Architectural Judgement

Name: Architectural Judgement
Author: Peter Collins
ISBN: 0571094589

by Peter Collins

This is a strange book, but a very interesting one and I think an important one. It’s not widely read compared to other books of his like Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture . This lesser-known work I think reflects a kind of crisis in his own thinking. He’s asking, what is the basis of our actual judgement? How do we make aesthetic judgements about architecture and other kinds of judgements about architecture? It followed from a year he spent on sabbatical at Yale Law School. He was an architectural historian at the University of McGill in Canada, and he went to Yale Law School for a year to take classes and consider legal thought. He felt that perhaps this would be the other profession with a highly developed sense of rational judgement and that by placing legal judgement and architectural judgement in parallel, he could discern the possibility of new principles of architectural judgement. “If architecture cannot resolve its own means of judgement in a more transparent and direct way, then it will find itself in an increasingly difficult position in relationship to public opinion.” Collins is really trying to decipher high modernism of the 1950s and 60s to understand how architecture might be viewed according to criteria other than functionalist. He’s looking at architecture that at that moment is explaining itself, legitimating itself in terms of functionalism and its ability to resolve a given function. In the book, Collins is arguing that we know that there are these other dimensions being considered, like the cost of a building, its structural efficiencies, and also its aesthetic qualities. He wants to know how architecture could begin to have rational qualities or rational principles for those dimensions as well. What he finds is a sense that architecture has experienced a schism between its rational principles, which are to do with function, and its irrational desires, which are to do with the aesthetic. He is also very concerned with the ability of architecture to present its judgments to the public, to be able to defend itself in a sense against public criticism or public judgments. This is also a moment when the critique of modernism is really beginning to emerge in force and people are beginning to describe high modernist buildings in negative terms and resist the introduction of new modernist civic buildings into city fabric. The preservation moment is just beginning around this time, as well. I think that Collins had a sense of anxiety. If architecture cannot resolve its own means of judgement in a more transparent and direct way, then it will find itself in an increasingly difficult position in relation to public opinion. It’s a natural place to look, certainly, because the legal profession announces its terms of judgement as it goes along. Every step of the legal process is an enunciation of a decision, a judgement or rationale, whether it’s the stipulation of a fact or the rendering of a decision. It’s about a kind of transparency of judgement. I think Collins actually found some difficulties in making the parallel, because he sees great differences as well between architectural and legal judgement. The understanding and use of historical precedent are certainly prominent among them. He is very interested in the way law uses precedent, and this is one of the reasons why he enters into law in the first place. He then discovers however that there are differences in legal approaches to history and architectural approaches to history, where law is really concerned with the instrumentality of a precedent. If a precedent is binding—if it still has some pertinence to a contemporary case—then it is still part of the law. If a precedent is not binding, if it does not have pertinence to a contemporary case, then it’s simply called history, and it really doesn’t have any presence any longer in the law. It’s simply an interesting fact from the past. This doesn’t translate for Collins directly to architecture, because he wants to think about how architecture can draw forms forward and use those precedents rationally, to legitimate a certain moment in the present. There, he obviously runs against the enormous functional changes that have occurred in architecture, as opposed to the aesthetic changes, which are maybe not so profound or so pronounced as the more technical aspects. Collins has a similar standpoint to Summerson: that the aesthetic dimension of architecture is really bound up or rooted within a broader social contextual setting, and that the isolated architectural object (or the object that seeks to free itself from any context and present itself as a kind of pure aesthetic object) has, I think in Collins’s view, drawn too much upon a kind of avant-garde art discourse ill-suited to the very different discipline of architecture. I think he would resist the ‘starchitect’ culture on those grounds. “So concrete cannot mean one thing; the concept of concrete unfolds in different ways precisely because it is also an economic instrument.” Even more so, he might resist it on professional as opposed to theoretical grounds. There’s a sense you get from this book that Collins is interested in the architectural professional being a good judge, an honest professional and practitioner not consumed with attracting attention to him or herself, indeed not even with attracting a great deal of attention to the building. Collins is asking for a slightly more restrained practice in a way, a more professional profession. He thinks that these principles, if they could be established, would actually be the basis for solidifying the reasonability of the profession.

