§ 24 “This is not architecture…”

Have you ever heard someone say: “This is not Art, it is Kitsch” or “You can’t call this mess of concrete and steel architecture!”, “This paper doesn’t deserve to be called science!”, I have… often.¹

Thinkers who commit themselves to such and similar statements commit to what in this model would constitute a fallacy, one that could also easily be remedied by the same model.

What I am accusing such people of is that they confuse an analytical understanding of something with a critical understanding of it, or, rather, that they try to do with analysis what one can legitimately do only with critique.

Let me explain. In the examples just given, something special happens, namely that a virtue masquerades as the mechanical working of something. For this reason, I am keen to find a model that keeps alethic and aesthetic judgments of truth and beauty cleanly distinguished from ethical judgments about the good. We saw earlier that it is very hard to keep them separate. But this is exactly why I think it would be useful to do so.

The question is this: do we want to describe things based on how they behave and work, or do we want to describe things in terms of our aspirations for them? Well, the answer is quite clear: it is both.

But do we want to mix them up so that you cannot properly distinguish one from the other? I think not.

In the example sentences I just gave, very different values are conflated; the existence of something is made to depend on its aspirational virtues as determined from a specific point of view.

For instance, architecture is not presented in this way as a whole, with working parts that constitute a process and a product.

Still, it is reserved for processes and products that have passed a qualitative threshold, as determined by someone with a specific perspective on their use and purpose, and on their quality with respect to those uses.

However, the criteria are left implicit (at least in the example sentences). In this way, a building can only be called architecture when it meets the taste of a judging individual. That is very confusing and will cause multiple ‘architectures’ to emerge, only to be denied their status as architecture by others on a whim. Do we want such a situation?

On top of that, it means that processes and products that differ only in the quality some person judges them to have will have to be called something else when they do not meet those criteria. It is sort of like saying that all numbers under five are too small to be called numbers…

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with deriving existence from use or virtue; many things do, like chairs and tables. But it does make things complicated, especially when existence becomes an honorific title given only to things that meet the criteria for good use, such that only good tables, as judged from a particular perspective, often left implicit, deserve to be called tables tout court.

These criteria can only be defined through a subjectifying approach. And that means that I will probably have different criteria from you. And if they are then also left implicit, they merely add to the confusion already latent in everything.

A good table for a tall person is a different kind of table for a short person. What to do? Imagine us busying ourselves the whole time with the question of whether something might be allowed to be called architecture, when all we really want to discuss is whether it is good architecture or bad from some point of view.

The goodness of architecture or indeed any intentional activity is just as discussable as the existence and working of architecture. Still, it has to be done from the perspective of some use or purpose, from which it can then be judged in terms of its virtue as expressed in the words good or bad.

This fallacy, which we might call the objective use-value fallacy, has been most prominently committed by John Ruskin, Nikolaus Pevsner, and Le Corbusier, but also by many, many more.

Here is John Ruskin in his otherwise magisterial Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849):

“It is very necessary in the outset of all inquiry to distinguish carefully between Architecture and Building. To build, literally to confirm, is by common understanding to put together and adjust the several pieces of any edifice or receptacle of a considerable size. Thus we have church building, ship building, and coach building (…) but building does not become architecture merely by the stability of what it erects; and it is no more architecture which raises a church, or which fits it to receive and contain with comfort a required number of persons occupied in certain religious offices, than it is architecture which makes a carriage commodious, or a ship swift. I do not, of course, mean that the word is not often, or even may not be legitimately, applied in such a sense (as we speak of naval architecture); but in that sense architecture ceases to be one of the fine arts, and it is therefore better not to run the risk, by loose nomenclature, of the confusion which would arise, and has often arisen, from extending principles which belong altogether to building, into the sphere of architecture proper. Let us therefore, at once confine the name to that art which, taking up and admitting, as conditions of its working, the necessities, and common uses of the building, impresses on its form certain characters venerable or beautiful, but otherwise unnecessary. Thus, I suppose, no one would call the laws architectural which determine the height of a breastwork or the position of a bastion. But if to the stone facing of that bastion be added an unnecessary feature, as a cable moulding, that is architecture. It would be similarly unreasonable to call battlements or machicolations architectural features, so long as they consist only of an advanced gallery supported on projected masses, with open intervals beneath for offence. But if these projecting masses be carved beneath into round courses, which are useless, and if the headings of the intervals be arched and trefoiled, which is useless, that is Architecture. It may not be always easy to draw the line so sharply, because there are few buildings which have not some pretence or colour of being architectural; neither can there be any architecture which is not based on building, nor any good architecture which is not based on good building; but it is perfectly easy, and very necessary, to keep the ideas distinct, and to understand fully that Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use.”

The logical problems contained in this beautiful, if rather preachy passage have been ignored.

Holders of this untenable standpoint are intransigent: Art has been so ennobled that it is no longer allowed to get its hands dirty.

With that, Ruskin in fact undermined the manifold purpose of art in society. The tradition John Ruskin set out, which is a bad interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, is continued in the Oxford English Dictionary and by Nikolaus Pevsner in the opening sentence of his enormously popular ‘An Outline of European Architecture’ (1943), where he writes:

“A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of Architecture…The term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.”

This appears like a nice distinction until you start to try to think of an example (in philosophy called a counter-factual) in which something has been designed without a view to aesthetic appeal.

You soon realise that there are no such objects. Nothing that has been designed, that has been intentionally made, can be designed or made without a view to aesthetic appeal, because design is intentional action with a view to achieving some future good based on current knowledge with which it has to fit in terms of coherence and consistency. These are aesthetic criteria!

