1This paper is attentive to a certain intellectual evolution taking place in French architectural circles today. It is an earnest invitation to understand why our research team has been so preoccupied with use, contrary to the current trend marked by the ‘return of the artists,’ to quote the title of a weekly magazine. In what way is the question of use a major issue in the work of architectural design, at a time when a renewed recognition for architecture—at least the one constructed by a certain current of thought—seems to be associated with a break from primary functionalism and a return to a reaffirmed artistic expression?
- 1 This consists of reconstructing the coherence our research team’s work, from the original text of m (...)
2My aim here is to verify and establish the legitimacy of attention to use, and the necessity of combining the creation of architectural forms with reflections about social practices in space.1
3In a context marked by the disappearance of the architect-technician and the reappearance of the architect-artist (both figures that leave little room for the social value of an architect’s role, which is to create an ‘environment for living’), I would like to demonstrate that paying closer attention to use does not jeopardize aesthetics, but can rather be the source of its enrichment in terms of form.
4To this end, I have focused my research on two, or even three, main lines of thought. Firstly, I have endeavored to reconstruct the progression of architecture-specific concepts that reflect a certain understanding of its social purpose. Secondly, I have questioned the status of knowledge that contributes to the production of architecture, starting from the observation of a long-standing, profound and recurring hesitation between resorting to science and appealing to artistic inspiration. Thirdly, I have attempted to understand the validity of the criteria used to distinguish architecture from the rest of construction, a question that builds on the previous one.
5In a way, this paper is a response to all the critics of our line of research, who question its significance for the field of architecture rather than its intrinsic quality. For them, the value of architecture boils down to quality, judged independently of any consideration of use. This perspective, which has gradually taken hold over the last few years, is based on the premise that research on the use of space sheds light solely on this use itself. It is therefore only of interest to specialists in the humanities and social sciences, as well as, to a lesser extent, planners and developers, while remaining of no interest to architects.
6We are not convinced that certain ways of conducting studies on the practices of those for whom architecture is intended can shed light on certain aspects of architectural design; neither to make it more functional and pleasant to live in, nor to generate an additional quality in the social life of architecture that goes beyond the desire to possess or to put oneself on the social map, but quite simply the pleasure of being in an appropriate space. This last characterization can be understood in two ways: by making space a place designed to correspond to the way of life of an individual or a group; or by making them the players of an active behavior towards the space, either because it constitutes an invitation to ‘take possession’ of it, or because it challenges lifestyles, thereby inciting spatial disfiguration and subversion.
- 2 Jean Lacoste, L’Idée de beau, Paris, Bordas, 1986.
7Instead, and in many respects, our research into the confrontations between space and practices aims to demonstrate that, in residents’ quest to bring space in line with their practices, there is a formidable demand for aesthetic pleasure and not just practical necessity. This demand is mediated by the exercise of ‘corrective invention’ on the part of the inhabitant. By appropriating the space, inhabitants work against an indifferent, heteronomous, cold and alien aesthetic being imposed on them in the name of controlling consciousness—an objective for which Le Corbusier2 was one of the most active proponents, as an inhabitant trainer.
8Let me now turn more specifically to the notion of use. I want to reconstruct its place and content in the development of architectural thought, seeing this as a kind of ‘archaeology of knowledge.’ However, I will do this by considering architectural thought less as a closed space (which would only be half the point), and more as a field shaped by societal change and its ways of representing the world, influenced by both intellectual and material fields that interact with architecture. Furthermore, when I speak of architectural thought, I will deliberately and primarily restrict myself to what is expressed in discourse (treatises, essays, monographs, etc.), without going into the material outcome of a thought, constituted by the graphic and constructed production of architects.
9Initially, my aim was to demonstrate that the founding trinity of architectural theory, formulated by Vitruvius in the first century BC—“firmitas, utilitas, venustas”—was consistently affirmed in the treatises written up to the present day, albeit with significantly different concepts and adapted to the evolution of society, its knowledge, techniques, customs and cultures. Below, we will see how changes in thinking about art and science have altered the validity and durability of these paradigmatic architectural concepts.