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Timothy Hyde

"This is a strange book, but a very interesting one and I think an important one. It’s not widely read compared to other books of his like Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture . This lesser-known work I think reflects a kind of crisis in his own thinking. He’s asking, what is the basis of our actual judgement? How do we make aesthetic judgements about architecture and other kinds of judgements about architecture? It followed from a year he spent on sabbatical at Yale Law School. He was an architectural historian at the University of McGill in Canada, and he went to Yale Law School for a year to take classes and consider legal thought. He felt that perhaps this would be the other profession with a highly developed sense of rational judgement and that by placing legal judgement and architectural judgement in parallel, he could discern the possibility of new principles of architectural judgement. “If architecture cannot resolve its own means of judgement in a more transparent and direct way, then it will find itself in an increasingly difficult position in relationship to public opinion.” Collins is really trying to decipher high modernism of the 1950s and 60s to understand how architecture might be viewed according to criteria other than functionalist. He’s looking at architecture that at that moment is explaining itself, legitimating itself in terms of functionalism and its ability to resolve a given function. In the book, Collins is arguing that we know that there are these other dimensions being considered, like the cost of a building, its structural efficiencies, and also its aesthetic qualities. He wants to know how architecture could begin to have rational qualities or rational principles for those dimensions as well. What he finds is a sense that architecture has experienced a schism between its rational principles, which are to do with function, and its irrational desires, which are to do with the aesthetic. He is also very concerned with the ability of architecture to present its judgments to the public, to be able to defend itself in a sense against public criticism or public judgments. This is also a moment when the critique of modernism is really beginning to emerge in force and people are beginning to describe high modernist buildings in negative terms and resist the introduction of new modernist civic buildings into city fabric. The preservation moment is just beginning around this time, as well. I think that Collins had a sense of anxiety. If architecture cannot resolve its own means of judgement in a more transparent and direct way, then it will find itself in an increasingly difficult position in relation to public opinion. It’s a natural place to look, certainly, because the legal profession announces its terms of judgement as it goes along. Every step of the legal process is an enunciation of a decision, a judgement or rationale, whether it’s the stipulation of a fact or the rendering of a decision. It’s about a kind of transparency of judgement. I think Collins actually found some difficulties in making the parallel, because he sees great differences as well between architectural and legal judgement. The understanding and use of historical precedent are certainly prominent among them. He is very interested in the way law uses precedent, and this is one of the reasons why he enters into law in the first place. He then discovers however that there are differences in legal approaches to history and architectural approaches to history, where law is really concerned with the instrumentality of a precedent. If a precedent is binding—if it still has some pertinence to a contemporary case—then it is still part of the law. If a precedent is not binding, if it does not have pertinence to a contemporary case, then it’s simply called history, and it really doesn’t have any presence any longer in the law. It’s simply an interesting fact from the past. This doesn’t translate for Collins directly to architecture, because he wants to think about how architecture can draw forms forward and use those precedents rationally, to legitimate a certain moment in the present. There, he obviously runs against the enormous functional changes that have occurred in architecture, as opposed to the aesthetic changes, which are maybe not so profound or so pronounced as the more technical aspects. Collins has a similar standpoint to Summerson: that the aesthetic dimension of architecture is really bound up or rooted within a broader social contextual setting, and that the isolated architectural object (or the object that seeks to free itself from any context and present itself as a kind of pure aesthetic object) has, I think in Collins’s view, drawn too much upon a kind of avant-garde art discourse ill-suited to the very different discipline of architecture. I think he would resist the ‘starchitect’ culture on those grounds. “So concrete cannot mean one thing; the concept of concrete unfolds in different ways precisely because it is also an economic instrument.” Even more so, he might resist it on professional as opposed to theoretical grounds. There’s a sense you get from this book that Collins is interested in the architectural professional being a good judge, an honest professional and practitioner not consumed with attracting attention to him or herself, indeed not even with attracting a great deal of attention to the building. Collins is asking for a slightly more restrained practice in a way, a more professional profession. He thinks that these principles, if they could be established, would actually be the basis for solidifying the reasonability of the profession."

Architecture and Aesthetics · fivebooks.com