SEAN KELLER

Illinois Institute of Technology Beauty, Genius, Epigenesis: TheKantian Origins of ContemporaryArchitecture

This essay explores parallels between computationally based architecture—here represented by thework of Greg Lynn—and three major themes in the aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant: aestheticvalue (beauty), artistic generation (genius), and natural generation (epigenesis). Further, it interpretsarchitecture’s place within Kant’s aesthetics as antinomic—that is to say, inexorably contradictory—and suggests that this interpretation offers a theoretical basis for the entanglement of computationalmethods with typological concerns.

Until recently, the architectural provocateur GregLynn was working on a project—punningly called theSlavin House—for his own family, including his wife,the architectural historian, and critic Sylvia Lavin(Figures 1 and 2). Given Lynn’s prior work as atheorist of, and speculator in, computational formgeneration, what is most surprising and significantabout this house is the extent to which it lookssomething like a house—the extent to which itengages and distorts a recognizable historical type:Le Corbusier’s Maison Domino.This is all the moresurprising because Lynn’s first publication,‘‘Multiplicitous and Inorganic Bodies,’’ was anargument for thinking outside of the typologicallineage represented by Le Corbusier’s villas.1 Whencontrasted with the alien and hermetical detachmentof Lynn’s earlier Embryological House project, theincorporation of a known type (arguably thefundamental type of the modernist house), withinthe design process for the Slavin House, represents acrucial shift in his approach.

And not only his approach. As has been truethroughout his career, Lynn here has given shape tobroader disciplinary tendencies. At the moment,these tendencies are leading to a noticeabletransition from a first generation of computationalarchitecture, defined largely by techno-euphoriaand otherworldly forms that were virtual in theshallowest sense, to a more mature position thataccepts computational approaches as a given and istherefore able to return to an engagement with

worldly concerns such as materiality, inhabitation,and history.2 It is therefore an opportune momentto attempt an interpretation of computationalarchitecture thus far and of the recent shiftrepresented by a project such as the Slavin House.

Over the last decade, the field of architecturehas witnessed an eruption of projects—mostunbuilt—that use computation to generate forms ofpseudo-natural complexity. Blossomed like coralfrom the sleek hull of neo-minimalism and thetwisted superstructure of deconstructivism, thiswork has been accompanied by a renewed interestin organicism, ornament, pattern-making, and thecurvilinear. Under a variety of labels—algorithmic,parametric, genetic, nonlinear, nonstandard,intricate, animate, blob—the most significantexamples of this work disrupt the core presumptionsof architecture, altering both the architect’sauthorial role and the conventional understandingof a ‘‘design’’ as a singular and static referent.Distinct from the now universal employment ofcomputers to represent and realize a project firstdesigned by traditional means—for example FrankGehry’s method of digitizing his demonstrativelyhandmade sketches and models—trulycomputational architecture explores the possibilitiesof generating forms, of originating architecture, byquasi-automatic methods.

Fifty years in the making, the full arrival ofcomputational methods for generating architecturalform has overturned the long-established convention

by which the discipline—despite manyrevolutions—identified itself, that is, architecture asdrawing-toward-building.3 On their arrival in firmsduring the 1970s, computer-aided drafting systemswere typically used simply as digital drawing boards,offering a more efficient way to produce the sametypes of drawings (primarily construction documents)that had previously been made by hand.Yet, even inits primitive state, the representation of architectureby computer held greater implications—implicationsinherent to the system of representation. Whereas inphysical drawing a static material ground receivesmarks of nearly equal stability, in a digitalrepresentation, the ‘‘ground’’—if that term has anymeaning—is fundamentally a continuously loopingand reactive cycle of algorithms invisibly hummingbehind (or beneath or beside) a graphic display,which offers a limited window onto this activity.Thus,the shift from material to digital representationinherently has entailed the activation of therepresentation, so that stability becomes, not thebase condition, but a highly artificial construction—aform of suspended animation. Material outputs, suchas prints or models or even a building itself, are nowmomentary impressions—life-masks—of the ever-variable computational model (and in advancedbuilding practices, computational models have evendisplaced paper documents as the legal objects ofrecord).

