Is Architecture an Art Form? Navigating Between Aesthetics and Purpose

What inspires us when we see art? What makes something visually appealing? How does a viewer perceive an object’s significance? With mounting client pressures and professional standards that focus architectural designs on pragmatic issues – program, building codes, the environment, circulation, economic values – how does an architect defend the need for beauty and pleasure, and is that an important defense?

Architects frequently regard our profession as an application of art. To reach such a conclusion, it would be insightful to disassemble what is meant by the term “art.” After researching this often studied issue, I deduce that we are talking about two separate, yet simultaneous, processes in architectural endeavors: (1) to create a visually pleasing environment, and (2) to instill meaning within our designs. Though design solutions can cater to both goals, Architects should be aware of their difference in execution. If we aren’t aware of this decoupling, we might miss opportunities to create richer environments.

The idea of hitting an object can be representative of: carpentry, cooking, or judicial enforcement. The judge’s gavel is an example of how superfluous physical features may lead to alternate understandings beyond a basic function. The last three examples barely function as “bangers.” Instead, these metaphoric hammers utilize the concept of banging for alternate emotional effects, moving them deeper into the realm of “art,” as we shall explore.

THE NEED FOR PLEASURE

It is important to note that the concept of pleasure – or displeasure – is an integral component of the human desire for art. Without emotional feedback within a viewer, mundane objects lack the complexity to transcend basic functionality to become art. Similarly, Architects might wish to consider encouraging an environment of cognitive stimulation for the spaces they design, transcending basic functionalities.

Chatterjee decouples pleasure into two distinct human operations: “Liking is the pleasure we get from some objects, and wanting is the desire we have for those objects.” [103] “Liking” is a relatively simple concept or ideal for architecture, though understandably complex to execute successfully in design. “Wanting,” however, is not an emotion often considered by architects in the design process. As architects, we certainly forecast what a user experience may desire. But the human subjects of that paradigm are generally disinterested. This is not entirely the architectural profession’s fault. Unlike commercial opportunities such as food or music, there is little sophistication for a building inhabitant to have the ability to “want” something of architecture, since they have hardly any sense of the options available. Thus, Architects may therefore have a special obligation to design buildings that have more readily pleasing spaces than say a chef or musician might in their sensory delivery.

ART

What is art then?

An enduring idea is that art depicts the world. Art is imitation. . . the art historian Ernst Gombrich characterized the history of Western arts as a long process driven to get better at rendering reality. . . regardless of the desires to render the world accurately, the advent of photography made the goal of painting to imitate the external world less relevant. [116]

The advent of photography* (*For simplicity, this article references literal photography. Understandably, there are photographers that instill authorship in their work by varying components such as timing, lighting, and composition) presents an early indication of why art is an alternate representation of reality, or “reality adjacent.” In his seminal essay in 1936, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin points out that the advent of photography signaled a fundamental change in art whereby it ceased to be about literal representation, and instead became about the author, the context and the aura of originality.

Art is positioned adjacent to reality because of the concept of authorship. The author of an artwork invariably instills some form of message, opinion, or perspective, regardless of the art form. And this has been true for all types of visual representation, both before and after technologies such as photography. For painting a portrait, this idea of authorship is relatively simple; the strokes, colors, and techniques of a painter invariably impregnates the artwork with the painter’s perspective.

If one were to consider video as an example, capturing an occasion and sharing it (or live streaming it) directly with friends and family might be a literal representation of that occurrence. Such documentation would not likely be considered “art.” If, instead, one were to add a soundtrack, titles, or altered sequencing, adding “authorship” eventually creates a work of art one might refer to as a “film.” The viewer is thusly enabled to see alternative realities through an author’s filter.

Architecture might become art in a similar manner, when it transcends or augments direct functionality with the implementation of other visual tools. In the spectrum from tool to art, each instance of Architecture falls somewhere in between. Tool being pure function and art being more surreal. A similar (frequently asked) question might be, when does a building become architecture?

This increasing authorship consists of: (1) visual sensation / aesthetics, and (2) meaning / purpose.  Art is felt by humans as the subsequent nature of how one would neurologically process those two components, and embody a visual scene, in the form of emotions.