10However, it is precisely these concepts, adapted to a new societal context, that we find both in Alberti’s “De re aedificatoriā” (1492) with “Necessitas, commoditas, voluptas” and in Nervi’s modern version of the Vitruvian trinity: “form, structure, function.”. Each of these concepts can be analyzed in terms of what differentiates them from their predecessors, making reference to the evolution of the discipline itself as well as its context. The variable articulations that exist between the concepts themselves can also be studied, from one expression of the trinity to the next. Here, however, I shall confine myself to discussing the evolution and fluctuations of ‘utilitas.’
- 3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, Translated by James Creed Meredith, Oxford: Oxford University (...)
11Thus, Vitruvius’ ‘utilitas’ successively became ‘commoditas’ for Alberti during the Renaissance; ‘distribution’ for Jacques-François Blondel during the Classical period; ‘usages’ and ‘programme’ for Viollet-le-Duc in the 19th century; before being reduced to ‘fonction’ by Pier-Luigi Nervi. An analysis, which I will summarize here,3 shows how we move from a crude design of purpose to a vision of spatial organization that first integrates the appropriateness of space in relation to social rank (Alberti, Palladio, etc.); then to a design that includes the notion of comfort, intimacy and independence (P. Le Muet, J.-F. Blondel, etc.); and finally to a rationality in which economic and technical criteria turned modern “customs” into “social physics” (Le Corbusier, Nervi, etc.) that Auguste Comte would not have disavowed.
- 4 Ibid.
- 5 Paul Souriau, La Beauté rationnelle, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes (PUR), 2023 [1904].
12Over time, however, the triad lost its power, because the value of its three constituent elements did not remain equal. This evolution was gradually confirmed by art’s assertion of autonomy. Jacques-François Blondel, despite being highly focused on “convenience,” expressed this change by stating that construction and utility (“distribution”) belonged to the lower register of practice, knowledge and techniques; while aesthetics (“decoration,”4 according to him) belonged to a higher level of knowledge, which he refers to as a “science.” Here, the concept is still to be understood within the system of classical thought, which sees art as the implementation of rules and intangible canons. At the same time, however, it heralded the debate that shook the eighteenth century, between intelligence and sensitivity,5 and which Kant’s aesthetics was to settle for good.
- 6 Luc Ferry, Homo Estheticus, Paris, Grasset,1990.
- 7 Theodor W. Adorno, Théorie esthétique, translated by Marc Jimenez, Paris, Klincksieck, 1982 [1970, (...)
13Kant discredited the level of Vitruvian “utilitas” when he drew a distinction between “free beauty” and “adherent beauty,” establishing that beauty is the object of satisfaction or pleasure detached from any interest.6 According to this definition, suitability for use therefore did not constitute a factor contributing to the aesthetic value of a work of art. Kant, however, was not unmindful of the difficulty that this restriction entailed for architecture. “For this art,” he says, “the essence lies in a certain use of the artistic object, a use that constitutes a restrictive condition for aesthetic ideas.”7
14In fact, this understanding of art was to have a considerable influence on architecture. The discipline’s evolution in the 19th century became dominated by this sense of detachment from use. This was entirely characteristic of the developments occurring within the Beaux-Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts.
15This trend, which dominated the 19th century, was opposed by Viollet-le-Duc (and undoubtedly Labrouste before him), who extended his concern for rationality—as applied mainly to construction systems—to the definition of the design project and its spatial organization. This approach is most evident in Histoire d’une maison (1873), but is also constantly referred to in Entretiens (1863). However, this aspect of his thinking was largely overshadowed by the architect-engineer debate, and was both prompted by his position and largely echoed the rise of the engineer’s prerogatives with the industrial revolution.
- 8 Georges Steiner, Réelles présences, les arts du sens, Paris, Gallimard, 1989, p. 108-110.
16The question of usefulness reappeared with the Modern Movement, which inherited the demand for rationality from Viollet-le-Duc by developing the concept of function into the realm of social life. The modern version of social utility, however, referred more to a certain idea of “practical use,” which itself called for the extension of certain qualities required of industrial production to the field of housing: namely, that of a production economy based on saving time and space, the reproduction by standard, the formal simplification of objects to be reproduced, etc. According to one of the theorists of aesthetic functionalism, Paul Souriau, “any object visibly capable of fulfilling its function is beautiful.”8
- 9 These include L. Mumford, E. T. Hall, H. Lefebvre, C. Pétonnet, H. Raymond, etc.
