A&S/books selected back list :
Leach & Macarthur Architecture, Disciplinarity and the Arts
* Maarten Delbeke, La Fenice degl 'ingegni. Een
alternatief perspectief op Gianlorenzo Bernini en zijn
werk in de geschriften van Sforza Pallavicino (2002)
(Dutch) ISBN: 90-76714-118
* Bart Verschaffel, A propos de Balthus. Le Roi
des chats, Le Regard sondeur (2004) (French)
ISBN: 978-90-76714- 23-1
* Wouter Davidts, Bouwen voor de kunst? Mu-
seumarchitectuur van Centre Pompidou tot Tate
Modern (2006) (Dutch) ISBN: 90-76714-282
* Andrew Leach, Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing
History (English) (2007) ISBN: 978-90-76714-
30-1
* Bart Verschaffel, Van Hermes en Hestia. Teksten
over architectuur (2006) (Dutch) ISBN: 978-90-
76714-29-0
* Maarten Van den Driessche & Bart Ver-
schaffel, De School als ontwerpopgave. Schoolarchi-
tectuur in Vlaanderen 1995-2005 (2006) (Dutch)
ISBN: 90-76714-318
* Marc Verminck (red.), Over Schoonheid. Heden-
daagse beschouwingen bij een klassiek begrip (2008)
(Dutch) ISBN: 978-9076714-356
* Maarten Delbeke, Dirk De Meyer, Bas
Rogiers, Bart Verschaffel, Piranesi. De prenten-
collectie van de Universiteit Gent (2008) (Dutch)
ISBN 978-9076 71-4004
Forthcoming :
* Pieter Uyttenhove, Stadland Belgie . Hoofd-
stukken uit de Belgische stedenbouwgeschiedenis
(2009) (Dutch)
* Dirk De Meyer & Maarten Delbeke (ed.), On
Piranesi (2009) (English)
Table of Contents:
Architecture, Disciplinarity, and the Arts : Considering the Issues /
John Macarthur & Andrew Leach
On Art and/or Architecture Being an Obstacle / Bart Verschaffel A N DR EW LEACH & JOH N MACA RTHUR (E DS.)
Architecture and the System of the Arts / John Macarthur
James Fergusson's Theory of Architecture and the Phonetic Arts / Peter Kohane
Architecture,
Disciplinary Contrasts : Science, Art, and the Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Writings
of William Lethaby, John Ruskin, and Alexander von Humboldt / Deborah van der Plaat
Wilhelm Worringer, Gothic Vitalism, and Modernity / Darren Jorgensen
Disciplinarity,
Problems for Architecture in the Art of Le Corbusier / Antony Moulis
Andre Bloc in Iran / Daniel Barber
Throwing Light on Our Intentions / Andrew Leach
and the Arts
Serial Techniques in the Arts : General Ambitions and Particular Manifestations /
Sandra Kaji-O'Grady
Buildings, Photographs, Sculptures : On Medium and Disciplinarity in the Work of the Bechers /
Naomi Stead
Callum Morton's Architecture of Disguised Difference / Rosemary Hawker
Icon and Ideology / Craig Johnson
Tectonics :Testing the Limits of Autonomy / Gevork Hartoonian
A-disciplinarity and Architecture? / Mark Dorrian
A&S/books are published by the Department of Architecture & Urban Planning,
Ghent University, Belgium
International distribution : Exhibitions International (Louvain, Belgium)
www.exhibitionsinternational.be
ISBN: A&S/books A&S/books
Architecture and the Systems of the Arts ;
or, Kant on Landscape Gardening

John Macarthur

From the middle of the eighteenth century to end of the nineteenth,

architecture was conventionally placed alongside poetry, painting,
sculpture, music, and so on, as one art among a system, or, as it was
sometimes put, a division of the arts. In this chapter, I will discuss the
recentness of our ideas of art and ``the arts'' and then the place given
to architecture among the art disciplines in the influential systems of
the eighteenth century: those of the Abbe Batteux, Denis Diderot and
Jean le Rond d'Alembert, and Immanuel Kant. 1 Today these systems
seem curious at best a bureaucratic vision of culture that is also aris-
tocratic in its attempt to rank the arts by nobility and even more ab-
surd for the very low place that, in general, architecture was said to oc-
cupy. Nevertheless, I aim to show that these systems reward attention,
not because they have organisational or explanatory powers but be-
cause they put in a different light and under a different order the issues
of the present.
These issues involve the nature of art in the so-called post-medium
condition, where the material basis of art practice has to a large degree
become disarticulated from a concept of medium. 2 Thus artists such
as Jeff Wall or Andreas Gursky are said to have revived the problem-
atic of history painting, but using photographic processes. Numerous

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).

