2024

Aesthetics of Architecture

Name: Aesthetics of Architecture
Code: FIL02550I
3 ECTS
Duration: 15 weeks/78 hours
Scientific Area: Philosophy

Teaching languages: Portuguese
Languages of tutoring support: Portuguese, English
Regime de Frequência: Presencial

Sustainable Development Goals

Learning Goals

- introducing to the field of Aesthetics and Art Theory, in so far as it is contributive to a theory and philosophy of architecture
- problematizing the irreducibility of architecture to the 'aesthetic sphere' and the work of art
- exercising the phenomenological way of considering, grasping its bearing on a broad cultural field and applying it to architecture
- problematizing the questions of space and dwelling, drawing on different coordinates of thinking: ontological, political, poetic, mythical, economic, anthropological
- studying some recent and fundamental culture-critical and philosophic texts, adressing the non-thematic issues in any theory of architecture
- reinterpretating the systematic mutations brought by the vanguards upon the sense of the object, form, color, space, sign, creation, representation, reality, perception, constructive rationality, art/society
- promoting complex, paradoxical, speculative and critical thought

Contents

1. The aesthetic space: the combine ‘dreamed’aesthetic space / ‘real’ architectonic
2. The suspension of ‘factic’ subject and object in the Kantian aesthetic judgement and the Deleuzian ‘percept’
3. Phenomenology: visibility, whole/parts, horizon/perceived thing, vision and body, perception as actively
motor and diferential phenomenon. The Cartesian paradygm vs. Phenomenological explanation of perception
and modern art
4. Saussure’s Linguistics, Matisse’s theory of the pictorial elements as diferential relations, not as positive
terms
5. The intertwinning between architectural thinking and phenomenological philosophy: Zumthor, Pallasmaa,
Cruz-Pinto 6. Anthropological dimensions: poetics and mythics of the space (Bachelard, Eliade)
7. Ontology of dwelling and building: Heidegger / Zumthor
8. The constructive and meaningful parameters in arts
9. Space, city and territory in contemporary culture and experience, and the stances of: Derrida, Lyotard,
Foucault, Deleuze, Virilio

Teaching Methods

Lecturing and oriented debates; ongoing assessments (20%) and a final written exam (80%)