Kant on architecture: beauty, function, and meaningn, and Meaning
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26439/limaq2025.n016.7658Keywords:
architecture, concepts, content, free play, function, imaginationAbstract
There might seem to be a logical contradiction between Kant’s claim that aesthetic experience and judgment are independent of concepts and disinterested, on the one hand, and yet that “adherent beauty” is conditioned by concepts of function and that all fine art expresses aesthetic ideas, on the other. However, Kant’s theory of aesthetic experience as the free play of imagination and understanding resolves any logical tension among these ideas. Rather than a theoretical challenge, balancing the demands of beauty, function, and meaning is the real practical challenge of the arts—especially of architecture as an art.
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References
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