On Architecture and Objects

Remarks for the Korean translation of Architecture and Objects

Graham Harman

My first lecture at an architectural school was at the Architecture Association in London in April 2007. It felt at the time like it might be an isolated event, and for several years thereafter no further speaking invitations came from architects. Things began to change in the fall of 2011. During September of that year, I was invited to give multiple lectures at various locations in New York. Although none of them concerned architecture, my old undergraduate classmate David Ruy attended many of the lectures. He was not only an architect, but one who began to spread the word about object-oriented philosophy among his professional colleagues. That eventually led to my being hired in 2016 at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (usually known as SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles, where I still work today. As many of you may know, David Ruy was born in Korea, though he grew up in New York.

In any case, I arrived at SCI-Arc without especial expertise in the field of architectural history and theory, as a philosopher whose ideas had simply proven to be of interest to a number of architects. The field had already passed through periods of influence dominated in order by Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze. When I arrived, the Deleuzean flower was beginning to fade. Of those who wanted architecture to maintain serious dialogue with philosophy, many saw object-oriented philosophy as the best hope, and this put a lot of pressure on me. Another group, at least as large, thought the time had come for architecture to break free of philosophical influence altogether– and this put the pressure on as well.

So for half a decade I read and studied; most importantly, I listened to what architects were saying and not saying. My developing thoughts on architecture were guided by my more established thoughts on art, which were consolidated in the 2020 book Art and Objects, translated and published by Galmuri last year. (And incidentally, in all the countries of the world where I have worked, I have never seen any publisher as fast and efficient as Galmuri. I am still amazed by this company, and am happy to be speaking in Seoul again today.) The basic standpoint of Art and Objects was that I wanted to defend aesthetic formalism, but not in the previous sense of the term. The grandfather of formalism in the arts was surely Immanuel Kant, even though –as far as I know– he only used the word “formalism” in connection with ethics. This word is used in different contexts to mean different things, but in Kant the term refers to the autonomy or self-containment of anything from its context. Famously, in Kant’s ethics, an action is not ethical if it is motivated by external purposes: such as wanting to go to heaven and avoid going to hell, or wanting to gain a good reputation, or wanting to avoid a feeling of guilt for not doing the right thing. An ethical action must be done for its own sake. A number of valid criticisms have been made of this position in ethics, but there is a certain undeniable core of truth to it: to perform an action for some reason external to the action itself is not really ethics, but something else. In the book Dante’s Broken Hammer, I had already formed an alliance with the colorful German philosopher Max Scheler: born in 1874, midway between Husserl (1859) and Heidegger (1889). His great book on ethics defended Kant for not letting ethics be motivated by external purposes, while also criticizing him for making ethics too empty and too universal. Scheler re-grounded ethics in love, meaning a strong passion for some things as opposed to others. Certain ethical duties are binding on me as an individual, or me as an American, or me as a husband, or me as a middle-aged professor, that do not weigh on all those who do not fit these descriptions.

Returning to art, the formalism of Kant’s Critique of Judgment can be seen in his view that an artwork cannot be paraphrased in terms of a meaning; that it is not reducible to my personal like or dislike for it; that it must be judged by taste rather than the concepts of the intellect. Yet the problem with Kant’s conception of autonomy in the aesthetic sphere was his assumption that autonomy must mean that the aesthetic beholder must stand at a distance from the work. Thus we have Kant’s emphasis on calm “disinterest” as the right way to approach art. In his present-day admirer, the art critic and historian Michael Fried, this takes the form of a distaste for “theatricality.” The artwork is not supposed to make direct appeal to the beholder. In fact, it is better if the figures in a painting are so absorbed in what they are doing that they have no energy left over to pay attention to us who look at them. Fried admits that this is a “supreme fiction,” since there would obviously be no painting if there were no one to view it. Yet he still aims at an ideal case of calm and distant observation of art, just as Kant would have liked. This is crystal clear in Fried’s famous early rejection of minimalism, and almost crystal clear in his wonderful book on anti-theatrical painting in the age of the French philosopher and art critic Diderot, who shared Fried’s distaste for theater.