The future good has to accord with some idea held, and that harmony is precisely what all designers look for. If you want to call it something else other than aesthetic appeal, go ahead. But my thinking should be more consistent and rigorous, so I won’t go there.

In ‘Vers une architecture’ (1923 and 1924), Le Corbusier famously wrote:

“L’architecture est le jeu savant, correct et magnifique des volumes assemblés sous la lumière.”

This must surely stand as one of the most attractive definitions of architecture, even though it is unapologetically normative in that it makes the reader focus on light and volume in their design, just as John Ruskin encouraged his readers to fixate on cable mouldings, and just as Pevsner equated aesthetic appeal with grand gestures instead of modest ones.

Definitions are naturally normative; you always select what you consider to be important, because as soon as a definition becomes too lengthy, it might become more objective, but it will also become more cumbersome. Here Le Corbusier continues:

“On met en œuvre de la pierre, du bois, du ciment; on en fait des maisons, des palais; c’est de la construction. L’ingéniosité travaille. Mais tout à coup, vous me prenez au cœur, vous me faites du bien, je suis heureux, je dis: « C’est beau. Voilà l’architecture. L’art est ici.”

Here you can see how the word architecture must be reserved for buildings that move you. Well, that is a tall order and not really very reasonable. Modernity for which Ruskin, Pevsner and Le Corbusier were all partly responsible, whether they like it or not, ennobled art out of existence.Although all definitions, including definitions of architecture, are normatively influential, their word choice works normatively on those who commit to such definitions.

Nevertheless, the existence of something should not be decided on the personal authority of someone’s taste.

A personal perspective on use, virtue and purpose should decide only the quality of that existence, and the workings of things should allow us to determine use, virtue, and purpose, but not existence itself.

As such, analysis objectifies and determines. It describes a concept in terms of its working parts, assigns properties that give it a role in inference, and, in critique, relates that thing to us and our preoccupations, desires, and needs. That is a nice and clear way of tidying up our thinking.

Importantly, defining something based on a quality threshold can quickly become dangerous, discriminatory, and, above all, tiresome.

My dear mother liked to do something like this with the term ‘Hitler’: “Surely that wasn’t a human being”, she would say with indignation. She had high standards with regard to people and human dignity, and those qualities were simply foreign to some beings, and so such beings should not be labelled as human but as monsters.

The deprivation of the right to exist as something, which, without those qualitative standards, would be hard to distinguish from other things like it, expresses that moral indignation in metaphysical terms.

The uses of such flawed analysis, which mixes up ontological existence and virtue, lie in its capricious ability to serve as an instrument of power for controlling human behaviour.

My mother’s attitude to Hitler will not surprise or shock many people. In fact, such conceptual strategies may even look attractive and seductive.

But now turn it around. As soon as whole groups of people are dismissed in such a way, something like racism, sexism, ageism and all the other discriminatory indignities emerge in our thinking. I

n fact, we see in my mother’s conceptual behaviour the mirror image of the conceptual behaviour of Hitler himself, with his reprehensible views on humanity and race.

He, too, denied certain people their humanity because he sought a qualitative threshold for what it means to be human. According to him, some individuals did not meet his standards for what a human should be.

Defining things based on some virtue you have in mind is dangerous and counterproductive; it is better to define by behaviour or by the use and purpose they are given. However, with the latter, you must also be very cautious. Humiliating examples of such a definition are rightly regarded as reprehensible.

Rigorous objective analysis on the basis of behaviour, without that behaviour being related to specific uses or virtues, is valuable precisely because it refuses to allow such tricks and knows how to distinguish semantic/ontological values from the values of virtue organised with reference to specific uses and purposes that pertain to a subject’s accommodation in his environment.

Analysis describes the workings of the parts that make up a whole in terms of cause and effect, an understanding of which comes about from our understanding of the properties of things. Still, it is critique that judges them, effective relative to some purpose.

We can describe how a toaster works without referring to its purpose. We can describe the purpose of the toaster and what it needs to do to do it well without reference to its workings. The one comes from the perspective of the technician mending the toaster; the other comes from the perspective of the person wanting a nice breakfast, knowing how to make one, using a well-functioning toaster, and being at a loss when that toaster fails them.

These bodies of knowledge are bridged by the inventor and designer, who can bring the two parties together. To privilege one above the other makes a nonsense of us all.

Architecture or anything else, for that matter, need not be an honorific title blessed and sanctioned on the basis of someone’s view of use and virtue.

Architecture is a conceptual entity allowing for the discussion and description of a process and its product.

Architecture, as a process and as a product, has its working parts and is itself part of a larger working whole, namely society and the environment.

Architecture, as the product of an activity, is a structured organisation of elements that acquire their meaning in use.

Architecture as a process is the activity by which we seek to accommodate ourselves in our environment intelligently, intelligibly, comfortably, securely, and enjoyably.

Architecture as a product is a proposition (in the form of ‘here this’) that seeks to have that purpose expressed in it.

The activity and its product need to be described analytically in terms of a thing’s working parts to make sense of that working and make explicit its inferential possibilities.

This must be used to build causal competence that can be explored modally, that is, creatively, imaginatively, rationally and empirically. And every design decision must be critically weighed against the using subject and the affected environment so that architecture can become a good, relative to a broad spectrum of good ends.

With that we can distinguish good from bad decisions, good from bad buildings, poor from rich architecture; with this we can distinguish between architecture that shrivels human being and diminishes its environment and architecture that makes both human being and its environment flourish.

© Jacob Voorthuis, 2026. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

1. A slightly older version of this paragraph was first published in Jacob Voorthuis, Theoria, use, intention & design, a philosophical reckoning; Analysis & Critique: Gardening in the metaphysics of the beautiful, the true, and the good, AHT, TU/e (2024) ↩︎