MMH Does Architectural Theory Part 5: Empiricism & The Picturesque (Conclusion)
Hello Friends! Boy is this going to be a little bit of a wild post. This is the part where ish hits the fan and things fall apart. It’s also just going to be a long post, so I’m sorry.
The architectural theory we’ve known and loved so far revolved around a Platonic concept of absolute harmony, or innate beauty, a concept the Renaissance tied to proportions in architecture.
However, what if it’s not proportions in architecture that make architecture beautiful? What if beauty really is relative? What if there’s more to great architecture than beauty alone?
Bickering About Beauty
Is Beauty Absolute or Relative? Or both? Why, if we don’t have any innate thoughts, do we find the same things beautiful?
As it turns out, it was mostly the Irish and the Scots who argued this one out while mainland Britain was content with its cool new gardens.
Francis Hutcheson, an important Irish philosopher, found a loophole that, while clever, was ostensibly of the past.
In his 1725 essay “An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue,” Hutcheson describes beauty not as an external attribute, but as an innate sense in all people. AKA, absolute beauty is not an objective quality, but an actual part of the human mind. This was Hutcheson’s way of getting around Lockean ideas of sensation - by calling beauty a sense within us rather than a reaction to that which is perceived by our senses.
Hutcheson was very into the writings of Shaftesbury, which attached our ability to determine what is beautiful to our moral character. Therefore only good people or geniuses could have good taste. Sure, claimed Hutcheson, all people can sense things, but only an elite few can use their senses in the “correct” way.
This is, of course, total bullsh*t.
George Berkeley, another Irish philosopher, rebuked these ideas savagely. Berkeley believed in Lockean empiricism, but unlike other philosophers, emphasized perception and human rationality rather than blind sensation or abstract thoughts.
Berkeley, in his rather humorous “Third Dialogue” of Alciphron (1732) uses a fake conversation (aka a dialogue) to completely wreck Hutcheson’s idea.
Basically, these two dudes Alciphron (Hutcheson) and Euphranor (Berkeley), are arguing. In the beginning of this conversation, Alciphron says that beauty is not just that which pleases but is actually that which is perceived by the eye, namely proportions. To paraphrase:
E (playing extremely dumb): but these proportions aren’t the same for everything, right?
A: of course not, idiot. the proportions of an ox don’t work for a horse, dummy.
E: so proportion is the relation of one thing to another
A: Duh, idiot.
E: So, these parts and their sizes and shapes must relate to each other in such a way to make up the best possible, most useful whole.
A: dude, of course.
E: So, like, you’re using reason to choose and match and assemble this whole from each part.
A: y-yeah…
E: So, proportions aren’t just perceived by sight, but by reason by the means of sight.
A: k
E: So beauty isn’t really of the eye but of the mind, right? The eye alone can’t tell if that chair is a great chair or that door is a great door, right?
A: Dude, where are you going with this?
E: To put it this way, you see a chair, right? Could you think this chair to be of good proportions if it looked like you or anybody else wouldn’t be able to sit your ass in it?
A: I guess not.
E: So you admit that we can’t find the chair to be beautiful without first knowing its proper use, which is of course, the domain of judgement.
A: Fine.
E: After all, if an architect finds a door to be pretty cool, and have its proportions just right, what use or beauty is left to that door if the architect instead turns it 90 degrees so it opens like, a doggy door but for people? It’s not beautiful, then, right? So the proportions don’t necessarily matter, the use of the proportions matter, u feel me, my dude?
A: gasp
This goes on for a while. But the point is the same: there’s more than just an innate sense to beauty, it must have an application or context and therefore is relative and not absolute.
ENTER MY HOMEBOY DAVID HUME
Aww yiss, it’s time for by main dude David Hume, the Scottish philosopher that would blow so many minds of other philosophers while also being less of a reactionary asshole than his contemporaries. (I’m not sorry)
Hume claimed that beauty was relative to our personal experience, and that because we all share similar experiences and a similar psychological makeup, we tend to find similar things to be beautiful. Hume, like Berkeley, believes in some sort of functional component of beauty, and even links this to architecture in his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40):
“In like manner the rules of architecture require, that the top of a pillar shou’d be more slender than its base, and that because such a figure conveys to us the idea of security, which is pleasant; whereas the contrary form gives us the apprehension of danger, which is uneasy.”
