? The beauty of this church allowed the building to speak of life on this Earth, of death, of community, and of the promise of happiness—the profound issues that mattered most to those who built it. Into the ground of everyday buildings, the cathedral inserted a figure of utopia. This form of beauty provided spiritual shelter. In stark contrast, beauty that is enjoyed only for beauty’s sake lets us forget the burdens of our everyday existence.
Nietzsche’s remarks on the beauty of architecture appear in a section of Human, All Too Human bearing the title: “Stone is more stone than it used to be” [3]. But are not stones what they always were? Of course, the earlier reference to our modern commitment to objectivity already intimated what has changed.
The contrast Nietzsche had in mind would seem familiar to all of us and to hold not only for architecture: Perceived meaning often veils the materiality of the things we encounter. To better understand this, consider some printed page. Matter, in the form of ink on paper rather than stone, is meant to communicate. And when we get caught up in some story, we may hardly be aware of the paper or the ink blackening our fingers. Our mind is focused on the ideas communicated by the printed words and our reactions to them. Here, in an obvious way, meaning veils matter.
And do not buildings, too, have meaning in this sense, meaning that allows us to liken them to texts? When we enter a railroad station or a bank, what we see is not an assemblage of stones but shapes and surfaces that suggest the purpose or importance of the place and invite a certain behavior. In all architecture, meaning veils the materiality of the material of which buildings are made.
The stones of architecture thus speak to us, though we may want to add that it is really human beings who endow these stones with meaning as both those who build and those who live in and with these buildings bring to them expectations and understanding of what purposes buildings should serve and what they should look like. In that sense, buildings cannot help but speak to us. But how then to understand Nietzsche’s claim that “stone is more stone today than it used to be”? In what sense had the buildings of his day lost their ability to speak?
Nietzsche was thinking of Neo-Gothic churches and Neo-Renaissance city halls, of apartment houses given the look of Baroque palaces, of banks built in the image of Greek temples. In the way they appropriated past styles, such buildings did still speak, but the original significance of the styles that were appropriated could no longer be understood.
The architecture of the second half of the 19th century offers ready illustrations of the mask-like beauty Nietzsche had in mind. Functional buildings were dressed up aesthetically with borrowed ornament, whose former spiritual significance was no longer understood. In the first decades of the twentieth century, just about every progressive architect, critic, or writer shared Nietzsche’s dislike of such architecture. This sense that architecture had become a masquerade provoked many a Modernist to demand a more honest architecture that was responsive to our modern reality and, in particular, to our science and technology.
But have we today not returned to the “decorated sheds”—to borrow a term from the authors of Learning from Las Vegas—of the nineteenth century, if in a new key? [4]. Consider Frank Gehry’s Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis (1991-93; photo, below). I would not deny this museum’s distinctive beauty. But almost self-consciously, with its folded façade of brushed stainless steel, this architecture brings to mind Nietzsche’s remark on the mask-like beauty of today’s architecture, here made conspicuous by the loose fit between glittering cladding and a quite ordinary shed. Whenever such a building lifts or drops its mask, the material beneath presents itself all the more insistently as the mute material it is, in this case terra-cotta-colored brick and concrete.
Does the aesthetic approach not demand of the architect attention to certain visual qualities that help make his or her work aesthetically appealing—if not beautiful, then at least interesting? Such concern with aesthetic appeal, however, denies architecture the aura that once belonged to it. As Nietzsche explains:
Originally everything on a Greek or Christian building had a meaning, with an eye to a higher order of things: this aura of an inexhaustible significance surrounded the building like a magical veil [5].
Our modern approach to architecture is governed by a very different understanding of the task of the architect: The architect is asked, among many other requirements, to create buildings that succeed as aesthetic objects—but the more successful the practitioner is in this regard, the more completely does the aesthetic object ornament and finally smother the building itself, transforming it into a mega-sculpture. The resultant beauty is experienced as but a mask, leaving what lies beneath pretty much untouched—and leaving us dreaming of a very different kind of architecture.
Dreams of the
Complete Building
That architecture has
difficulty rising to the purity found in modern painting or
sculpture is evident. Reality, with its own demands, places too
many restraints on the architect. This shows itself in the
disjointed appearance of countless decorated sheds. But should
great architecture not overcome that tension by embracing that
reality more completely, instead of hiding it beneath some
beautiful mask?
