§ 31 Criticism
Now that we have all this in order, we can consider its practical application and test such things empirically in architectural criticism. I hope the attentive reader has already done some preparatory work on the practical implications of all the above for the city and architecture, because there are many such implications, and I have space for only the most cursory treatment.1
The analysis of a building will continue to concern itself with a description of wholes and their working parts as it has always done, but now perhaps explicitly. In this way, you can take the notions of wholeness, partness, working relationships, and team effort as things you can think about systematically, whereby the working relationship shows how everything has a role to play and a function to perform.
Wholes come at all scales. We can look at how the city form as a whole, and the building as a working part. How the building forms a whole and the classic concerns of good architecture, such as routing, access, spatial organisation, orientation, atmosphere, and its working parts. The construction can be seen as a whole, and its details and tectonic expression as working parts; the building’s climate is a whole and its systems as working parts.
If the analysis is accurate and truthful, the beauty of the analysis will have been made apparent. But the beauty or beauties of the building will still need to be measured against virtues, duties, and the consequences of use.
All buildings can be considered beautiful from a certain paradigm or perspective; it sometimes takes a little effort, but it is true. A building, to be liked, only needs to fit with a certain mindset, or feeling, a memory or image, it needs to accord with a set of ideas, left implicit or made explicit. And here I mean fit both in the sense of fitting like a puzzle or like a constructive detail (which is what the original Greek word for Harmonia referred to) and fit in the supposedly more metaphorical sense of being appropriate, showing decorum, the pleasing and harmonious fitting together of form and expectation that results in the judgment of character.
Critique places all these things in relation to all possible stakeholders, in terms of their well-being, purposes, and usage. Beauty-finding is itself not yet productive of the good life, of a flourishing built environment.
That would be my ultimate goal, the thing I would want to measure the effectiveness of every design decision against. A brutalist building may be found beautiful by a modernity-loving creator, their developer, and their city councillor. Still, it may also be found depressing and miserable by the single mother who has to drag their unpromising shopping as well as their three demanding children through it every day, in the incessant rain. The single mother is indeed no doubt capable of polishing their thinking so that they can live in glorious harmony with the architect’s vision, but the effort might be supreme. They might not have the energy or the time; they might have more pressing concerns than harmonising with an architect’s vision.
A writer will not want to deal with analysis and critique as separate chapters but will probably want to braid them into a single narrative, whilst remaining conscious of what they are doing about both. They will aspire to write an accurate and truthful account, laying bare the beauties to be found and opening themselves up to the goodness to be found in the building, the design or whatever they are critiquing. Of course, they must also look for what could be improved. If they find ugliness or badness, they must be prepared to offer an account of that ugliness or badness by making the perspective from whence it comes explicit, just as they must account for any beauties and virtues found, so that their readers can make up their own minds about such things. They must be aware of how things are objectified through analysis and how those same things must be subjectified through critique by placing the stakeholders in any building project at the centre.
Who are the stakeholders of a building, and what is their stake? They must ensure they have answers to these questions and not cast their net too narrowly. An architect’s vision is not more important than the aspirations and desires of someone dwelling or working in a building, is no more important than someone who has to clean the building, no more important than the people living in the neighbourhood of the building, and is no less important than the wider concerns of the environment. At the same time, someone with a vision might be on to something, and the rest might well come round. There must be space for innovation.
We were short-changed by the simplistic objectification of use, purpose and the good in functionalism. Function has an objective aspect, which can be represented by the working relationship that any set of parts has in forming a whole. Still, it also always relates to the subjective and intersubjective aspects of a building in terms of use, purpose, and virtue. It concerns the program and the building’s purpose. Still, it also concerns subjects such as urban friendliness and care or indeed the lack thereof, in a façade that radiates its inexorable presence over public space. Beauty has a function.
Beauty in the form of attractiveness, friendliness, and ease on the eye is a function of flourishing. We should be sympathetic to the notion that not everyone has the time or inclination to find difficult things beautiful.
I would therefore like us to return to the advice of Charles Francis Annesley Voysey:
“Certain qualities may be regarded as essential to all classes of homes,…repose, cheerfulness, simplicity, breadth, warmth, quietness in storm, economy of upkeep, evidence of protection, harmony with surroundings, absence of dark places, evenness of temperature, making the home the frame to its inmates, for rich and poor alike will appreciate these qualities.”2
Amen. And now let’s extend that thinking to all buildings, the whole environment, and all living creatures.
© jacob voorthuis, 2025. 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.
- 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) ↩︎
- CFA Voysey, ‘The English home’, The British architect (27th January 1911), pp.60 & 69-70; paper read at the Design Club on 11th January, also published in the Annual of art work, a supplement to the Art workers’ quarterly (no. 1), pp.19-27 ↩︎