In the latter case I say “almost” crystal clear because from the beginning, Fried realizes the problem with his position. For one thing, in a painter such as Jacques-Louis David, the most prominent artist of the French Revolutionary period, it is often impossible to tell whether a given painting is anti-theatrical or extremely theatrical. Fried’s position becomes even more problematic in the next two books of his trilogy on French painting. The next book was Courbet’s Realism, where Fried shows beyond a doubt that Gustave Courbet deliberately broke down the distinction between himself and his paintings, effectively painting himself into his own canvases in almost the most theatrical way possible. Then came Manet’s Modernism, in which Fried described Manet’s breakthrough modernist paintings in terms of “facingness”: the central figure of a Manet painting often looks at us directly in a kind of challenge, and even the application of the paint seems to press directly against the viewer’s eyes.

To summarize, in Art and Objects I summarized Fried’s art-historical career as an involuntary path of coming to terms with the inevitable theatricality of art. But this does not spell the end of formalism. Art is still autonomous. But instead of the artwork remaining autonomous from the human beholder, as for Kant and his descendants, it becomes a chemical compound made up of both te work and beholder. No one denies that water exists autonomously just because it is made of both hydrogen and oxygen; likewise, no one should doubt that art is at least relatively autonomous from its surroundings simply because it is made of both work and spectator. The new formalism that results leaves much more room for personal contributions by the beholder, and also leaves room for a certain amount of relevance for the socio-political context of works in a way that the old formalism made impossible. It simply entails that any artwork interacts selectively with its context, admitting and denying entry by various factors in the environment. Picasso’s Guernica obviously makes a harsh commentary on both fascism and the horrors of war, while also excluding everything else going on in the political world during the year of its composition.

We now turn to architecture, the topic of my latest book to be translated into Korean. Here I was inspired once again by Kant, who after all is the major philosopher of aesthetics (and not just aesthetics) in the past two-and-a-half centuries. Kant first notes that certain kinds of beauty are not pure, since they are contaminated by ulterior motives. He mentions the beauty of a horse, which probably makes us think of the speed and monetary value of this animal. He then mentions the beauty of a human body, which is also hard to experience purely since it is likely to be contaminated in some way by lust. From here he turns to architecture, which is ruled out as pure beauty due to its utility. Another way of putting it is that for Kant, architecture fails the formalist test: it is inevitably tangled up in its surroundings. But in Art and Objects, I had already demonstrated that such entanglement is not a problem. At the very least, all art requires an entanglement of an interested beholder with a work. We achieve formalism not by cutting the link between the two (as Kant and the early Fried wished) but by seeing this particular entanglement as cut off from the environment of further possible entanglements. But this makes architecture look more promising than ever, since the very fact of its usefulness forces it to confront the limits of Kantian formalism in a way that visual art is not compelled to do.

However much or little a given architect tries to emphasize the function or program of a given building, architecture is not pure engineering. It is also a design discipline, which means an aesthetic one. When we speak about aesthetics, we usually think that the key opposition is between the beautiful and the ugly. Here I strongly disagree: the ugly is really just an unlucky cousin of the beautiful. To see something ugly is to have an aesthetic experience, even if an unpleasant one. The true opposite of the beautiful, I contend, is the literal. Consider the following sentence from Reuters financial news for July 31, 2023: “All three major stock indexes ended Monday little changed but with gains for the month, ahead of a busy week of earnings reports from companies including Amazon and Apple, plus U.S. economic data including the jobs report.” Notice that this sentence is neither beautiful nor ugly, but simply literal. For reasons that cannot be explained in detail here, I have often defined literalism as the notion that an object is nothing more than the sum total of its qualities. This makes David Hume the supreme literalist in the history of Western philosophy, since he held that an object is nothing more than a “bundle of qualities.” There is no unified apple hiding behind the red, hard, solid, slippery coldness we see and feel in ours hands. I have also made the case that phenomenology in philosophy is, above all else, a critique of Hume’s literalism. For Edmund Husserl and his heirs, the object comes first: a given thing can change all of its qualities, within certain limits, and still remain the same. In this spirit, I have argued that aesthetics essentially refers to any experience that drives a wedge between an object and its qualities. I have often spoken of how this happens in the case of metaphor, though it also happens with love, courage, embarrassment, jokes, and others I have dealt with elsewhere.