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28 John Macarthur
artists, such as Jorge Pardo, practise by what looks like building, and
yet we understand a disciplinary division between this kind of work
and architecture, no matter how conceptual, ephemeral, or without
function a ``critical'' architectural project might be. We could charac-
terise the situation by saying that the basis of medium has changed
from material constraints to ideational constraints that typically arise
from the internal questions of an art discipline. The categorical distinc-
tions and confusions that arise in a post-medium condition are often
seen as merely a matter of lexical convenience that ought not constrain
the free interaction of artists and architects. I will argue to the contrary,
that the question of disciplinarity, of the internal conceptual and his-
torical coherence of a discipline such as architecture, is all the more at
stake if there is no medium given to it if space, building, and even
the idea of architecture could also be the medium of the visual arts.
The eighteenth-century systems that interest me are not shy of cate-
gorising. They explicitly attempt to find principles with which to dif-
ferentiate the arts and to arrange them in a hierarchy of nobility or seri-
ousness. Some of the ensuing contradictions and confusions are risible,
but the parallels they offer also have the effect of making our present
categories seem strange and arbitrary. Beyond the precedent and com-
parison that these systems of the arts offer for current debates is the
question of history. The direct links between present-day and eight-
eenth-century systems of the arts are tenuous when compared to the
great foundation that eighteenth-century aesthetics and art theory gave
to the modern world. The conceptual heritage of Rosalind Krauss's
concept of differential specificity in a post-medial condition runs back
through Clement Greenberg to Kant's ``Analytic of the Beautiful'' in
his Critique of Judgement. 3 What interests me here is that, at a discursive
level, Krauss is also indebted to the latter section of Kant's book,
where he gives a hierarchy of the arts and struggles to decide on issues
such as the relative nobility of architecture and landscape gardening.
An important aspect of the systems of the arts is that they predate
philosophical aesthetics and hence a modern concept of art. Oscar

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.

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 Architecture and the Systems of the Arts 29
Kristeller, in his foundational text ``The Modern System of the Arts''
(1951-52) shows that our present concept of art did not really exist
until the project of philosophical aesthetics, of which the systems of
the arts are a part. 4 From its ancient origins to the Renaissance, the
word ``art'' was applied generally to skills and the mastery of knowl-
edge. What we nowadays call ``art'' emerged in the eighteenth century
with the qualification beaux arts, the fine arts. It did so by combining
three old ideas with a new one. The first old idea is that of a structured
division of knowledge inherited from antiquity and developed in the
curriculum of the ``liberal arts'' of the medieval schools: trivium (gram-
mar, logic, and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music,
and astronomy). Of the ``arts'' that we enjoy today, only music would
have been called so in the scholastic tradition. The second old idea is
the ancient prejudice against manual labour, which was the work of
slaves undertaken at the direction of free men. This developed as a dis-
tinction between liberal and mechanical arts. The trivium and quadrivium
were liberal arts because they were not applied by necessity or by man-
ual labour, nor in order to produce items of use or sale; they com-
prised intellectual work freely chosen and where the product was an
end in itself. Applying this distinction to manual trades such as paint-
ing and building so that, for instance, representational painting could
be categorically distinguished from more prosaic uses of pigment was
the great achievement of Renaissance thinkers on art. Although
Alberti was successful in using the idea of the liberal arts to reform
architecture and painting, in the Renaissance there was no concept of
``the arts'' in a modern sense (which would, for instance, exclude
astronomy). This emerged much later. Equally foreign to us, Renais-
sance discussions of beauty were not connected to the arts but to the
human body and personal beauty.

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.

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30 John Macarthur
The third old idea is the origin of our present discussion: the trope
of the paragone or the contest of the arts. In the Renaissance, artists and
writers revived and developed the classical idea of ut pictura poesis, in
which Horace had explored parallels between poetry and painting. 5
Alberti, in De Pictura (1435), recast the theme of comparison as one
between painting and sculpture, and by the sixteenth century this
became a well-known trope for competitions between orators, even
between artists who made works intended to show the superiority of
one or the other in figural representation. Such debates were similar to
those between medicine and law, and characteristic of the importance
of precedence in courtly societies. The most sophisticated development
of this ancient formula was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laokoon oder
Uber die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie of 1766, in which he attempted to
define the relative strengths of poetry and painting in imitation of
space and time with the aim of defining the medium of each in empiri-
cal terms and beyond the simple contrast of their abilities. 6
What transformed these older ideas into the modern system of the
arts was philosophical aesthetics, specifically French and German
uptakes of British empiricism. Aesthetics supposes there is a sensory
basis, or a critical judgement of sensory experience, which accounts
for feelings of the beautiful in nature and in art. The arts in the mod-
ern sense the beaux arts then formed a group separate to the arts
of astronomy, gastronomy, or carpentry, and based on feelings of
beauty that only they and natural beauties aroused. Like earlier ideas
of the interdependence of the liberal arts, the ``fine arts'' formed a set,
a different and self-contained sphere of knowledge belonging to a dif-
ferent faculty of mind. This new idea of aesthetic feeling was based on
philosophical distinctions between perception and cognition, and
hence separated taste from reason and morality. The liberal/mechanical
distinction articulated the relation of knowledge of art to reason and
science. Art and aesthetic feeling for nature were thought to be not
self-interested or goal-directed in the way that virtue or reason are. In

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).