A series of consequences flow from thedynamism—one could nearly say vitalism—of

Journal of Architectural Education, Beauty, Genius, Epigenesis 42pp. 42–51 ª 2012 ACSA

computer-based representation. To anunprecedented extent, it becomes natural (or,better, ‘‘second-nature’’) to think of design as theprocess of designing a process—and to think ofarchitectural form as the product of a sequence ofsemi-automatic transformations. This emphasis onprocess means that the aesthetic project ofcontemporary architecture resembles that ofminimalism in painting and sculpture, with a similarinterest in creation through series rather thanthrough intuitive gestures. This anachronism ispartly explained by the global control of a projectoffered by parametric modeling—which finally givesthe architect the simultaneous command of partand whole that abstraction had offered to paintingand sculpture decades earlier. In this sense, we cansay that contemporary architecture is for the first

time dealing with the issues of postwar abstraction(rather than a reiteration of Cubism orConstructivism).4 The capacity to embed ever-morecomplex automated processes within architecture’srepresentational system is unprecedented and liesbehind the range of pseudo-natural forms that havebecome the face of advanced computational work.

Confronted with the rapid expansion ofarchitectural computation, by its highly technicalmeans of production, and by its equally specializedvocabulary, it has been all too easy to see only itsnovelty. We have been encouraged to believe that arevolution has occurred (even if an apolitical one)and that the forms created by computationalmethods are technologically, formally, andconceptually severed from architecture’s past. Yet,while computation has undeniably disrupted the

conventions established during the long period ofdrawing’s centrality, the emerging conventions arethemselves not entirely novel. Rather, it is preciselythrough its supposed naturalism and detachmentfrom history that this work is bound to the historicalprecedent of Kantian aesthetics. The developmentof responsive, animate design environments has ledcomputational architecture to an unwittingreanimation of late Enlightenment ideas about therelationships between design, nature, authorship,and aesthetic value. Historiographically, this revivalof Kantian aesthetics is uncanny: it is unconscious,apparently automatic, strangely precise, and yet notidentical. The forms and rhetoric of computationalarchitecture call us to look newly at Kant’saesthetics and architecture’s strange place therein.

The Kantian Split: Free and AdherentBeautyOf the many difficulties that constitute Kant’sdeeply—that is, thoroughly andnecessarily—difficult Critique of Judgment, one ofthe strangest is his momentary sundering of beautyinto unequal parts: free beauty (freie Schönheit,pulchritudo vaga), and adherent beauty(anhängende Schönheit, pulchritudo adhaerens).The rupturing of this central aesthetic concept fitsuneasily within the Critique—Kant himself seemscaught off guard when he introduces it in sectionsixteen (‘‘A Judgment of Taste by Which We Declarean Object Beautiful under the Condition of aDeterminate Concept Is Not Pure’’) and,confoundingly, never again uses the newterminology or further discusses the issue.5 (Thisodd division also occupied Jacques Derrida in his‘‘Parergon’’ essay—incidentally the best place tobegin to explore the implications of Derrida’sthinking for architecture.6)

To summarize the split: The beauty that Kantcalls free arises in a judgment of taste that ‘‘doesnot presuppose a concept of what the object is[meant] to be.’’7 Yet, free beauty cannot be simplyformless—the play of imagination and

2. Greg Lynn, Slavin House, north elevation, Venice, CA, 2005-10. (Courtesy of Greg Lynn.)

1. Greg Lynn, Slavin House, model, Venice, CA, 2005-10. (Courtesy of Greg Lynn.)

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understanding must be instigated by thesuggestion of a concept or purpose in the objectbeing judged. This is the precarious state capturedby Kant’s famous formulation Zweckmäßigkeitohne Zweck [purposiveness without purpose]. Freebeauties must seem to represent something,suggest a concept, or tend toward an end, but thistendency equally must be interrupted, cut off,

unfulfilled. As Derrida puts it, free beautiesembody a relation of nonrelation toward an end.8

In contrast, adherent beauty is determined by aconcept of its end, by a purpose. Confronted withan example of adherent beauty, the imaginationand understanding are not able to engage inirresolvable free play but are guided by theconcept of the object’s purpose, which determinesjudgment of the object.