Valery’s definition of poetry as “an effort by one man to create an artificial and ideal order of a material of vulgar origin,” the material in this case being ordinary language, invites application to architecture: Architecture is an effort by one individual to create an artificial and ideal order out of a material of vulgar origin, the material now furnished by all the requirements of building [6].
Frank Lloyd Wright’s dream of an organic architecture that would make it “quite impossible to consider the building as one thing, its furnishings another and its setting and environment still another” points in this direction: “The very chairs and tables, cabinets and even musical instruments, where practicable, are of the building itself, never fixtures upon it” [7]. Residents of such a house would be expected to behave, perhaps even to dress and eat in ways that would preserve the integrity of the aesthetic whole.
Such dreams invite an aestheticization of life, and because the physical and social environment, too, are to be incorporated into the aesthetic whole, an aestheticization of politics. Architects and theorists have long dreamed of architectural concepts that might gather some multitude into a genuine community. As religion proved less and less able to offer effective spiritual shelter, such dreams gained a new actuality: Why should some genius not be able to create a city that would once again allow individuals to discover their vocation as parts of a greater whole? Presupposed is the conviction, articulated by Nietzsche, “that the human being has value, meaning only in as much as he is a stone in a great building” [8].
Nietzsche knew this kind of dream is likely to strike many as a nightmare. We are too committed to the autonomy of the individual, too preoccupied with the self, to furnish suitable material for such an architecture. But this does not mean that we do not dream of it now and then. Those spiritually at sea may well long for some architecture strong enough to bind or crush freedom. (In the absence of Moses, they may call for Aaron and the golden calf.)
This dream has seduced many Modern architects. Walter Gropius invited Bauhaus students to see themselves as part of a new elite, from which would grow a new belief, “a universally great, enduring, spiritual-religious idea,” that would find an architectural expression worthy to take its place beside the great cathedrals. Projecting the “miracle of the Gothic cathedrals” into the future, Gropius envisioned an architecture that once again was “the crystalline expression of man’s noblest thoughts, his ardour, his humanity, his faith, his religion!” [9].
We may wonder whether architects like Paul Ludwig Troost and Albert Speer did not come closer to realizing the dream of a new cathedral than did the Bauhaus, although, like German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Nazi architects preferred the paradigms furnished by the Greek temple, transposed into a cold monumentality that reduces the individual to insignificance. As long as nostalgia looks to architecture to furnish human beings with spiritual shelter, it will also feed dreams of Babel’s tower. All dreams of the complete building are shadowed by that tower.
Dreams of
Freedom
Does the kind of edifying
architecture represented by Lincoln Cathedral still have a place
in our modern world? Does it not belong, as German philosopher
Friedrich Hegel insisted, to a never-to-be-recovered past—where
Hegel would have us affirm the death of architecture in its
highest sense as part of humanity’s coming of age, no more to be
mourned than the loss of the magic the world held when we were
children? Perhaps the only spiritual shelter that can adequately
protect us moderns is a conceptual architecture raised by reason.
The French writer Victor Hugo suggested that the printing press killed the cathedral. Has the car not similarly rendered the place-establishing city obsolete, where the car is but one manifestation of a way of life that has brought us physical and spiritual mobility and, thus, a freedom that by now seems an inalienable right? How will the electronic revolution and all it stands for transform our sense of space and the need for architecture?
Many today dream of a post-architectural future. And with good reason: Must an ever more vigorous commitment to freedom of the individual not make us suspicious of all place-establishing architecture? In aesthetics, the shift from the beautiful to the sublime testifies to that change, where beauty has long been linked to the establishment of bounded wholes, while the sublime demands open space. Freedom, democracy, and the promise of open space go together. There is tension between the call for a place-establishing architecture and the value placed on freedom. French writer George Bataille was not alone in suspecting a prison in every work of architecture [10].