Historically, one of the original tenets of what inspired modernist thinking was a conceptual separation between decorative elements and functional geometry. This separation allowed modernists to pare their designs down to the minimalist surfaces one might see at the Barcelona Pavilion, and is analogous to our discussion between aesthetics and purpose. Architectural theorists may reflect back to Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who was perhaps the first architect to conceptualize that the geometric form of his architectural designs could be severed conceptually from historic precedent and associated decoration. (I discuss it here)

AESTHETICS

Let’s first distill “aesthetics” from “art” in order to aid our research. Aesthetics may have developed as an evolutionary adaptation to prefer certain elements from our environment. From Wikipedia: “aesthetic judgement refers to the sensory contemplation or appreciation of an object.” Chatterjee elucidates:

It is worth underscoring the fact that aesthetics and art are not the same. They are overlapping but different ideas. Aesthetics, as generally understood, focuses on [physical] properties of objects and our emotional responses to those properties. The object need not be art per se. It could be a field of flowers just as easily as it could be Van Gogh’s painting of irises. Aesthetics typically relates to the continuum of beauty to ugly. . . However, aesthetic encounters need not be confined to beauty. The philosopher Frank Sibley listed examples of other aesthetic properties that include objects being unified, balanced, serene, tragic, delicate, vivid, moving, trite, and garish. [115-116]

That is why for something we consider beautiful, we typically modify the term “aesthetics” with the word “pleasing” as in, “aesthetically pleasing.” Aesthetic goals may also be much darker in spirit, including elements of horror, disappointment, or sadness. The philosopher Edmund Burke refers to these darker appeals as sublime objects, which “overwhelm us, produce awe, and force us to face our own insignificance. [117]”

Adjacent to the discussion of beauty or sublime, is how widely accepted such value judgments are among a population. This adjacent discussion is about “taste,” and perhaps can be measured along a spectrum, in which the two extremities are never quite reachable: singularly affected vs universally affected. (ie, singularly beautiful vs universally beautiful). I would conjecture that the majority of considerations for beauty or disdain have general effect, though taste is of course by no means universal. For theorist Pierre Bourdieu, taste is only definable through a sociological filter, where social class might be the determinant factor in artistic comprehension.

People do not always agree on which art is beautiful. . . David Hume. . . developed the notion of “taste.” He viewed beauty as a pleasure that involved a value judgment. These value judgments were an expression of taste rather than the result of logical analysis. . . Hume recognized that education and culture profoundly influence our experience of art. [118]

Chatterjee spends much of his text identifying the elements of our visual environment which relate to aesthetics, including human facial properties, human sexual desires, natural landscapes, and mathematical proportions. Most neuroscientists would agree that our brains process human interactions distinctly, so we can focus instead on how we cognitively process our sensory spatial environment.

Humans of all types consistently admire natural landscapes for mostly obvious evolutionary reasons, including security, abundance, and power. Images with expansive views, bodies of water, forests, and mountains, all evoke these positive emotions in viewers. Scientific research has also noted the recurrence of the “savanna principle,” where people tend to have a preference for images of the African Savanna even if they have never been there. Scientists would argue this relates to our evolutionary origins.

Many scientists believe the images of the Savanna offer more than just emotional reassurance, as there are mathematical (fractal) relationships that are measured in the human preference for natural landscapes. This second recurring theme throughout human aesthetics is the consistent appearance of certain proportions and a desire to develop visual environments that offer a cohesive effect on a viewer.

Specific parts of the brain are specialized to process numbers and mathematical relationships. Numbers could be like language. . . .In the same way that we can combine words and sentences beautifully, maybe we can combine numbers beautifully. [60-61]

There is a strategic advantage for humans to see pattern:

People who enjoyed quantities, probabilities, and correlations would have had an evolutionary advantage in meeting their needs to assess immediate and future sources of nourishment and shelter. . . A more general evolutionary advantage for taking pleasure in math would be in seeing patterns in what would otherwise be an overwhelming amount of information. [63]

In other words, consistent adherence to proportion engenders recognizable patterns in the brain processing of the viewer. The ability to more quickly identify patterns in our visual environment would reduce cognitive processing, thereby adding survivalist speed. Though we no longer require cohesive pattern processing to find food or shelter, a more contemporary usage for cognitive recognition of pattern environments may more likely lead to mental comfort.

Understanding pattern recognition elicits a discussion of Gestalt, the concept that our brains process entire scenes rather than individual objects, thereby reducing the necessary cognitive processing.