17In this way, the productive rationality embodied in movements, such as Taylorism, penetrated the living environment and architecture of the home. This was the advent of Le Corbusier’s famous “machine for living in.” An object’s beauty was brought back to the revolutionary nature of the production process that gave rise to it. From this perspective, and as a scientific application, the machine tool was also the expression of a higher truth that derived its legitimacy from scientific laws. This marked the arrival of a new form of rationality in art. On the one hand, it replaced the canonical rules of classicism, which were based on Cartesian interpretations of the values of Antiquity and, on the other hand, it competed with sensory aesthetics that emerged at the end of the 18th century and were subsequently developed by Baudelaire, making imagination “the queen of human faculties.” Luc Ferry seems to have correctly identified this aesthetic of modernity, describing it as “hyperclassicism.”9
- 10 Charles Jenks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, Londres, Academy Editions, 1977.
18Moreover, this development confirmed a movement towards the scientification of art, or at least of certain artistic trends, as Theodor W. Adorno10 rightly noted. This movement was no stranger to the prestige that covered the hard sciences in the nineteenth century, while at the same time accentuating the split problematized by Kant, between the ‘noumenal’ and the ‘phenomenal;’ that is, between literary and artistic culture, on the one hand, and scientific culture on the other, spheres that had previously been intertwined for the most part. The first chapter of Vers une architecture (1923), which Le Corbusier titled “Esthétique de l’ingénieur. Architecture,” is clearly indicative of this trend. From a purely aesthetic perspective, this dogmatic application of scientific rules to architecture gave rise to regulating layouts (Viollet-le-Duc before Le Corbusier), as well as research into the Golden ratio, the Modulor, and so on.
19Without completely denying the interest of such research, it is questionable whether this alone could sum up the work of artistic creation. Its application and generalization may have also been the shortest route to sterility and the expression of a new academicism. In this sense, I fully agree with the philosopher George Steiner when, referring to semiotic or linguistic analysis, he states that:
- 11 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [1935]” in Illuminations(...)
(if) there are mathematical or meta-mathematical (logically formal) approaches to the constituent elements and constructions of textuality (and here a certain degree of theory is in its place...), the failure (is) absolutely decisive... when such approaches seek to formalize meaning, when, starting from phonetic, lexical and grammatical elements, they seek to reach semantic and aesthetic levels. No formalization is adequate to the semantic mass of a culture and its movement...11
20What interests me here, however, is not so much extending positivist scientific rules to the production of forms, but rather invoking rationality as a way of thinking about the social dimension of architecture and urbanism in the Modern Movement.
21Equipped with the ‘overarching’ thinking (M. Maffesoli) of 20th-century scientistic positivism, functionalism arranged space using organizational standards taken from the world of industrial production. In this way, the industrial series inspired the architectural series, just as it shaped the human series (Fourrier also used this concept, but in a less undifferentiated way!).
22Thus, the human being was abstract, general, and was assigned the practices that they should have as a “modern man,” by “teaching them to live” if need be. In a way, the fine ideas of machine society were projected onto the cultural mentality of the human being.
- 12 Michel Maffesoli, Au creux des apparences, pour une éthique de l’esthétique, Paris, Plon, 1990, p. (...)
23I will not dwell on the reaction of residents to the physical and moral torture brought on by housing’s failure to become a genuine mold of conscience and behavior, despite the high hopes of masterminds: from employers’ housing of the nineteenth century, to state-owned large housing developments. This issue was the subject of a great deal of empirical work in the 1970s, as part of a whole movement of studies aimed at showing the cultural loss produced by functionalism, not only in its theories, but also in its applications.12
24These studies were also supplemented by alternative architectural proposals. Renowned architects such as Robert Venturi and Aldo Rossi, as well as Hassan Fathy prior to them, significantly contributed to this. In my view, the essential thing that these architects did was to restore meaning to the narrowly functional spatial response of the Modern Movement. Le Corbusier’s standard man thus rose above his exclusively biological attributes to invest in history, ethnicity, culture, symbolism, rituals, and so on.
