Is Architecture Art?
An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Architecture
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:28th Nov '24
Should be back in stock very soon
Is architecture an art, like literature or music? Or is it more akin to science or engineering? Can buildings be artworks, just like paintings and sculptures, or does their fundamentally functional nature mean they cannot be considered pure works of art?
Questions of architecture, art, and aesthetics do not allow for simple answers. But by asking such questions, we can usefully reveal the ways in which the concepts and meanings of architecture have changed over the centuries, and how they continue to change in the contemporary era.
Is Architecture Art? explores the key conceptual questions about the aesthetic appreciation of architecture and its persistently contested status as an artform. It engages the work of thinkers ranging from Hume and Kant to Adorno, Tafuri, and Rancière, and draws on accessible and thought-provoking accounts of historical and contemporary architectural and art theory. Taking novel approaches to issues that will be familiar to the practising architect, it shows how aesthetics and art theory can open up and illuminate architectural theory, issue by issue. Is Architecture Art? will provoke discussion and debate among architects and architectural theorists, and force a new understanding of the purpose of architectural practice in the contemporary era as the concepts of ‘art’, ‘the arts’, and of the creative economy have shifted and blurred as never before.
John MacArthur combines a thorough knowledge of classical aesthetics and art theory, with all its philosophical implications, with a near exhaustive knowledge of modern architectural theory. This book offers much more than an introduction: it brilliantly and inspiringly surveys and synthesises the question of the status of architecture, and is undeniably an obligatory reference from now on. * Bart Verschaffel, Professor Emeritus of Architecture, Ghent University, Belgium *
No word is more abused and degraded in contemporary discussions of architecture than “aesthetics,” and John Macarthur’s Is Architecture Art? is a welcome corrective. His nuanced, knowledgeable, incisive writing, and the organization of his book into brief discussions of distinct yet permeable problems – from “standards of taste” to “autonomy” to “the sublime” to “aesthetic education” - will have a long life as a standard resource for architecture students, practitioners, and scholars. Macarthur is more interested in entanglements than answers, so for those seeking the fast-food pseudo-knowledge of serviceable catchphrases, this is not a book for you. It is a book that will reward those who are enticed by the pleasures of a problem well-posed, fascinated by a historical example fully scrutinized, and satisfied by an argument elegantly phrased. * Mark Linder, Professor of Architecture, Syracuse University, USA *
The question of whether architecture is an art or not has been knocking about since the eighteenth century. Macarthur wisely does not try to answer it – sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. Instead he lays bare the whole apparatus which has not let the question go away, and that has led to there being such different answers to it. In so doing – and here lies the book’s real originality – it becomes a full-blown enquiry, of a kind not previously seen, into the relevance of philosophical aesthetics to the practice of making buildings. Macarthur persuasively shows us why this relationship matters to the discipline of architecture, possibly more now than ever before. * Adrian Forty, Professor Emeritus of Architectural History, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, UK *
ISBN: 9781350147706
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
240 pages