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Architecture and The Systems of The Arts Or, Kant On Landscape Gardening
Architecture and The Systems of The Arts Or, Kant On Landscape Gardening
Architecture and The Systems of The Arts Or, Kant On Landscape Gardening
Architecture,
* Wouter Davidts, Bouwen voor de kunst? Mu-
seumarchitectuur van Centre Pompidou tot Tate Disciplinary Contrasts : Science, Art, and the Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Writings
Modern (2006) (Dutch) ISBN: 90-76714-282 of William Lethaby, John Ruskin, and Alexander von Humboldt / Deborah van der Plaat
* Andrew Leach, Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing Wilhelm Worringer, Gothic Vitalism, and Modernity / Darren Jorgensen
History (English) (2007) ISBN: 978-90-76714-
Disciplinarity,
30-1 Problems for Architecture in the Art of Le Corbusier / Antony Moulis
* Bart Verschaffel, Van Hermes en Hestia. Teksten
over architectuur (2006) (Dutch) ISBN: 978-90- Andre Bloc in Iran / Daniel Barber
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John Macarthur
1. In fact this project continues in some corners of academia. See, for example
Bulat M. Galeyev, ``The New `Laokoon' : A Periodic System of the Arts,'' Leonardo
24, no. 4 (1991) : 453-56.
2. Rosalind Krauss, ``A Voyage on the North Sea'': Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Con-
dition (New York : Thames & Hudson, 1999).
3. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston : Beacon Press,
1961) ; Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, trans. James Creed Mer-
edith (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1911) ; Krauss, North Sea.
4. Paul Oskar Kristeller, ``The Modern System of the Arts : A Study in the His-
tory of Aesthetics,'' Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (1951) : 496-527 (Part 1) ;
13, no. 1 (1952) : 17-46 (Part 2). Republished as Paul Oskar Kristeller, ``The Mod-
ern System of the Arts,'' in RenaissanceThought and the Arts: Collected Essays (Princeton,
NJ : Princeton University Press, 1990) ; L. E. Shiner, Invention of Art: ACultural His-
tory (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2001). Contrast James I. Porter, ``Is
Art Modern ? Kristeller's `Modern System of the Arts' Reconsidered,'' British Jour-
nal of Aesthetics 49, no. 1 (2009) : 1-24.
5. Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis; the Humanist Theory of Painting (New York :
W. W. Norton and Co., 1967).
6. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoo n : An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry,
trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press,
1984).
7. Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1996).
James Elkins, ed., Art HistoryVersus Aesthetics, The Art Seminar, vol. 1 (New York :
Routledge, 2006).
13. Anthony Ashley Cooper Shaftesbury, Standard Edition: Complete Works, Selected
Letters and Posthumous Writings [Standard Edition: Samtliche Werke, ausgewahlte Briefe und nach-
gelassene Schriften], ed. Gerd Hemmerich & Wolfram Benda, vol. 15 (Stuttgart :
Frommann-Holzboog, 1981) ; Jerome Stolnitz, ``On the Significance of Lord Shaf-
tesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory,'' Philosophical Quarterly 11, no. 43 (1961) : 97-
113 ; Li Shiqiao, Virtue and Power: Architecture and Intellectual Change in England 1660-1730
(London : Routledge, 2006).
14. Denis Diderot and Jean le Ron d'Alembert, Encyclopedie, 32 vols. (Paris,
1751-77). See also ``The Encyclopedia of Diderot & D'alembert Collaborative
Translation Project,'' http ://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/ (accessed January 9, 2009).
16. On this reading of Perrault see Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Archi-
tects of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1980).
Architecture's limits are then manifold. Aesthetic ideas are the obverse
of concepts for Kant: Reason deals in concepts; the Imagination, in
ideas. Thus when architecture presents `concepts of things only possi-
ble through art' (in the broader sense of artifice), rather than semblan-
ces of nature, it moves it down a peg. It is common for lay-people
and readers of Kant to think that architecture cannot be art because it
must be useful; however, Kant is more subtle than this. If architecture
necessarily implied utility (or pleasingness) it would not be a fine art
at all, whereas, as we have seen, it is included as such and regarded as
superior to music. Although we can consider a building as possessing
its own finality, without thought of its use, architecture nevertheless
has a concept of this subsequent use. (Were we to consider how well
or badly it performs against this use in which we have no interest, we
would make a judgement of reason not an aesthetic judgement.)
Kant gives a high place in his hierarchy to landscape gardening,
which he claims is a kind of painting. 25 It is surprising that this
implies superiority to sculpture and architecture. He follows new ideas
of gardening at stake in the term ``landscape'', which we read in his
curious description of gardening as being like ``simple aesthetic paint-
ing'' (what we would now call landscape painting), as that which `by
means of light and shade makes a pleasing composition of atmosphere,
26. Kant, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 51 Kant might well have been per-
suaded on this by C. C. L. Hirschfeld's Theorie der Gartenkunst, Engl. ed. Theory of
Garden Art, Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture (Philadelphia : University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
27. Kant, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 14.
28. Jacques Derrida, ``Economimesis,'' Diacritics (June 1981) : 2-25 ; La Verite en
peinture (Paris : Flammarion, 1978), Engl. ed. TheTruth in Painting, trans. J. Benning-
ton & I. McLeod (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1987).
29. Kant, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 52.
30. Kant, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 51.