25With varying degrees of success, these architects sought to tackle the problem of architecture in a fundamental, anthropological way. Humankind was no longer simply the driver of a modern machine (Le Corbusier saw the open-plan kitchen of the Cité radieuse as a “cockpit” comparable to that of the Constellation long-haul aircraft of the 1950s); but rather was restored to dignified existence as historical and cultural beings. History and culture thus entered into the home, influencing its internal configurations. I like to compare the house in Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1961), analyzed “from the cellar to the attic,” with R. Venturi’s Tucker House, characterized by its enormous roof that contains the library, and a chimney that resembles a reduced model of the house’s overall profile (a microcosm of a macrocosm, as was the chimney in the Breton house: a house within a house, a shelter within a shelter).
Figure 1. Tucker House, section, Robert Venturi, architect, 1975
© Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates
- 13 Georges Balandier, Le Détour, Paris, Fayard, 1985, p. 236 sq.
26For a time, this trend was pioneered by those whom the critic Charles Jencks pigeonholed as part of a short-lived post-modern movement.13 History was, for a short time, the reference point for an artistic conscience in the throes of doubt. This moment of modesty turned out to be fleeting, however: we cannot help but link the vision and creative impulses of architects, perhaps more than those of other artists, to the feelings of a decade (because centuries are now too long to periodize architectural styles). The brief economic upturn of the 1980s and the new-found self-confidence of the ‘white man’ in the face of the immoralism of Third World regimes (the Human Rights movement), after years of remorse over colonial or post-colonial abuses, gave renowned architects certainty to rediscover the monumental tradition that marked the architecture of regimes and peoples who considered themselves chosen. The end of the century thus gave us the Bibliothèque nationale de France and its dehumanized silos, reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin, the clean slate from which Paris escaped.
27The comeback of avant-garde reassurance took place against a backdrop of star-studded exhibitionism, reflecting a society in need of heroic figures, at the heart of which the image and the immediacy of spectacle gained considerable power. The news flash, the ad, the logo and the lapel pin all became ways of summarizing, thereby reducing existence to the ephemeral, the temporary, the consumable, the disposable, and the surreptitiously visible.
28Architecture is thus no longer a place to make our own, to be lived in for the long term and to be evaluated on the basis of familiarization and appropriation. Further, the experience of those who live in these spaces unfortunately also represents the experience of those unable to control communication. Increasingly, architecture is a design that appears in glossy trade magazines and now in municipal newsletters, which use a prestigious artistic signature to announce municipal sponsorship and sign off on advertising campaigns in tune with contemporary intercity competition.
29Architecture is no longer seen as a place designed for its inhabitants, but as a phase in an artist’s work, and as a sequence in their personal artistic history, already identified with the soon-to-be-published monograph. The ‘style,’ the visual quality of the architectural forms used, their originality and, in short, the architectural rhetoric (hardly an exaggeration), supplant any other perception of the work.
30So, when assessing architectural quality today, what place is given to architecture’s dialogue with people other than art and architecture critics; that is, those who have a particularly privileged and intimate relationship with architecture on an everyday basis? For them, in such a situation, it is a question of engaging all the senses: not just sight, but also touch and hearing. In short, it involves the whole body, whether it feels good or not, keeping in mind that this body is not just biological, sensitive or sensory, but also culturalized. Further, it conveys an internalized history, cultural models and deep-rooted habits. Architecture must strive to speak to these culturalized bodies—and, difficult as it may be, in all the diversity of their existence—and not simply to an audience of art critics. Here, we return to Walter Benjamin’s remarks on ways in which architectural works can be read:
- 14 Jean Lacoste, op. cit.
Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception—or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards to architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation.14
31This approach to architecture, and aesthetics in general, is echoed by Michel Maffesoli when, in his essay on “An Ethics of Aesthetics” and following in the footsteps of a little-known sociologist, J.-M. Guyau, he reaffirms that:
- 15 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, Translated by James Creed Meredith, Oxford: Oxford University (...)