AKA, the rules of architecture are derived from a practical standpoint, one of structural integrity, and that appearance of stability makes us feel relaxed because, well, the building doesn’t look like it’s going to fall down, right?
But Hume is most known in aesthetics for what has become a rather pithy adage: the statement that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
‘‘Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.’’
But then the question is if each mind perceives a different beauty, which brain perceives the right beauty? Thus enters the question of “taste”.
Bickering About Taste
We’re still bickering about good taste. In fact, this blog is primarily a treatise on, well, bad taste. One of the more important documents in architectural theory about taste was a dialogue by the Scottish painter Allan Ramsey, a best friend of David Hume (he painted the above portrait).
(In fact, Hume, Ramsey, Adam Smith, Alexander Gerard, and Robert Adam formed a group in 1754 called the Select Society, which I’m sure has provided for ample historical slashfiction at some point in time.)
Anyways, Ramsey’s “Dialogue on Taste” is important because it’s the first clear articulation of relativist aesthetics in architectural theory.
The dialogue occurs between Col. Freeman, a clever, roguishly handsome, free-thinking modernist and Lord Modish a good boy who loves his traditions. Yes, this is Perrault v Blondel all over again, but with savage wit.
you, dumb & trad: there are objective rules for architecture. Proportions!
me, incredibly mod & smart: uh, those are more knowledge than taste. It doesn’t take any genius of taste to follow a dumb Palladian recipe. Anybody can read a cookbook and make a boring dish. These so-called rules are only an analysis of what others find to be culturally acceptable, and don’t actually point to any natural standard beauty.
me, continuing to slay it: give me one reason that isn’t cultural why a Corinthian column in all its proportions isn’t as beautiful if I turn that SOB upside down. Like, what if, somewhere out there there are cultures that would find my upside-down column sick af - maybe they’d be horrified to hear about our right-side up traditions.
me, increasingly sassy: after all, these so called traditions and “tastes” are just the works of powerful rich people. If a poor dude wore a coat with triangular cuffs everyone would laugh at him and call him a big dummy. If a rich dude did it, suddenly you’d start seeing triangular cuffs everywhere no matter how stupid it looks. Tell me architecture ain’t the same way.
This is probably one of my favorite hot takes of the 18th Century, especially since it calls architecture a “fashion” explicitly, which was, like, unacceptable even though it’s ultimately true.
Regardless of this relative nature of taste, the centuries have still seen general consensus on what pieces of art are superior to others, and there must be some underlying theme other than cynicism regarding why this is the case.
Hume sought to answer this question in his 1757 essay “On the Standards of Taste” where he claimed that this consensus did not lie in specific rules of artistic composition, but rather in the universal makeup of the human psyche, which must be “rightly formed” to allow the emotions related to beauty to form.
“Though some objects, by the structure of the mind, be naturally calculated to give pleasure, it is not to be expected, that in every individual the pleasure will be equally felt. Particular incidents and situations occur, which either throw a false light on the objects, or hinder the true from conveying to the imagination the proper sentiment and perception.”
AKA you’re not going to find the Parthenon to be all that great if you’re, say, stricken with food poisoning or just got a call telling you you’ve been laid off.
We all have the potential to be stricken by a beautiful thing, but beautiful things strike us differently depending on how we feel at the moment or because of our pre-existing experiences. For example, you’re not going to find that Talking Heads album to be all that great because your jerk ex used to be really into them, even if the music is objectively pretty good.
However, sometimes art strikes us in ways that are different than mere beauty - sometimes art smacks us in the face and leaves us breathless, awed even. The non-beauty reactions to art are what will be discussed in the second half of this post, after the break.