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 Architecture and the Systems of the Arts 31
the aristocratic societies of the time, this gave continuity to ancient
ideas of prejudice against manual work, for the free and fine arts were
supposed to be enjoyed by gentlefolk who had the personal freedom
to cultivate their aesthetic faculty. Thus it was that the fine arts, usu-
ally said to be painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry,
formed a discrete area of human activity. The fine arts were held to be
distinct from other kinds of practical ``crafts'' because the latter were
conducted with manual dexterity, which was valued over cognition,
and had an aim in utility. Equally, the arts, because they exercised aes-
thetic feeling, were distinct from other purely mental work such as the
former ``liberal'' arts, which were now sciences, knowledges based on
the pure exercise of reason over phenomena.
Before looking at how architecture is placed as an art in eighteenth-
century systems, it is necessary to account for subsequent ideas of art.
A part of the present-day interest of the systems is their unequivocal
categorisation of architecture as an art, a matter that has subsequently
become confused. Today ``the arts'', with the definite article, is perhaps
a memory of ``the beaux arts'', which might include architecture, music,
and dance (strangely, it rarely means literature). The word ``art'', how-
ever, without the definite article, has come to mean those things that
go in art galleries and are taught at art schools: painting and sculpture,
which are sometimes called the ``visual arts'' to the chagrin of sculptors.
Of course, in the contemporary art world, disciplines and media are in
great flux, and the terms ``painting'' and ``sculpture'' better reflect insti-
tutional memories than actual disciplines. Photography is perhaps the
most popular means for contemporary artists, but today the graduates
of arts schools tend to call themselves artists, whether they press shut-
ters, merge pixels, weld metal, or paint with brushes on canvas, and
their product is, of course, ``art'' a concept that has developed since
the eighteenth century to a now almost metaphysical level of generality,
despite being used, in an institutional sense, to name the narrowest set
of activities to which it has ever been applied.
As Thierry de Duve shows in Kant after Duchamp, much of twentieth-
century artistic culture can be divided into two camps. 7 First are those

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).

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32 John Macarthur
who think there is art-as-such practised by the available means and
variously constrained by institutional investments in the disciplines
and institutions. Second are those who think that art is merely an
umbrella category in which to group the likes of painting, architec-
ture, video art: disciplines with a concrete history of progressing inter-
nal problematics proper to them. The latter position is the older one,
and its most prominent proponent is the historian and critic Michael
Fried, who has developed a sophisticated and historicised version of
the formalism of Clement Greenberg. If art is merely a consortium of
disciplines, then there is not much at stake in calling architecture an
art, as it was in the eighteenth century. Indeed, architecture would be
an art because of this history, but its driving questions would be its
own. The former position most prominently put by Rosalind
Krauss, but also by de Duve is the more dominant position in the
visual arts of today, where inter-disciplinarity is almost compulsory
and where the post-medium condition seems to require artists to pro-
duce the equivalent of a medium and a discipline from their own
work. The concept that there is art-as-such requires the foundation of
aesthetics. If one thinks that an artist can go beyond the historical
problematics given to them in the history of their discipline, then this
must be given in a native aesthetic sensibility anterior to ``art'' and its
disciplines. Thus much contemporary visual-arts discourse does not
include architecture on grounds going back to the eighteenth century
and the idea that the utility of architecture makes it less good an occa-
sion of aesthetic feeling. Within that view remains the older prejudice
against the ``mechanical'', by which architects, being commissioned,
are acting out the instructions of others and are therefore less free.
Across its history, architecture has more often than not refused or
avoided the label ``art''. Like the other, now visual arts, in the Renais-
sance architecture was a kind of rhetoric attempting persuasion and
communication rather than a programme of sensation and affect. It is
only in the eighteenth century with the definition of architecture by
Nicholas le Camus de Mezieres as an art of sensations, by Etienne-
Louis Boullee as an art of volume, and in the English picturesque as a
sequential visual experience that we find a strong idea of architecture
as an art in the aesthetical sense. 8 This has always been the minority