It is immediately apparent that this subdivisionof beauty is highly biased, because only free beautycorresponds to the descriptions Kant giveselsewhere in the text. (The preference for freebeauty is even hinted at by the ornamental flourishthat appears on the frontispiece of the book’s firstedition—the only image in a volume largely aboutappearances [Figure 3].) In fact, according to thevast majority of the text, it is difficult to understandhow adherent beauty is beauty at all. Logically, thesplit does not hold, because it amounts to sayingthat there are two kinds of beauty—beauty andnonbeauty—creating a problem for any reader ofthe third critique:

After he has told us so insistently thatjudgments of beauty are determined by feelingand not by concepts, can he really be sayingnow that there is another kind of beautywhose recognition requires not feeling butconcepts? If so, it is a remarkable volte-faceand to all appearances a purposeless one, for itis obscure what Kant would want to say thetwo forms of beauty have in common to justifythe common label.9

However, Kant was led to this ‘‘purposeless’’convolution of the purposeless by something otherthan logic. Section sixteen is one of the few placesin the discussion of the beautiful where he providesa range of concrete examples, and, as Derrida hasnoted, ‘‘the examples put forward by Kant have far-reaching implications.’’10 The troublesome cases canbe compiled into two sets:

Free BeautiesFlowers; many birds, including parrots,hummingbirds, and birds of paradise; many types ofcrustacean; designs à la grecque; foliated borders;wallpaper; musical fantasias; instrumental music;curlicues; and tattoos.

Adherent BeautiesHumans; horses; and buildings, for examplechurches, palaces, armories and summerhouses.

It is an odd way of sorting the world and onethat poses real difficulties for Kant’s theory, but insome form, this division (if not these veryexamples) has shaped the entire field of aestheticsdown to our present (the ready-made, for instance,is an object smuggled between categories, fromadherent to free beauty). Kant’s struggle to offerconcrete examples of free beauty exposes thedifficulty created by his formulation ofZweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck. Any instance of freebeauty must hover just at the point of conceptualcontainment, without ever being fully graspable,and this turns out to be a narrow, if notimpossible, category.

‘‘Many birds’’ and ‘‘a lot of crustaceans’’ arefree beauties, but not all, and some animal speciesare excluded entirely (horses, for instance). Kant’sremark that ‘‘Flowers are free natural beauties,’’seems definitive, but is immediately qualified:flowers are free beauties for everyone except abotanist, who knows that the purpose of the floweris to serve as the reproductive organ of the plant(Figure 4).11 The dangerous, although unexplored,extension of this reasoning is that merely theknowledge that flowers (and all natural objects)have this sort of purpose—absent specifics—isenough to unduly limit the free play of imaginationand understanding that is essential to free beauty.The very project of the Enlightenment inexorablyreduces the possibility that an object can stimulatethe experience sought by the notion ofZweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck. Thus, if we follow

3. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, first edition, frontispiece,

1790.

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Kant—as modern aesthetics often has—inesteeming some form of free beauty as an aestheticcategory, the struggle to achieve purposivenesswithout purpose becomes the central artisticchallenge (substituting the more recent term‘‘autonomy’’ makes this point clear).

In the case of man-made objects, only certainforms of ornament qualify as free beauties: designsà la grecque, foliated borders, wallpaper, curlicues,and tattoos (Figure 5). At first, this seems toprovide a narrow, but definite, space for man-madefree beauty. However, when Kant turns toarchitecture, the space he has set aside for freebeauty unintentionally collapses. We discover that,as adherent beauties, buildings themselves arerestrained by concepts of purpose and therefore‘‘[m]uch that would be liked directly in intuitioncould be added to a building, if only the buildingwere not to be a church [for example].’’12 And notjust churches: while acknowledging the immediateattractions of ornament, Kant goes on to explicitlyexclude it from palaces, armories, andsummerhouses as well. (This last example has the

widest implications. Prior to ‘‘summerhouse,’’ wemight still have preserved some space for freebeauty apart from buildings with obvious public

functions; but if one cannot escape purpose even ata summerhouse, then where can one go?) Foliatedornament might be an example of free beauty, but

4. Carl Friedrich Dieterich, Verschiedene Arten der Blumenkrone.

(Anfangsgründe der Pflanzenkenntniss, 1785, plate 9.)

