Architecture

In what follows, four issues in architectural aesthetics will be addressed: architectural design, architectural style, the justification of “optical correction”, and the metaphysics of reconstruction. The first three issues have been selected because they are fundamental, because they bring out some of architecture’s distinctive features, and because they can be expected to be found interesting by philosophers and non-philosophers alike. The fourth issue is less likely to be found interesting outside philosophy, but it is representative of recent discussions in the analytic philosophy of architecture. Those interested in the unselected topics—for example, the ways in which buildings can mean something—are referred to other survey articles and books, in particular, to Scruton (1979), Haldane (1998), Graham (2005), and Winters (2005, 2007).