8. Etienne-Louis Boullee, Architecture, essai sur l'art, ed. Jean-Marie Perouse de

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 Architecture and the Systems of the Arts 33
theory of architecture as, at roughly the same time, Marc-Antoine
Laugier's grafting of ideas of rhetoric onto construction produced the
more dominant idea of architecture as a legible civic language. 9 In the
twentieth century, much of the architectural profession desired archi-
tecture to be a science, a kind of engineering married to Taylorist ideas
of organisational efficiency. Those who thought of architecture as an
art were generally on the aesthetic side of the argument, from Heinrich
Wolfflin and August Schmarsow onwards, thinking of architecture as
the art-as-such, the art that affected the whole sensorium through the
relatively new concept of space as an object of sense of the whole
body. 10 Similarly, the Arts & Crafts movement in architecture was
the first point at which the liberal/mechanical split that dominated
Western thought was brought under critique, and with it one of the
main pillars of the modern idea of art. The most interesting and pro-
gressive ``artistic'' architects of the twentieth century did not think of
their products as artworks. What distinguishes the villas of Le Corbu-
sier over those of equally talented modernists of the 1920s was that his
houses were not intended to be unique instances of architectural art
but serial, reproducible buildings. For much of the last century, archi-
tecture has been defined as the art that did not produce artworks but
buildings that were instances of capacity applicable to the whole of hu-
man artifice. In the 1970s, architecture turned towards a concept of it-

Montclos (Paris : Hermann, 1968) ; ``Architecture, Essay on Art,'' in Boullee and

Visionary Architecture, ed. Helen Rosenau (London : Academy Editions, 1976) ;
Nicholas Le Camus de Mezieres, Genie de l'architecture, ou, L'analogie de cet art avec nos sen-
sations (Paris, 1780) ; The Genius of Architecture; or, the Analogy of That Art with Our Sensa-
tions (Santa Monica : The Getty Center, 1992) ; Uvedale Price, Essays on the
Picturesque: As Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful and, on the Use of Studying Pictures
for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape, 3 vols. (London : J. Mawman, 1810).
9. Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l'architecture (Paris : 1753) ; An Essay on the Study
and Practice of Architecture. Explaining theTrue Principles of the Science: Illustrated with Figures,
Elegantly Engraved, ... To Which Are Added, Directions for the Embellishment of Cities and the
Laying out of Gardens, 305 ed. (London : Stanley Crowder & Henry Woodgate,
1756).
10. August Schmarsow, ``The Essence of Architectural Creation'' ; and Heinrich
Wolfflin, ``Prolegomena to a Pyschology of Architecture,'' both in Empathy, Form
and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873-1893, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave &
Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica : The Getty Center, 1994).

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34 John Macarthur
self as an art, but one founded on its intellectual autonomy, its own in-
ternal problematic, rather than a role played in consort with other arts.
To take a bearing on the present-day convergence of architecture
and the arts, the main lines of this history need to be understood: the
recentness of the beaux arts and their connection to an aesthetic concept
of beauty; the older history in which architecture, painting, and sculp-
ture were related and compared without a concept of art; the conflict
between an historical conventionalist account of art disciplines and a
claiming of an aesthetic faculty as the basis for art-as-such; and the par-
adox that the main distinction between architecture and the visual arts
in the twentieth century was the obverse views they have taken on
matters foundational for both whether art-as-such exists. If, by
necessity, this essay has been a sketch thus far, I hope it will suffice to
justify a closer examination of one small part of the history of this
question.
The Abbe Charles Batteux's treatise Les beaux-arts reduits a un meme
principe of 1746 is the point at which a modern concept of art and the
arts is formed. 11 Batteux names five fine arts: music, poetry, painting,
sculpture, and dance, which are distinguished from the mechanical arts
on their two effects of pleasure and usefulness. 12 Architecture sits with
eloquence in an intermediate category of arts that combines pleasure
with usefulness. Batteux thus includes architecture in the ancient hier-
archy that praises poetry and invention over rhetoric and persuasion.
Batteux's system also had the advantage of familiarity in that the fine
arts he lists were all understood by ancient writers to be imitative arts,
and architecture was not. Batteux is more innovative in extending the
meaning of the ancient concept of mimesis by linking it to our taking
pleasure in beauty. Drawing on John Locke and Voltaire, he thought
that our knowledge of beauty has its origins in taking pleasure in the
experience of nature, and that the fine arts could be defined as the
faithful imitation of the beauty of nature. Thus the idea of ``art'' as a
whole was bolstered not only by the supposition of a faculty attuned

11. Kristeller, ``The Modern System of the Arts,'' 199.

12. In this section, as well as Kristeller I draw on Gita May and Gary Shapiro,
``French Aesthetics,'' in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, Oxford Art Online,
http ://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t234/e0218 (accessed Janu-
ary 7, 2009).