Now, architecture since the nineteenth century has often been described in terms of the opposition between form and function, even though some have questioned this distinction, or tried to reduce one of the terms entirely to the other. But I tend to agree with Patrik Schumacher that both are indispensable to architecture. All form and no function would mean we are dealing with sculpture rather than architecture; all function without form would mean we are in the realm of engineering, trying to solve a given building problem with a strict economy of technological means. The problem, as I see it, is that both form and function have been taken too literally, which means they have not been explored in a purely aesthetic sense. To deliteralize something means to formalize it, to make it autonomous, to split it off from its own qualities but also from its surroundings. This remains the case even if it can only be done partially (since architectural objects, like all others, do exist in a world of relations).

How are form and function usually treated? When we speak of the “form” of a building, we are usually speaking of its visual look. Yet it should be clear that this cannot be what the form of a building truly is. For one thing, a building is a three-dimensional object that can be seen from many angles, distances, and viewpoints. We might pick our favorite viewpoint and distance and take a postcard photograph of it. But we cannot exhaust the form of a building with a single photograph from any location in particular. More than this, the building also has an interior, and to enter it means to have a series of experiences held together by memory. Surprisingly, this was seen most clearly by the young Peter Eisenman, who later took such a different path in his building and his thinking. As for the “function” of a building, we normally think of this as its use or purpose: meaning its current use or purpose. But there are problems here as well. In fact, let’s start with the problems of literalist function.

One of the classic early books of what might be called “postmodern” architecture was Architecture of the City, by the Italian Aldo Rossi. One of the most famous sections of this book is entitled “Critique of Naïve Functionalism.” Writing from the densely historical built environment of his home country, Rossi points out that many buildings now have a different function from their original one, and many (such as monuments) never had a definite function to begin with. Consider the school where I work, SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. The building was originally designed to be a freight depot for a railroad. Now it is an architecture school. In between it was an abandoned building where homeless people lived, and I once met an Uber driver who said he used to pay the homeless to leave for a night so that he could organize large rave parties inside. In any case, although the interior of the building was intensively renovated before SCI-Arc took over in the year 2000, the basic structure of the building is the same as in its railroad days. But whether we use it as a rail station or an architecture school, a deeper function remains present: we might call it “extended axial movement along a narrow corridor.” This has certain practical consequences for those of us who work there. Since a single hallway extends through the entire building, it is impossible to avoid seeing anyone you might not want to see, unless you leave the building and move from one end of the building to the other along city sidewalks. It also means that, quite often, official meetings do not need to be scheduled: the Director of SCI-Arc can simply walk down the hallway and he is likely to meet everyone he needs to see.

There is another example of deep function that is covered in my book, and it involves an interesting article by Jeffrey Kipnis about Rem Koolhaas’s failed competition entry for the Tate Modern Museum in London. Kipnis goes so far as to claim that, as brilliant a design as it is, it would have ruined architecture if it had won. The supposed reason is that Koolhaas simply proposed an infrastructural project rather than an architectural one, aiming to circulate the most guests possible through the museum in the least amount of time. Kipnis complains gently that there was no reason this design had to be for an art museum in particular. But if we recall Rossi’s words about the shifting functions of a building over time, this starts to sound like a positive rather than a negative: as if what Koolhaas had really delivered was an abstract function. In Kipnis’s more colorful description, Koolhaas seems to have taken the design brief and hacked away its flesh and muscle and even its skeleton, leaving only a nervous system of the building intact. But it seems to me that this is on the right track as a strategy for deliteralizing the function of a building.

As for deliteralizing the form, I have already mentioned the need for movement, for varied experiences appearing in sequence, and for anchors to be established for memory to hold all of it together. This suggests a number of departures from the usual aesthetic of modernism. The need for variety suggests asymmetry, an embargo on being able to see the whole from a privileged vantage point, agglomeration of different forms onto each other in a quasi-Gothic manner, and perhaps even a touch of the old picturesque, which more or less went out of fashion with the end of Romanticism. These are just a few ideas for how to deal with a more pressing central concern: how to remove architecture from its excessively literal interpretation of both form and function, the two recent pillars of the discipline.