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Architecture 1798

While architecture is not a major focus of Kant's aesthetics, his philosophical work had a profound influence on subsequent thinking about architecture. Prior to Kant, architecture was viewed as aiming for beauty and utility, in line with Vitruvius's conception. However, Kant's idea that art expresses "aesthetic ideas" shifted architecture to be seen as expressing and communicating abstract ideas, not just beauty and function. This shift occurred because Kant argued that art allows the imagination to engage with rational ideas in an inexhaustible way.

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32 views1 page

Architecture 1798

While architecture is not a major focus of Kant's aesthetics, his philosophical work had a profound influence on subsequent thinking about architecture. Prior to Kant, architecture was viewed as aiming for beauty and utility, in line with Vitruvius's conception. However, Kant's idea that art expresses "aesthetic ideas" shifted architecture to be seen as expressing and communicating abstract ideas, not just beauty and function. This shift occurred because Kant argued that art allows the imagination to engage with rational ideas in an inexhaustible way.

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Reo28
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Architecture does not loom large in Kants aesthetics, nor has Kants thought about architecture, such as it is,

loomed large in the history of thought about architecture. But there is a profound difference in the philosophy of architectureby which I mean here views about architecture in the writings of canonical figures in the history of philosophy and philosophical aesthetics, not the broader body of professional writing that might go under the name of architectural theorybefore and after Kant.1 Given the indisputable influence of Kants aesthetics on the next epoch of the discipline, above all the aesthetics of German idealism in the forty years following the publication of Kants Critique of the Power of Judgment in 1790, it thus seems natural to look for the shift in philosophical thinking about architecture within Kants aesthetics. The shift is there to be found. The shift I have in mind is from an essentially Vitruvian conception of architecture, according to which its two chief goals are beauty and utility, to a cognitivist or expressivist conception of architecture, in which, like other forms of fine art, architecture is thought of as expressing and communicating abstract ideas, not just aiming for beauty and utility. The decisive factor in this turn, I would suggest, is Kants thesis that all art involves the expression of aesthetic ideas, that is, the expression of rational ideas in a form that yields inexhaustible material for the play of the imagination. But I will also argue that the range of forms that this general thought can take in the philosophy of architecture, from the thought that a work of architecture should express and communicate its own function to the thought that it should express the nature of its structure and of the physical forces that underlie that to the thought that a work of architecture should give expression to more abstract, metaphysical ideas, can be seen as a consequence of, or at least allowed by, Kants own loose specification of just what sort of intellectual content aesthetic ideas have.

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