Introducing the Sublime (With Bonus Wrestling GIFS)
No, not that one.
Basically, the sublime (in art) is the quality of greatness, that which cannot be comprehended or imitated. A bunch of smart philosopher dudes wrote about it, often after visiting the Alps.
Photo by Steve Evans (CC-BY 2.0)
Addison’s Foreshadowing of the Sublime
It was Addison, the guy from the end of last week’s post that foreshadowed thoughts about the sublime. Addison was not an architect, and sought to leave debates about the techniques and praxis of architecture to the experts. His essay revolves around the idea that it isn’t just beauty we should be talking about here, and offers a view of art as being either “Great, Uncommon, or Beautiful.”
What’s most important of the three is what Addison calls “Greatness” referring to “the Bulk and Body of the Structure, or to the Manner in which it is built…”
By Greatness of Manner, Addison referred to that familiar feeling of walking into a great place, the “Disposition of Mind he finds in himself, at his first Entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, and how his Imagination is filled with something Great and Amazing.”
This idea was taken further by Alexander Gerard, a member of Hume’s Select Society, who proposed that in order for something to be truly sublime it had to be both massive and simple.
“Large objects can scarce indeed produce their full effect, unless they are also simple, or made up of parts in a great measure similar. Innumerable little islands scattered in the ocean, and breaking the prospect, greatly diminish the grandeur of the scene. A variety of clouds, diversifying the face of the heavens, may add to their beauty, but must take from their grandeur.“
Basically:
This was an important precursor to the most lasting ideas on the sublime from everybody’s favorite reactionary philosopher who thought the French Revolution was bad (and monarchy was good) but that the guillotine was #^$%#ing sweet:
EDMUND “PAIN AND DANGER” BURKE
This is the greatest thing I’ve ever done with my time.
Burke’s treatise A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) claims that there are not only “some invariable and certain laws” behind our judgements of taste, described by him as “that faculty or those faculties of the mind, which are affected with, or which form a judgment of, the works of imagination and the elegant arts.”
This essentially puts the smackdown on the classical ideas that beauty is somehow related to utility or reason, as well as form or proportions destroying all of the theory we’ve learned about in the last four posts.
Burke then goes ahead to lay out and define some qualities of art and the reactions they engender in us:
The Sublime
I’ll just let ol’ “Pain and Danger” Burke speak for himself on this one:
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.”
TL;DR: Sublime, is pain & danger, the strongest emotions we can have, and pain is way more powerful than pleasure.
Qualities of the sublime, according to Burke include: vastness, infinity, succession (or consistency/repetition), and uniformity.
Specifically related to buildings, Burke focused on concepts such as difficulty, which he describes as “When any work seems to have required immense force and labour to effect it, the idea is grand.” He cites Stonehenge as an example - the labor needed to move such huge stones is more impressive than the end product.
He also discusses (and is one of the first to do so specifically) the important role light plays in building, especially on mood:
“I think then, that all edifices calculated to produce an idea of the sublime, ought rather to be dark and gloomy, and this for two reasons; the first is, that darkness itself on other occasions is known by experience to have a greater effect on the passions than light.
The second is, that to make an object very striking, we should make it as different as possible from the objects with which we have been immediately conversant…to make the transition thoroughly striking, you ought to pass from the greatest light, to as much darkness as is consistent with the uses of architecture.”
AKA dude was a huge Goth.
Most importantly to this blog, Burke had this to say about McMansions:
“Designs that are vast only by their dimensions, are always the sign of a common and low imagination.”
Burke’s writing set the course of aesthetic and architectural thought from this point on, eclipsing many that came before him, including Hume. Now that architecture had been liberated from the ties of proportion and function (for now), a new era of thought (and building) could begin.
I’m not sorry lmao
Well, that does it for Part 5! Stay tuned for this week’s Certified Dank Massachusetts McMansion on Thursday, and next Monday’s wrapping up of the 18th Century in which we see what’s up with the rest of Europe. Have a great week, and sorry for the technical delays!
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