Environmental Philosophy Group

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Philosophy of Architecture and the Built Environment

Project description

The philosophy of architecture is a new philosophical sub-discipline which embraces the various philosophical approaches to architecture. I suggest a general characterization of the philosophy of architecture as a field to be distinguished from architectural theory and to be placed within philosophy. I criticize several attempts to distinguish it from architectural theory by means of author-related or content-related criteria, and propose – as an alternative – to effect that distinction by appeals to more formal criteria (generality, reflexivity, systematicity, neutality).

The two best established branches of the philosophy of architecture are the aesthetics of architecture and the ethics of architecture. I characterize these branches by suggesting a list of issues they are dealing with, and argue to conceived them as essential parts of environmental aesthetics (aesthetics of the built environment) and environmental ethics (ethics of the built environment) respectively (Baumberger 2013a; 2015).

By now, my work in philosophy of architecture has focussed on the following more specific issues:

  • Architectural meaning: How do buildings mean? (Baumberger 2010a, 2014c) In which sense can buildings be ambiguous? (Baumberger 2009) Can buildings quote? (Baumberger 2014a)
  • Architectural identity: What does it mean that a building has a certain identity or specific character? In which sense can a building have different identities? How can they be evaluated? And how do they interact with the identities or landscapes, persons, corporations and nations? (Baumberger/Brun 2013)
  • Architectural experience: What characterizes the aesthetic experience of buildings? In particular, how does our understanding of the structure and the function of a building influence our aesthetic experience of it? (Baumberger 2014b)
  • Architectural value: Do ethical assessments of buildings have any bearing on their value as works of architecture? And how is the ethical value of an architectural work related to its aesthetic value? (Baumberger 2015b)
  • Architectural functions: Which types of functions do buildings serve? How do these functions relate to each other? And how are they connected to the use we make of the buildings? (Baumberger 2010b)

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