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 Architecture and the Systems of the Arts 35
to it and nature but also by the idea that divinely created nature was
the cause and end of human creative endeavours. The combination of
the mechanical and the useful was a recent idea. The earlier prejudice
against the mechanical arts is largely a social one, a contrast between
the manual work of the lower classes and the freely manipulated ideas
of the upper classes. Around 1700, however, the Earl of Shaftsbury
developed the distinction of the liberal and mechanical into the mod-
ern idea of disinterestedness.13 Just as true virtue was conducted with-
out expectation of a reward, so the fine arts would be conducted with-
out a use or a preconceived product. The ambiguous position into
which these concepts placed architecture remains today. Architecture
is obviously occasioned by use, and fails if it is not useful, yet this
end-point in a product does not govern the architect in the way that
utility rules in the design of pulleys and levers. Although architects
are contracted to build, to a large extent, their horizon, like that of
poets and painters, is a free contemplation of their art and hence
beauty.
The encyclopedists Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert
placed architecture back into the company of painting and sculpture,
which it had enjoyed in the Renaissance. 14 They were impatient of the
denigration of practical knowledge, and mechanics formed a large and
honourable part of the Encyclopedie of 1751-72, which also included sig-
nificant articles on architecture by Diderot's friend Jacques-Franc ois
Blondel. In his crucial article ``Beau'', Diderot mentions architecture
ten times and painting (as a discipline) only three. He argues that Bat-
teux had been unable to define the `beautiful nature' that the fine arts
imitated. His own answer is that beauty is a pleasure we find in order

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).

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36 John Macarthur
among variety, a point he takes from Frances Hutchenson and which
he called the `rapports'. From Pere Andre he takes an opposition of
real to relative beauty, which must surely derive from the earlier idea
of material and customary beauty we find in Claude Perrault.15 Like
Perrault, Diderot supposes that we experience the existence of such
``rapports'' as harmonic proportion in a building without measuring
the ratios of members, and it is in this sense that a building is like
nature, if not an imitation in the strict sense. Diderot suggests there is
a relative beauty by which we judge one building more beautiful than
another, and that this involves a knowledge of architecture, such as
the right proportions of the orders of columns. Diderot does not pro-
pound a system for the arts, unlike d'Alembert, whose ``Discours pre-
liminaire'' to the Encyclopedie contains a Map of the System of Human
Knowledge.
D'Alembert's system takes its primary division from Francis Bacon
and divides knowledge into three kinds of understanding with their
attendant knowledges: Memory and History, Reason and Philosophy,
and Imagination and Poetry. The diagram is confusing as a system of
the arts; in Memory and Reason each knowledge is clearly placed in a
hierarchy under the master terms, whereas in Imagination one straight
line separates the genres and forms of poetry from a ranked set of
music, painting, sculpture, civil architecture, and engraving. One
assumes that these latter arts have access to imagination without being
poetry. Equally interesting is that ``practical architecture'' falls under
the heading of Memory. Practical architecture, along with practical
sculpture, masonry, and tiling, appears under the heading `Uses of
Stone and Plaster', which is one of the arts and crafts of manufacture,
which is a kind of use of nature, and lies under the master heading of
natural history. This is not consistent with the Encyclopedie as a whole.
Blondel, in his article ``Architecture'', divided the topic into civil
architecture, and military and naval architecture, but he only treats the

15. Wolfgang Herrmann, The Theory of Claude Perrault, Studies in Architecture,

vol. 12 (London : A. Zwemmer, 1973) ; Claude Perrault, Abrege des dix livres d 'archit-
tecture de Vitruve (Paris, 1674) ; An Abridgement of the Architecture of Vitruvious (London :
Able Swall & T. Child, 1692) ; Ordonnance des cinq especes de colonnes selon la methode des an-
cien (Paris, 1683) ; Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients
(Santa Monica : The Getty Center, 1993).

