The Aesthetics of Environment

Ten: Environment as an Aesthetic Paradigm

Environment as an Aesthetic Paradigm Chapter Ten ~ In earlier chapters I commented on how the doctrine of aesthetic disinterestedness has dominated discussions of art and its experience since the eighteenth century. I The idea of keeping art distinct from practical purposes and regarding the art object sympathetically for its intrinsic qualities seems to account well for the kind of attitude necessary for appreciation. While some, like Nietzsche, have challenged its appropriateness, disinterestedness has continued to reign as a preeminent aesthetic principle to the present day. We have discovered difficulties with this tradition, however. Perhaps Nietzsche was not being entirely hyperbolic when he accused Kant of"a complete lack of esthetic sensibility" in the importance he gave to disinterestedness.Z He may once again have been attempting to move us beyond the established track by insisting on the poverty of that notion and its unfortunate consequences for aesthetic appreciation . For the doctrine has not only obscured the function of the museum, as we have seen; it raises serious difficulties for understanding the traditional arts. Moreover, it is even more inadequate in dealing with the arts of our own century, for our experience of them has begun to broaden in ways that undermine or directly confront the aesthetics of disinterestedness. 145 146 Environment as an Aesthetic Paradigm Despite its dominance, disinterestedness has always had difficulty accommodating certain arts like architecture and dance to its strictures . Architecture was treated as a hybrid art, one that combines the aesthetic and the practical in uneasy juxtaposition, as in Vitruvius ' classic trilogy of architectural requirements: firmness, utility, and beauty; while dance tended to be ignored altogether.' Architecture is, moreover, a striking example of the artistic enlargement of our time. We have come increasingly to see it, not just as the art of building, but as the art of constructing a human environment. It is possible, in fact, to regard environment as the fulfillment of architectural aesthetics, although certainly not in the traditional sense, which requires removing all practical considerations and adopting a contemplative separation from the art object. Instead, environment both elicits and epitomizes experience that is quite the contrary-a human engagement that architecture has actually always exemplified in practice. As the fulfillment of an architectural aesthetic that is no longer primarily visual and formal, environment suggests a mutual participation of perceiver and object that is continuous with practical , cultural, and historical interests. If architecture challenges the aesthetics of disinterestedness, environment, its proper extension, does so even more. Consider classical architecture, perhaps the exemplar ofthe architectural object as a work of art. It is true that classical architecture impresses modern eyes as a free-standing structure, positioned on a height, embodying principles of harmony, balance, and proportion , and exemplifying a kind of Apollonian restraint in the purity and permanence of marble. Yet this is a bit of modern mythology, considering that the Greek temples were often polychrome and that their geometric precision is only apparent. The Parthenon, the most refined ofall such structures, is often taken as the symbol of classical civilization, the architectural embodiment of the virtues of rational contemplation. Yet its platform is not a level plane, its columns neither vertical, cylindrical, equidistant, nor identical in size, its triglyphs not equally spaced. Even the walls are not vertical. A number of explanations have been offered to account for such subtle disorder , but the most plausible suggests that these fine deviations were 147 intended to relate the building to the site as its culmination and, further , to produce in the experience of those approaching it qualities of rhythm as well as harmony.4 The dependence of the Parthenon on its site, on the one hand, and on those who perceive it, on the other, shatters the classical ideal of architectural beauty as a self-sufficient object whose geometrical proportions appeal to a contemplative satisfaction in harmony and proportion. This reciprocity of building, site, and perceiver shows many ofthe Parthenon's imitations to be pallid products of a misguided rationalism. To take a building as a self-sufficient object points up the very limitations of the disinterestedness principle . Moreover, meeting the spatial needs of public buildings by simply expanding the dimensions of such models to colossal proportions , a typical practice in classical revival architecture, sacrifices the human scale inherent in the original style and produces caricatures, not proper emulations. Thus, both the imitation and the emulation of classical architecture fail when they confuse...