Our minds actively organize visual elements into more complex chunks, thus scientists should be studying these organized chunks. [135] . . The physicist Richard Taylor drew attention to the fractal dimensions in art by examining Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. He and his colleagues found that Pollock’s early paintings had fractal dimensions around 1.45, the dimensions found for many coastlines. . . Taylor raised the possibility that we respond to hidden mathematical regularities in artworks. . .scientists found that visual art and natural scenes share statistical properties, including that they are typically “scale invariant.” This property means they contain the same kind of information whether one zooms in or out of the images . . . These investigators identified scale-invariant properties of visual art by using the Fourier power spectra of images. Fourier spectra describe the range of spatial frequencies from low (broad swathes) to high (fine details) in any image. [136]

Artists create images with Fourier spectral-image statistics seen in complex natural scenes. These image statistics also apply to abstract images. Viewers prefer abstract paintings that match the statistical properties of natural scenes. . . cultural variables, such as technique, century, and country of origin, and subject matter did not change these quantitative parameters in the art. . painted portraits have statistical properties that are closer to those of natural landscape than to those of natural faces. [137]

Architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros has a relatable view of architectural coherence: we can more quickly identify our surroundings and more quickly take action if our visual scene has a consistent use of patterns between operational scales. Mathematically, rulesets help our brains process the visual scene and can lead to a more pleasing experience. For example, Salingaros would advocate there be consistency of proportional detailing, in descending order, from the outline of a whole building -> the outline of a story -> the outline of a window -> the outline of a window pane.

Chatterjee had also spends quite a few pages on understanding the value of the “divine proportion:” the phi/fibonacci/golden rectangle. Undoubtedly, humans tend to find such proportions pleasing. Even if one might believe the sanctity of this proportion is exaggerated, its continued recurrence over many centuries undoubtedly implies that humans tend to find it pleasing. And by extension, as an Architect ventures further away from a pleasing proportion such as the golden rectangle, that Architect – whether consciously or not – is venturing to design something more jarring.

MEANING

Of the two proposed components of art, meaning is probably the more obvious. Humans have always had a desire to develop and uncover meanings in our visual environments. We like to assume or discover “why” something has a particular physical appearance. This search will typically rely on an author’s expression of ideas, whether political, emotional, organizational, religious, etc.

Consider the role of meaning in art. A short description of an artwork or even knowing the name of the artist changes our aesthetic experience of looking at a painting. People can judge very quickly whether they like a painting, but it takes longer (10 seconds or more) for the descriptions to produce an initial understanding of the painting. People can also be given information that fits or doesn’t fit with what they see. . . When given ambiguous information, people found modern abstract artworks more interesting and liked them more. [140]

Meaning within Architecture may be decidedly less poetic, and much more about programmability, function, and purpose, embedded within a specific space, geometry, or detail element.

CHARTING AESTHETICS AND MEANING

Chatterjee writes an interesting chapter on Conceptual Art, which turns out to be a good vehicle for our examination, as visual sensations and meanings are especially distinct. Chatterjee discusses Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ most extensively. In this work, a “mass produced crucifix floats in golden amber fluid.”

As a work of art, there is little to discuss about the project’s aesthetics. We could assess the amber color, the proportions, or luminescence; but, even those properties are laced with symbolism. Piss Christ’s emotional power derives from politics much more than visual processing, employing symbolism and raw information to bestow the viewer with emotion.

For further analysis, we can disassemble the work into its two physical elements: (1) the cross, a trite object, with religious connotations and (2) the bodily fluid, oddly also a trite condition, offering political connotations. The first element is so commonplace, there is little to distinguish between instances. Instead, the artist’s authorship is most heavily contained in the bodily fluid, which completely alters the meaning of their combined product. Without knowledge of this second component, the artwork holds little purpose.

Let’s test the hypothesis – that art is composed of aesthetics and meaning – with an xy graph opposing these two components to evaluate individual works of art.

As I began to chart example artworks, I realized that a further classification of art had to be addressed: the difference between quantitative criteria and qualitative criteria. Quantitatively, artwork has properties that can be measured for intensity, both for the level of visual stimulation (sensory impact) and for how spiritually demanding that message may be (message impact). Qualitatively, artwork can be evaluated across impressionable spectrums, both for the level of visual appeal (beauty) and for the profoundness of meaning (depth and complexity). Let’s try with Piss Christ, La Danse, The Scream, and Mona Lisa.