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 Architecture and the Systems of the Arts 37
first, which, as he points out, is typically called architecture. He makes
no mention of ``practical architecture'' in that entry, but in another
article, ``School of Architecture'', he describes the curriculum of his
own school, the Ecole des arts, which emphasises site visits, construc-
tional knowledge, and costing, alongside the academic and creative
studies. The idea of a practical architecture, of the accumulation and
dissemination of a common knowledge of materials and their con-
structional properties, is quite like Perrault's division of architectural
beauty into the positive and the arbitrary.16 For Perrault, the positive
beauties are those of materials and their working, whereas everything
the Encyclopedie calls civil architecture would be arbitrary in the sense
of what is customary. One must assume, however, that both aspects
of Diderot's beauty pleasure in sensing the existence of rapports
within a building, and the relative beauty of understanding the rap-
ports between a building, other buildings, and architectural ideas
must both be aspects of Imagination.
Kant admired Diderot's essay on beauty, but his aesthetics con-
tained in the Critique of Judgment surpassed all previous aesthetics in its
rigour. It remains the strongest philosophical form of modern ideas of
aesthetic feelings and practices. Diderot, like all previous thinkers on
the topic, believed that at some level beauty was objective, residing in
beautiful objects. He explicitly repudiates personal taste as the basis of
beauty, saying that although it might seem that beauty exists at the
point where we prefer one object to another, and although personal
tastes vary, this is because we are so habituated to attend to ``rap-
ports'' what British thinkers later called associations that we do
not realise that aesthetic feeling follows a kind of reasoning. Kant
takes the opposite tack and argues that beauty exists in judgments of
taste and is fundamentally subjective: beauty is what we feel, not a
quality of objects. In the ``Analytic of the Beautiful'', Kant gives four
`moments' of his analysis, each describing conditions that are to be sat-
isfied if we are to be sure that our judgement is aesthetic, as opposed

16. On this reading of Perrault see Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Archi-
tects of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1980).

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38 John Macarthur
to an act of reason or a realisation of morality.17 The first condition of
this analytic is that we must have no interest in the actual existence of
the object, only the pleasure it gives us. Kant distinguishes this pure
pleasure from ``agreeableness'', where a desire is satisfied, and from
the pleasure we find in the good, which we ought to find. The second
condition is that when we make the judgement that a tree is beautiful
we imagine that no person should disagree. The judgement of beauty
is thus universal, but it is so without a concept. That is to say there is
no concept of the beauty of trees on which we have prior agreement.
If that were the case, our judgement would be rational, not aesthetic,
as we would be comparing the object to its concept. The third condi-
tion says that we admire in beauty the form of the purposiveness of an
object, but not its purpose. To admire the beauty of a tulip is to ad-
mire the form of its completeness and is distinct from the botanist's
admiration of the flower as a reproductive mechanism. The fourth
`moment' is related to the second: supposing not only that none
should disagree with our judgement but also that all will necessarily
agree with us, giving rise to a ``common sense'' that governs the rela-
tion of sensation to feeling, meaning that beauty is necessarily inter-
subjective.
Fine art for Kant is a kind of human productivity that imitates
God's creativity. It appears to be natural, although we know it is
not.18 Kant still has the older sense of art as making and makers'
knowledge, what we call `craft' in current usage. This is not aesthetic,
however, for the reason of the third moment of the analytic of the
beautiful craft has a purpose. Similarly, Kant rules out of aesthetic
judgement what he calls the ``agreeable arts'', as in entertaining con-
versation, in which we have an interest because it is conducted with
the aim of enjoyment. By contrast, fine-art objects are intrinsically
final, whole in themselves without reference to the use or pleasure they
might entail. Nature is in this, the model of art and superior to it, but
Kant also thinks there are aesthetic ideas that exist only in the fine
arts. 19 Fine art is the result of genius where an artist, by their talent,

17. Kant, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 1-22.

18. Kant, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 45.
19. Kant, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 17, 57.

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 Architecture and the Systems of the Arts 39
goes beyond the established rules of art and thinks newly created aes-
thetic ideas that are equivalent to new conceptual knowledge. 20
Kant's aesthetics and his definitions of fine art remain the definitive
explanation of our uses of beauty and art in the modern world. With
his rigorous subjectivism, however, it is surprising that Kant supposes
he can make a `division of the fine arts' and a `comparative estimate of
the worth of the fine arts'. 21 He is aware of this problem, stating that
his division is a possible scheme and not a definite theory. He also sug-
gests that the best approach to analysing the arts would be to divide
them into the expression of thoughts and intuitions. But this would
be, he writes, `too abstract and less in line with popular conceptions'.
He then gives a discussion of the familiar fine-art disciplines. The first
level of Kant's division is anthropological: word, gesture, and tone
(according to him) being the three armatures of human expression.
These become the arts of speech (poetry and rhetoric), formative art
(painting and plastic art), and `the play of sensation' (music and `the
art of colour'). Architecture is, along with sculpture, a plastic art. Kant
then gives an estimation of the aesthetic worth of the arts, and this is a
gradient across his three categories. Music is the lowest of these
because it is difficult to distinguish between the mere agreeableness of
tones and harmony and the `beautiful play of sensations' that is the
sense of musical form a listener might have. 22 `The art of colour' is
the most obscure, as it is clearly not painting as an art, and nor could
it be decor, which would be merely agreeable. It could be that Kant is
thinking of the experimental colour harpsichords of his time, for
which Georg Philipp Telemann composed in 1739. 23 Kant assumes,
rather than argues, the superiority of poetry over painting, and within
the arts of speech follows the traditional valuation of poetry over rhet-
oric.
Of the formative arts, he prefers painting to the plastic arts. Sculp-
ture and architecture are sensuous truths, as we truly sense them like

20. Kant, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 46-48.

21. Kant, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 51-53.
22. Herman Parret, ``Kant on Music and the Hierarchy of the Arts,'' Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 3 (1998) : 251-64.
23. Joseph Rykwert, The Judicious Eye: Architecture against the Other Arts (London :
Reaktion, 2008), 128.

