THE CENTRALITY OF THE AESTHETIC UNDERSTANDING TO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF SPIRIT OF PLACE

This thesis contends that the contemporary city is losing its sense of place. It is losing its sense of place because those who are engaged in constructing it have lost sight of its true nature as an object of the aesthetic understanding; in short, they have stopped practicing civic art. The fragmentation and degradation that result are everywhere apparent. The prevailing attitude amongst architects and urbanists in much of the West remains that appropriateness in urbanism and architecture arises from the solution of problems that are not in themselves aesthetic, such as environmental sustainability, economic necessity and technical and social utility. Whilst these elements and myriad others may all have an individual role to play in generating an architectural and urban design solution, this thesis contends that such considerations can only achieve coherence within the overall context of an essentially aesthetic act of judgement broadly conceived. Such an act of judgement was necessary to the creation of the most cherished urban environments in our tradition. This is reflected both in the built fabric of these exemplary cities and in their artistic representation, for example through the eyes of painters such as Canaletto, who were equal participants in the same conceptual tradition (see Fig. 1). It is therefore only through explicitly restoring the primacy of the role of the aesthetic understanding and the concomitant criterion of beauty in urbanistic and architectural production that we may hope to cure the sickness of the aforementioned attitude of ‘aesthetic consequentialism’ .1 In so doing we will recapture our ability to represent the genius loci of our cities and revive the lost art of settlement.