Judgments about art will certainly vary between individuals, though perhaps less so when measured quantitatively. Regardless, charting the two components allows for a deeper understanding for the balance between how we interpret our sensory environment and how we accommodate meaning from that visual world.

After plotting, I’d propose that The Scream has the greatest variation between quantitative and qualitative analysis. Quantitatively, the work is highly visually stimulating, and it’s message of horror is easily identifiable. When we review the work qualitatively, this horror evokes an ugliness of spirit, and the singular message is a relatively simple concept (though, an art historian might expand my oversimplification of The Scream).

ARCHITECTURE = AESTHETICS + PURPOSE

To extend the hypothesis to architecture, it may be necessary to reconceive the application of “meaning” when we are to discuss an “applied art,” where meaning might come from more pragmatic purposes. Good architecture arises from a design process that not only makes a beautiful building that resonates with its inhabitants, but that also genuinely accommodates constraints and strategizes for purposeful opportunities. I wrote a whole separate article on “purpose” a few years ago.

Purpose, I would concede, is a generously broad topic, and could incorporate applications varying from environmental strategies, circulation strategies, daylighting strategies, emotional impact, and so on. Theoretically we could plot each thematic application on a chart independently, evaluating each across a corresponding spectrum. That would be a bit excessive for the purposes of this article, so we’ll attempt to simplify a particular building’s purpose as a whole, even admittedly if that is a bit judgmental. What role might “purpose awareness” play in the experience of architectural design for a building’s user?

I’ve been considering possible experiments comparing the architectural experience of someone who acquires knowledge of a building’s organization before they visit, versus the experience of someone acquiring such knowledge after they visit. Any experiment might have to take into consideration the subject’s prior general knowledge of buildings and architecture, a sort of litmus test of architectural sophistication.

Investigating people with and without expertise is another way to find out what happens in the brain when knowledge influences visual experiences. One study recruited architecture students as experts in buildings and compared their responses to those of other students as they looked at pictures of buildings and faces. The architecture experts had more neural activity in the hippocampus when they looked at buildings than when they looked at faces. [141]

In evaluating purpose, It is challenging to determine when the user of that space understands the purpose of their environment. Besides functional spaces, there are symbolic works of architecture like Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, which has a fractured appearance. Such visual obfuscation may affect an unsophisticated occupant solely by the fragmented nature of the shapes. In addition, Libeskind has also expounded that the shifts in the building’s form are derived from a mapping project of historic Jewish locations in Berlin. Such additional information may affect a visitor even more when such a conceptual strategy is shared. Therefore, in addition to plotting the building on the xy graph, we might plot the building twice – both before and after additional information is provided to the visitor – to represent the differences in architectural experience. For comparison, we can also plot a banal building, Ralph’s Supermarket, and a graphic building, Randy’s Donuts.

And what about more diagrammatic buildings, where purpose relates to programmatic and circulatory information? If we try plotting OMA’s Seattle Library, we find that the building reads differently between the exterior and interior experiences. Outside, the form might be oppressive and offers few human scaled details. Inside, the layout is color coded, the spaces are inviting, and the circulation is clear.

Let us also try plotting an [almost] universal aesthetically pleasing project, Santiago Calatrava’s Oculus, against an [almost] universal aesthetically unappealing project, Morphosis’s Perot Museum. The former finesses form to magnify light and offers a skeletal metaphor for comprehending the geometries. The latter employs jarring imagery to suspend your sense of place, utilizing the sublime nature of aesthetics to jolt the viewer.

There is, however, at least one neurological condition that doesn’t fit snugly into the aesthetics vs. purpose opposition. For the cognitive peculiarity of “associative purpose,” a viewer might mentally associate certain architectural components on a subject building with their purpose from other structures. For example, a pitched roof still seems like it makes sense in southern California, even though there are few environmental reasons to design for it (slope, attic space). Does that pitched roof engage us as purposeful in spirit, or is it decorative because of its lack of practical application?

IN CLOSING

If we acknowledge architecture as a form of art, we cannot ignore how visual sensations complement purposeful strategies when we design. I believe that successful art and architecture will mine both of these components for maximum effect. As an architect, my goal has been to provide as much easily interpretable information within the organization and visual texture of a building so that purpose is conveyed with little effort. The more logic that can be infused into a building’s geometry to relate to context, program, and circulation, the more readily a building’s inhabitant may understand its purpose, without copious signage or instructions.