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40 John Macarthur
objects of nature. By contrast, paintings are sensuous semblances of
that which they represent, and, Kant implies, superior because, not
being objects, they are more easily combined with ideas. The problem
of sculpture is that the truer it is to its idea, the more easily we might
mistake it for a natural object. Kant thus defines architecture and its
aesthetic potential:
[Architecture] is the art of presenting concepts of things which are pos-
sible only through art, and the determining ground of whose form is
not nature but an arbitrary end and of presenting them both with a
view to this purpose and yet, at the same time, with aesthetic finality.
In architecture the chief point is a certain use of the artistic object to
which, as the condition, the aesthetic ideas are limited. 24

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,

24. Kant, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 51.

25. Also see Lucia H. Albers, ``The Perception of Gardening as Art,'' Garden
History 19, no. 2 (1991), 163-74.

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 Architecture and the Systems of the Arts 41
land, and water.' He goes on: `In addition I would place under the
26

head of painting, in the wide sense, the decoration of rooms by means

of hangings, ornamental accessories, and all beautiful furniture the sole
function of which is to be looked at.' In Kant's time, both gardens
and furnishing would have been understood as ornaments to a build-
ing, and elsewhere he is dismissive of parerga, or ornament such as `the
frames of pictures or the drapery on statues, or the colonnades of pala-
ces', which are supplementary to a work.27 Here it seems that a garden
is not an ornament to a building if it is not an added gratification of
the senses, but rather that its design and form are the objects of taste.
It is not clear how furnishing and decor could be understood as the
fine art of painting rather than as ornamental and agreeable arts. Jac-
ques Derrida has pointed out that Kant's aesthetics falls apart at this
point, as his clearest examples of aesthetic finality are decorative, agree-
able, extraneous, and supplementary abstract forms. 28 Kant does
briefly treat the combination of the fine arts, and here the example he
has in mind seems to be musical theatre, which he regards as ultimately
about enjoyment rather than ideas.29 Perhaps a building and its garden
could be thought of as Kant might understand a song, as a combina-
tion of poetry and music, but these familiar combinations of the arts
spoil their potential for thinking aesthetic ideas. Gardens, he writes,
have a `semblance of use', but he does not explain how this differs
from architecture's actual utility. 30 It seems that the productivity of a
garden landscape does not constrain it from shifting into semblance
and evoking aesthetic ideas. The habitability of a building, however,
remains an end point for architecture, meaning that architects must
put concepts ahead of aesthetic ideas.

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.

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42 John Macarthur
What has confused Kant is that picturesque landscape gardening is
the first intermedial art. His acceptance of the tradition of the fine arts
means that he has also accepted a differentiation of media. Although
he does not say that building is the medium of architecture, and
although he fails to differentiate the two media of sculpture (carving
marble and casting bronze), his descriptions of their sensory properties
are based on traditional examples. By contrast, he denies that `grasses,
flowers, shrubs, and trees, and even water, hills, and dales' are the
material of landscape gardening, claiming instead that gardens pro-
duced the `sensuous semblance' of these same materials.31 In short,
landscape gardens take as their medium another art-form: painting,
imitating not nature but art. This differs from the combination of
poetry and music in song, or the contest of the arts in the paragone.
The fuller meaning of the picturesque began with William Gilpin's
project of the 1780s to apply Roger de Piles's rules of painting compo-
sition. 32 In this he married contemporary French art theory to a British
empirical account of subject experience such as that of David Hume's,
Francis Hutcheson's, Joseph Addison's, and Edmund Burke's. Gilpin
had produced a new art practice based on the aesthetic ideas (in Kant's
terms) learned from painting.
Although Schopenhauer elaborated Kant's aesthetics and his system
of the arts, this collective project effectively ended with Georg W. F.
Hegel. Hegel famously reversed the usual thinking by claiming that
the beauty of nature is a conjecture we make from concepts learnt in
art. 33 Art and aesthetic feeling could not be based on nature because
art developed. Thus Hegel's division of art into symbolic, classic, and
romantic modes is also fundamentally historical, proceeding from the
ancient symbolic form to the Romanticism of Hegel's time. The apo-
gees of each of the succeeding periods are architecture, sculpture, and
music. Architecture is the oldest form of art and thus, because it was

31. Kant, Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 51.

32. On Gilpin's project, refer to John Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Dis-
gust and Other Irregularities (London : Routledge, 2007), 20-40.
33. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst oder sthetik. Nach Hegel.
Im Sommer 1826. Mitschrift Friedrich Carl Hermann Victor von Kehler, eds. A. Gethmann-
Siefert & B. Collenberg-Plotnikov (Munich : Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004) ; Introduc-
tory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. B. Bosanquet (London : Penguin, 1993).