Similarly, this desire for freedom will rebel again and again against the rule of reason. In his short novel Notes from Underground, Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky succinctly portrays this seemingly deep-rooted need to oppose modern society’s reliance on the authority of reason. One of his characters acknowledges that:
Twice-two-makes-four is, in my humble opinion, nothing but a piece of impudence. Twice-two-makes-four is a farcical, dressed-up fellow who stands across your path with arms akimbo and spits at you. Mind you, I quite agree that twice-two-makes-four is a most excellent thing; but if we are to give everything its due, then twice-two-makes-five is sometimes a most charming little thing, too [11].
Recent manifestations of such contrarian thinking can be found in the architectural movements known as “deconstructivism” and “anarchitecture.” Influenced by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the former has liked to challenge well-established expectations about what a work of architecture should look like by playing with fragmentation, distortion, dislocation of familiar architectural elements, and surprising geometries, where the computer has greatly facilitated such play. By now, such gestures have descended from elite architecture into the vernacular and become a familiar part of everyday postmodern building practice.
The neologism “anarchitecture” suggests buildings that rise without the architect’s art. It’s not a wholly new concept: Austrian architect Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects, published in 1964, was a “frankly polemical” celebration of Old World vernacular building. But in the work of architectural historian Robin Evans and architects Gordon Matta-Clark and Lebbeus Woods, the word speaks with a different, more oppositional voice: For them, anarchitecture is not a product of anonymous builders supported by the collective wisdom of generations in tune with the rhythms of nature, but very much the expression of individuals responsive to our rapidly changing cyber-world, ever on the verge of slipping out of our control.
Anarchitecture here means cuts, ruptures, insertions, and intrusions into the body of architecture that challenge its often all-but-overlooked rule over our lives, inviting more thoughtful consideration of architecture and its ruling ethos. Anarchitecture invites us to fantasize about very different environments, very different ways of life. (Gordon Matta-Clark, on the occasion of the 1973 dedication of the Twin Towers, in fact, called for their erasure, unable to even suspect that terror would all too soon realize what was meant only as a thought-provoking comment. Of course, 9/11 has made words such as deconstruction or anarchitecture more difficult to use and invites weightier and more difficult reflections concerning the future of architecture.)
Anarchitecture can be seen as a recent species of “fantastic architecture,” which has long communicated the tension between the generally accepted function of architecture (to provide physical and spiritual shelter by bounding space) and our unruly imaginations that, moved by desire, fear, pleasure, or disgust, give birth to fanciful apparitions, fictions, and dream visions, none of which rests on solid ground.
Fantastic architecture belongs with utopia, this land that lies somewhere beyond our all-too-familiar earthbound world with its place-assigning order. Utopia, in fact, possesses two faces: Eutopia, that imaginary realm where reason coexists with freedom and happiness; and dystopia, a realm where pain drowns freedom and mocks pretentious reason. Visions of paradise, Jerusalem, or the City of God—realms where human beings, no longer bound by the spirit of gravity, are finally free to fly and where buildings will seem to float, immaterially, in boundless space—are thus shadowed by versions of the labyrinth, Babel, or hell—dark suffocating spaces in which lurk minotaur and devil. The seductive appeal, not just of eutopic visions but also of dystopic ones (think of Piranesi’s Carceri) invites consideration: While it does not lead to an architecture fit for earthbound mortals, it should make our building more thoughtful.
Dreams of
Nature
Suspicion of architecture
has attended thinking about architecture from the very beginning:
In paradise, there was no need for building; in this garden, Adam
and Eve were at home. And might artifice not recover what pride is
supposed to have lost? Both English philosopher Francis Bacon and
Descartes thus dreamed of paradise regained on the basis of
science and technology.
We are not done with that dream. Our architecture shows that the Cartesian promise that reason will render us the masters and possessors of nature was not idle. But the history of the twentieth century demonstrates that the possession of such power has not brought us wisdom. The shadow of Babel’s tower, which today so easily blurs with the shadow cast by fascist architecture, darkens many a Modernist dream of architecture and invites very different thoughts. Was it not Cain who built the first city? Convinced that our true home is not to be established by human artifice, painters thus liked to place the Nativity in some fantastic ruin.
The same distrust of an architecture ruled by an all-too-human reason let the painter Friedensreich Hundertwasser call “the air raids of 1943 a perfect automatic lesson in form; straight lines and their vacuous structures ought to have been blown to pieces, and so they were.” He admonishes us to “strive, as rapidly as possible for total uninhabitability and creative mouldering in architecture” [12]. In this connection, the decision by architects of the eighteenth century to actually build ruins deserves consideration, as does the related decision by Romantic painters to represent still-intact buildings as ruins.
