[MUSIC PLAYING]

K. MICHAEL HAYS: We've begun in a fairly abstract way.

But this is an important first step in our demonstration
that architecture is a mode of knowledge.
When we normally consider architecture, we include its function or program.
We include its materials, and techniques of construction, and its context--
both the physical and the social context--
as well as its formal property or its aesthetics.
And all these are legitimate and necessary considerations
to understand architecture.
Architecture very much is in the world.
Architecture resides in the common-sense world.
But to really focus on architecture as exceeding mere building,
we have to detach a portion of that common-sense world from the rest.
And we need to establish some aesthetic distance from ordinary concerns.
And so we frame our thinking, and we exclude a lot of the common-sense world
as outside that focused frame.
And for just a time, we free architecture from its function,
but we also free ourselves from our own interests, and prejudices,
and expectations about architecture-- its function, its social role,
how it was physically built.
And we did this in our comparison of the Greek temple and the modern white
house.
We separated out even material considerations, considered
the patronage, in order to think of architecture as constructing
its own world within a world.
And the world that it constructs cannot be reduced to mere purpose.
Now, this part of our model of the architectural imagination
borrows from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
In the late 18th century, Kant produced a foundational theory of aesthetics
that we still use today.
For him, our experience and our judgment of beauty--
our aesthetic judgment-- involves, as we've
seen, this resonance between the two cognitive powers of understanding,
on the one hand, and imagination on the other.
But that judgment of beauty does not depend on having a priori determinate
concepts.
It involves more feeling and affect.
And the affects of beauty are particular and subjective.
They are my feelings at this moment,
but, at the same time, they're nevertheless
endowed with a universality.
And the universality is not reducible to the laws of reason.
It's not reducible to the laws of morality, which
are the other two modes of knowledge.
Consideration of aesthetics is necessary as a third mode of knowledge
because the concept-driven fields of pure reason and practical morality
cannot account for all there is of human knowledge.
And of course, this is why Kant is important
if we want to show that architecture is a mode of knowledge,
or if we want to think of architecture as producing
conceptual frames for knowledge.
So we follow Kant in our attempt, then, to isolate examples of the particular
techniques of production-- like making diagrams, like making sketches--
and the particular modes of experience that are characteristic of architecture
and different from other sorts of practices, even other art practices.
For scholars of architecture influenced by Kant, like Panofsky and Wittkower,
whom we've seen, this particular productivity,
this particular architectural experience involves investigations
of geometry and proportion.
It's highly intellectual.
It's self-reflexive and recursive.
And it's very abstract.
In the next module, we want to look in more detail
at an example of Wittkower's practice of this Kant-inspired interpretation
of the project of architecture.