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 Architecture and the Systems of the Arts 43
conceived in the world of Pharaohs, was the least capable of artistic
expression in the nineteenth century, in the age of Beethoven. Con-
versely, though, architecture is an important art as it is a continual
reminder of origin. Since Hegel, it has been possible to compare art
and artworks one to the other not only on the basis of their pleasing-
ness or aesthetic ideas but also on whether they progress or retard
the development of human spirit. Thinking like Hegel's, and later
Friedrich Nietzsche's, which was to dominate late-nineteenth-century
thought on art, does not lend itself to the kind of systematising and
diagramming that interests us here.

Anthony Vidler recently remarked on the conceptual anxiety of inter-

disciplinary practice where there is no clear differentiation of architec-
ture from the spatial practices of the visual arts, a concern shared by
contributors to the present volume. He has borrowed a term for this
from Rosalind Krauss: `Following several decades of self-imposed
autonomy, architecture has recently entered a greatly expanded
field.' 34 Vidler's `expanded field' of architecture can be surveyed be-
tween landscape, biological form, programme, and self-referential ar-
chitectural language, and he notes the prevalence of a kind of axio-
matic thinking that makes these terms like opposing poles of a
diagram. Thus what we know of the so-called landscape urbanism de-
rives from its opposition to the biomorphic. The former is about field
conditions, subjects, and perception; the latter, about objects and
form. Landscape urbanism has an affinity with ``programme'', through
which architects like Rem Koolhaas have reasserted what we might
call the ``form of content'', and this is in explicit opposition to the for-
malism in which form is understood in natively architectural terms
(the form of form). 35 Vidler's model is Krauss's article ``Sculpture in
the Expanded Field'' of 1979, in which she used a Greimasian semiotic

34. Anthony Vidler, ``Architecture's Expanded Field,'' in Architecture between Spec-

tacle and Use: Clark Studies in the Visual Arts, ed. Anthony Vidler (Williamstown,
Mass. : Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute ; New Haven : Yale University
Press, 2008), 150.
35. Rem Koolhaas and Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Content (Cologne :
Taschen, 2004).

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44 John Macarthur
square to explain the mutually defining oppositions of architecture,
sculpture, and landscape, and the forces that were changing the con-
cept of site. 36 Krauss's more recent work steps beyond seeing the art
disciplines as mutually defining. 37 She argues that there is only a dif-
ferential specificity of media, which artists produce work by work. In
the broader view, however, we can trace AVoyage on the North Sea back
to ``Passages in Modern Sculpture'', to Krauss's arguments with the
champion of formalist media specificity, Clement Greenberg, and his
``Toward a Newer La ocoon''; 38 to Lessing's original; and to the Ren-
aissance paragone that predates a concept of art.
Vidler's description of the decades of autonomy from which the
field of architecture is now expanding could also be described as a turn
from art to aesthetics. This is to say that the definitions of architecture
that have dominated since the 1970s assume ``the arts'' to be a consor-
tium of autonomous problematics with no underlying aesthetic princi-
ple. The turn that we are observing at the moment makes an assump-
tion that the relation of the arts is not merely contingent but is, rather,
founded on an aesthetic faculty that necessitates the arts and has the
potential to order their interactions, so that, for instance, visual artists
and architects will understand one another and work better together.
To think like this, however, would be to forget the earlier systems of
the arts, the disreputable side of aesthetic theory that wanted to nor-
malise the arts but could not even make a reasonable account of how
architects and landscape gardeners worked. Further, it is to misunder-
stand how much cultural history of the last centuries has been driven
by the instability of an aesthetic account of art. The current fashion
for diagramming all kinds of cultural phenomenon looks like the
eighteenth-century philosophical systems of the arts, but if this
moment is to be productive it will be best to think that such diagrams
are not firm concepts but ``aesthetic ideas''.

36. Rosalind E. Krauss, ``Sculpture in the Expanded Field,'' in The Originality of

the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, ed. Rosalind E. Krauss (Cambridge, Mass. :
MIT Press, 1985), 276-90.
37. Krauss, North Sea.
38. Clement Greenberg, ``Towards a Newer La ocoon,'' Partisan Review 7, no. 4
(1940) : 296-310.

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