Architectural Philosophy

Abstract

This book is the result of trying to think through the relationship between architecture and philosophy. Teaching in the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and more recently at the Architectural Association in London coupled to teaching the occasional undergraduate courses in aesthetics in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick in which architecture figured, I have had the opportunity to work with outstanding colleagues and students in remarkable and exacting institutions.1 The project was always presented as teaching philosophy to architecture students or architectural concerns to students of philosophy. And yet it was never that simple. For both sets of students, though equally for colleagues involved in all these institutions, the question of relation proved the most demanding. That there is a relationship goes without saying. That philosophy uses architectural metaphors is clearly the case. That architecture deploys a language that is in part philosophical is also now commonplace. That in the founding texts of architectural theory - e.g. Vitruvius, Alberti — there are passages and insights that would be equally at home in philosophical texts concerning aesthetics, is both well known and yet not remarkable. The question of the relation between philosophy and architecture is both already staged and yet to be addressed in a way that allows for the particularity of the architectural to be maintained. Philosophy has a tendency of reducing the visual arts and architecture to a body of examples. Works are deployed as evidence for a particular argument or as an example of a more generalized movement. The question to which this book can be taken as a response is the following : What happens when the reductive move is refused and the constraint is having to think the particularity of the architectural? Once this question is posed then a range of other questions follow. All of them are concerned with the philosophical or theoretical problem of addressing particularity. PREFACE There is already a response to the insistence of the particular. Simple empirical description is a way both of addressing specificity and allowing for the detail of architecture. Leaving aside the question of whether or not description is itself already a theoretical position, there is still the problem that the generality of the description will fail to engage with architecture understood as a site of repetition. What is repeated is that which is given in order to be repeated. Much of the work of this book is an attempt to link the specificity of architecture to a conception of function. Rather than taking function as a given it is rearticulated within a structure of repetition. While a concern with particularity will always involve recourse to the detail of the particular that detail is not on its own sufficient. The chapters comprising this book have been written over the last few years.2 They represent an attempt to develop a project. It was too easy to plot the relationship between architecture and philosophy in terms of a shared language. There is a very real sense in which operating at the level of metaphor - both as a way of proceeding and as a site of investigation - fails to address either the particularity of the architectural or the philosophical. In attempting to move from an analysis taking place on the level of language to another level there seemed to be the need to develop certain concepts in order to effect that move. Part of what is presented here needs to be read in that light. In other words, rather than treat architecture and philosophy as though they were both texts in which there was either an overlap or similarity of language such that an analysis of the language was an analysis of the relation, there is an approach which takes the demands of architectural work as that which necessitates a response that pertains to philosophy or the theoretical. The question - what is the thinking of architecture? - has to begin with a thinking of architecture. On one level this is a tautology. On another it is not. It is the latter precisely because the means for thinking architecture - not architecture as language, or as sign system or as the domain of examples - have not been developed in a sustained way. The chapters making up this book can be read as continual attempts to develop such a thinking. As such they comprise architectural philosophy.