VAD 08. Call for Papers. The aesthetics

Aesthetics, as a reflection on the image, cannot be understood as an immutable discipline. The perception of aesthetic values, whether they relate to beauty or ugliness, harmony or imbalance, has historically been determined by social, scientific or philosophical conditioning factors.

Although the concept is as old as mankind, the first time the term was used as such in a title was in Aesthetica (1750) by Alexander Baumgarten, who delimited the discipline and differentiated it from the other branches of philosophy concerned with the theory of sensibility. In the prelude to this work, aesthetics was defined as the

«Theory of the liberal arts, lower gnoseology, art of beautiful thinking, art analogous to reason, [in short, as the] science of sensible knowledge».

Baumgarten presented aesthetics as the philosophy of beautiful art, and beauty as perfection perceived through the senses rather than through the pure intellect:

«The end of aesthetics is the perfection of sensible knowledge as such. This perfection is beauty».

Although Baumgarten titled his book with the Latin term, Greek philosophers already referred to aisthetike as that which is endowed with sensibility, and linked the word directly to the perception of beauty and the influence it exerts on our mind. But their understanding of the beautiful went much further. The ideal of Greek virtue was based on the Kalos-kai-agathos, that is, the union between physical beauty and the good, understanding that goodness as the collaboration of the entity in the achievement of its own end. In short, for something to be considered beautiful, it also had to be useful, that is to say, suitable and adequate to its function.

Four centuries later, and referring specifically to architecture, Vitruvius not only added solidity as a third condition to be considered, but also separated once again the beautiful and the useful, and thus coined the famous triad that would mark from that moment onwards a good part of the theoretical reflections on the discipline: firmitas, utilitas and venustas. When Leon Battista Alberti wrote De re aedificatoria (c. 1450), he used the Vitruvian model of the ten books and returned to the triad, although he introduced some changes in its meaning, among them that beauty should also provoke delight. Thus, an actor who had lost prominence, the user, was recovered, as delight was directly linked to the perception or enjoyment of the built environment through our senses and, therefore, depended on the subjective response it elicited in individuals.

The importance of this last agent diminished considerably at the beginning of the 20th century, when some architects, such as Hannes Meyer, presented delight as the result of obtaining the maximum functionality of use and the external manifestation of the structure. According to Leland Roth:

«the Vitruvian formula had changed forever, so that utility plus solidity equalled delight».

Thus, many of the proposals of the early avant-garde tended to obviate not only traditional aesthetic values, but also the idea of aesthetics itself. As Antonio Fernández Alba stated, the aim was to:

«to "rationally formalise space [...] in such a way as to arrive at a conforming whole, where the habits of the human being are excluded».

This hermetic approach left out of the discussion aspects such as architecture's relationship with tradition and nature, or with symbol and representation. In other words, it subordinated human values to a supposed superiority of function over form. It is probably in this inflexible search for answers based on use and technology that a large part of the reasons for the visceral reactions of opposition to the Modern Movement that arose from 1965 onwards can be found.

Half a century later, many of the vicissitudes of that time are questionable, including whether the debate is still going on. How important are aesthetic criteria in architecture in the 21st century? Has the debate between form and function been overcome? How does the change in society's values influence what is demanded of a work of architecture?

We invite papers that reflect on the concept of aesthetics not only from conceptual positions - where the debate has traditionally been situated - but also from the analysis of concrete examples, historical or contemporary, that allow us to delimit the relevance of the sensorial in architecture; texts that help us to understand whether the traditional dichotomy between form and function has been overcome and, moreover, whether this discussion is still relevant today.

Submissions rules.
Check the SUBMISSIONS section to find out the procedure to follow to send the documentation.

Calendar.
Opening reception of articles: July 14, 2022.
Deadline for receipt of articles: September 30, 2022.
You can check the calendar in the ANNOUNCEMENT section.

Web.
All the information web.

Prologue by Ana Esteban Maluenda.