Related is the dream of buildings in the image of the architecture of animals. Juhani Pallasmaa has suggested that what makes their architecture so beautiful “is its total integration into the life pattern of its builder and to the dynamically balanced system of nature” [14]. Its beauty figures what is denied to us: a dwelling completely at home in nature, in tune with its rhythms.
Today, such dreams have gained weight and been given a special urgency by ever-more-pressing environmental concerns. Green architecture has become much more than just a slogan: It is demanded by a still expanding humanity on a collision course with finite natural resources.
How should environmental problems, of which the energy crisis is only the most visible manifestation, affect the look of the built environment? How will they transform our still prodigal use of space? Will there be gardens on the roof of every building? Everyone who builds, no matter how modest the work, bears responsibility for how those who come after have to live with it. To meet that responsibility, architects must be able to meet the challenges presented by the environment and by the needs of still-unborn generations.
Common sense tells us that, in light of these environmental pressures, much of what we call development today is in fact irresponsible. Not just this country but the entire world remains caught up—despite numerous warnings, prophecies of doom, and modest efforts to remedy the effects of waste and pollution—in a process that, if not checked by a changed attitude to this Earth, will lead to disaster or, rather, disasters.
The list is long and sobering: a deteriorating environment that will make clean water, air, and soil—not to mention relatively unspoiled nature—a thing of the past; wars over dwindling resources; mass starvation; and moral disintegration that could lead to the self-destruction of humanity itself. To ensure a livable environment for future generations, we must learn to consider physical space a scarce resource; to develop different, much denser settlement patterns; and to imagine a less oppositional relationship between architecture and nature.
Such efforts, however, are unlikely to be successful without a change of heart. If shortsighted, selfish interests are allowed to continue to shape the built environment, we can only expect its further deterioration. Also needed is what German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller called an aesthetic education. Decisions to give a high-rise the look of a turning torso, as Santiago Calatrava did in Malmö, or an apartment building the look of a dancing couple, as Frank Gehry did in Prague, may lead to interesting aesthetic objects but make no contribution to such an awareness.
Needed is architecture that transforms our understanding of how we should live. A high standard of living measured by per capita income does not necessarily mean a high quality of life. What kind of life do we want for our children and our children’s children? A greener architecture is needed, not just to address ever-more unavoidable environmental problems but, more fundamentally, to help bring about a change of heart.
The
Architect’s Responsibility
William Gass called
“concern for the nature and beauty of building” the architect’s
“trust and obligation.” Much depends here on how the nature of
building and its beauty are understood.
In the late 1950s the philosopher Paul Weiss, writing very much in the orbit of aesthetic Modernism, defined architecture as “the art of creating space through the construction of boundaries in common-sense space” [15]. Like William Gass, he thought it important that the architect’s creativity not be fettered by “judges, critics, clients, and problems relating to engineering, city planning, and scales.” So he called on architecture schools to encourage students:
to experiment with the building of all sorts of space, in all sorts of ways, with all sorts of material. They should have periods in which they do not care that their work may not interest a client or that no one may ever build it or that it may not fit in with prevailing styles. Not until they take seriously the need to explore the possibilities of bounding spaces in multiple ways will they become alert to architecture as an art, as respectable, revelatory, creative, and at least as difficult as any other [6].
But while such thinking has led to the creation of countless striking aesthetic objects, their often undeniable beauty resists inhabitation and contributes little to the creation of a successful built environment. Like all aesthetic objects, such works invite admiration simply for what they are. If we demand that architecture provide both physical and spiritual shelter, the creation of such aesthetic objects fails to meet the architect’s special responsibility. Instead of shelter, it offers distractions. A different kind of beauty is needed.
Benjamin’s understanding of aura intimates such a beauty. Why does aura matter? An answer is suggested when Benjamin links the experience of aura to the experience of a person as a person:
Looking at someone carries the implicit expectation that our look will be returned by the object of our gaze. Where this expectation is met (which, in the case of thought processes, can apply equally to the look of the mind and to a glance pure and simple), there is an experience of the aura to the fullest extent [17].