‘Aesthetics serves a purpose.’ This is a dynamic paradox that clearly shows that it is possible to link beauty and functionality: what is useful and pleasant in the common sense. Aesthetics is also practical; or to be more precise, it is pragmatic: it puts people in touch with each other, and enables the production of communicable meaning... In other words, society “remembers” that it is a social body by collectively “living” these small bodies that are objects. This is what I have called the ‘objectal’: a functionality that enables communion, a functionality that enables social tactility... Extrapolating, I would say that this sums up post-modern aesthetics (aisthesis) in general, for which the trivial object or art object is valuable, both for itself and for the relationship it establishes or fosters. Aesthetics, then, is that which is less interested in the traditional categories of ‘beautiful,’ ‘sublime,’ ‘ugly,’ etc., than in the atmosphere created by the ‘objective’ world in its various manifestations.15
32With this kind of approach, use is legitimately reintroduced into the assessment of the architectural value of a built place. But how, under these conditions, can we think about the relationship between use and aesthetics?
33I personally continue to see signs of a latent aesthetic in the popular reappropriation of space. I believe it is on the lookout for the slightest interstices, left empty by the dominance of techno-architecture in order to develop new initiatives by means of diversion, circumvention and various other procedures of positive subversion. In his anthropological ‘diversions,’ Georges Balandier clearly emphasizes the “counter-imaginary of planning” that residents used to confront the techno-imaginary of Le Corbusier.16
34This re-appropriation, prompted by the desire to live according to one’s own cultural models, adjusts space so that it conforms to the practices engendered by these same cultural models. It goes beyond the strict requirements of biology and reproduction-consumption that functionalism has confined it to. Instead, it seeks to make us feel at home, contributing to an aesthetic plenitude that prevents the recipient of the aesthetic message from remaining an outsider.
35In fact, architects and art critics are increasingly entering into such a relationship with built places, through the photography of professional journals or the visit-blitz-report. The perspective vision of our spatial culture, formed during the Renaissance, has forced us to reduce architectural space to its representation, thereby cutting us off from the essence of architecture as an inhabited space. In this process of limiting architecture to its image, it loses a considerable amount of meaning, precisely because of its reality as a space intended for habitation. From this point of view, architecture is likely to be perceived in the multiplicity of its relationships with our cultured bodies, in search of multiple, closely interlinked physical and cultural requirements. Architecture is indeed the lens through which nature is reinterpreted by culture.
36The cultural gap and distance from our cultural universe, which is excessively subject to the power of the image, can once again open us up to other ways of looking at architectural aesthetics and the place that use might occupy within it, both in a banal and a more transcendental sense. Architecture in the Arab world invites us to do this, by associating the multi-sensory perception—the fragrant scent of jasmine, the refreshing coolness of a pool, the shade of a deep room—with tactile sensations that can be combined with visual effects (produced by the arrangement of volumes, the design of surfaces and the use of materials). However, it is also associated with references that place these natural elements within a cultural interpretation. In this way, the garden becomes more than just an association of plant elements, mediating physically pleasurable sensations. It is also refers to paradise, and therefore to a dimension of dreams. In the same way, its geometric division into four parts makes an implicit reference to the four rivers— water, milk, wine and honey—evoking the gustatory delights of the Oriental notion of paradise, a term which is itself of Persian origin.
37In this way, use can fully partake in an aesthetic that is both every day and imagination-oriented, reintroducing values that the distant Kantian vision, separating object and subject, had discarded from aesthetic taste. Largely inspired by the hegemony and prestige of painting in the 17th century—a representation of the world and of dreams the remains unrivaled (ut pictura poesis)—the logic of Kantian aesthetics, stemming from the Renaissance, favors optics (vision, perspective) to the detriment of tactility, considered a less noble sense. The shift from a living space to one that is solely to be seen (in today’s magazines or ephemeral inaugurations) challenges this optical point of view which has become dominant, reintroducing a broader dimension of aesthetic pleasure, at the heart of which ‘tactility,’ as defined by Walter Benjamin, finds its rightful place.