To experience the distinctive aura of the other is to experience an incarnation of spirit in matter so complete that there is no distance between the two. Although Benjamin is describing an interaction between two people, something of the sort is present in every experience of aura.
Benjamin claimed that works of art have to lose their aura in the age of mechanical reproduction. Does this not also hold for works of architecture? Jean Nouvel points to what awaits us:
From the moment an office building is made on the basis of an existing typology, whose technology and price and the conditions for its realization are known, we can duplicate the building and have it constructed without paying for a new design” [18].
In the same conversation, French social theorist Jean Baudrillard said this about the then still-standing Twin Towers: “These two towers resemble two perforated bands. Today we’d probably say they’re clones of each other, that they’ve already been cloned” [19].
To experience a work of architecture as a simulacrum is to experience it as unbearably light. (This observation of their design, of course, does not in any way take away from the unbearable weight we feel for the destruction of these towers and the subsequent loss of so many lives.)
In this age of the computer, the very concept of aura may seem to betray nostalgia for something that lies irrecoverably behind us. But without some experience of aura, we feel alone and homeless. That is what makes the increasing loss of aura in the age of technical reproduction so frightening: Are not even human beings today in danger of losing that special aura that distinguishes persons from their simulacra? What in principle distinguishes a person from a robot with a computer brain? The loss of an experience of aura threatens the loss of our humanity.
That threat is recognized by Baudrillard when, in his discussion with Nouvel, he takes the task of art today to be that of tearing away the masks that aesthetics and culture have placed over our suffocating artificial world, where the virtual threatens to displace the real. Art, he insists, should preserve the “enigmatic side” of things, should break open modern culture, which today is
everywhere... a homologue of industry and technology... A work of art is a singularity, and all these singularities can create holes, interstices, voids… in the metastatic fullness of culture [20].
Why such emphasis on singularity? At issue is the distinction between what artifice can produce and what is given. Whatever artifice can produce can, in principle, be reproduced. But the simplest thing, say a rock or a leaf, is infinitely complex, a unique given that resists full comprehension and therefore reproduction.
What is at issue is related to the question: Why does aura matter? What allows us in this age of the technical reproducibility, not just of works of art, but increasingly of everything, to hold on to a fundamental distinction between the aura of human beings, works of art, and natural objects?
The threat that reproduction poses to our experience of the aura of things is also a threat to our own human essence. This makes it important to open windows in the conceptual architecture raised by reason, windows to dimensions of reality that resist comprehension and therefore cannot be reproduced. A successful work of art should have something of the enigmatic presence we experience in the face of a person. That, it seems to me, is a test that architecture, too, must meet if it is to continue to provide us with spiritual shelter. At stake is nothing less than our humanity.
Endnotes
1. Vitruvius, The Ten
Books of Architecture, (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1926).
2. W. Gass, “House VI,” Progressive Architecture, 58 (June 1977):64.
3. F. Nietzsche, Menschliches Allzumenschliches, I, 218.
4. R. Venturi, D. Scott Brown, & S. Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, rev. ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977).
5. Nietzsche, Menschliches Allzumenschliches, I, 218.
6. P. Valéry, The Art of Poetry (NY: Vintage, 1961), 192.
7. F. L. Wright, “Organic Architecture,” in Programs and Manifestoes of 20th-Century Architecture, U. Conrads, ed., (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1975), 25.
8. F. Nietzsche, “Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen,” Götzen-Dämmerung 11.
9. [W.] Gropius, [B.] Taut, and [A.] Behne, “New Ideas on Architecture,” in Programs and Manifestos, 157.
10. See D. Hollier, Against Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
11. The Best Short Stories of Dostoevsky, (NY: Random House, 1955), 139.
12. Hundertwasser, “Mould Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture,” in Programs and Manifestoes, 157.
13. Cf. H. Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1959), 77.
14. J. Pallasmaa, Animal Architecture (Helsinki: Museum of Finnish Architecture, 1955), 11.
15. P. Weiss, Nine Basic Arts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1961), 69.
16. Ibid., 84.
17. W. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 188.
18. J. Baudrillard & J. Nouvel, The Singular Objects of Architecture (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2002), 50.
19. Ibid., 4.
20. Ibid., 13, 2.