5. Hearth in the audience chamber of the Königsberg Palace. (Adolf Boetticher, Die Bau- und Kunstdenkmäler in Königsberg, 1897, figure 55.)

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no building, dominated by a concept of purpose,could admit such adornment. The depth of theparadox Kant has constructed is eloquently revealedby his terminology: all of his examples of man-madefree beauty (freie Schönheit) are literally adhered(anhängen) to buildings that themselves areexamples of adherent beauty (anhängendeSchönheit) although they are free-standing. ForKant free beauties must be adhered, and onlyadherent beauties can stand free.

Mathematical BeautyI raise the troublesome issue of free beauty becausemuch recent architecture concerned withcomputation has been engaged with just the sort ofintricate pseudo-natural forms that Kant describesas free beauties. In place of the self-consciousartifice of Postmodernism or Deconstructivism,computational architecture has typically presenteditself as an imitation of nature, free from historicalor cultural contexts. Speaking about his work, Lynn,for example, has said that ‘‘what’s interesting aboutarchitects is we always have tried to justify beautyby looking to nature’’ and that ‘‘arguably beautifularchitecture has always been looking at nature.’’13

However true this might be, what is characteristic ofcontemporary architects like Lynn is that they justifybeauty by looking to nature through computation,through simulation.

One characteristic of this simulated nature iscaptured by the term intricacy, which Lynn used asthe title of an exhibition he organized in 2003 andwhich hovers over much of his and othercomputational work:

[I]ntricacy connotes a new model ofconnectionism composed of extremely smallscale and incredibly diverse elements. Intricacy isthe fusion of disparate elements into continuity,the becoming whole of components that retaintheir status as pieces in a larger composition....Detail is everywhere, ubiquitously distributedand continuously variegated...14

Through the use of parametric models,computation allows all of the elements of a designto be interlinked, so that a change to any element,at any scale, ripples through the entire model, as inLynn’s scheme for the Kleiburg Block, where ‘‘tensof billions of calculations’’ determine eachcomponent (Figure 6).15

This interest in total interconnectedness echoesquite exactly the quality of nature that Kant arguedart should imitate. As John Zammito hassummarized it:

The ‘‘exactness’’ Kant prescribes for art is notthat of conformity to mechanical canons of

correctness, but rather the parallel it shows tothe inevitability and ease of natural order....That is the other side of the analogy of art andnature: it is not just in its lack of constraint butin its precision, indeed, effortless precision,that art must seem natural.16

Today, this ‘‘effortless precision’’ is achievedthrough computation—a development that hasseveral consequences.

One aesthetic novelty of computationalarchitecture lies in its combination of thequalitative, formal, pleasure of the Kantianbeautiful with the quantitative aspect that Kantascribes to the sublime. We visually trace thecomplex forms of this new architecture in themanner of the rococo patterns and ornamentalcreatures that Kant offered as exemplars of thebeautiful, but simultaneously we know that theyare determined by loops of code, by algorithms,and ultimately by an inconceivable number of flipsof binary switches. Within Kant’s framework, thisamassing of innumerable simple elements to createan overwhelming effect is not part of beauty butinstead belongs to the realm of the mathematicalsublime. For example, Kant tells us that thesublime effect of an Egyptian pyramid comes notfrom its sheer size, but from our inability tocomprehend the great number of blocks fromwhich it is constructed—an inability best provokedby middle-distance viewing. Yet, while for Kant theperception of a vast quantity could only bestimulated by an equally vast assembly of physicalelements, computational architecture opens up thepossibility of intuiting an uncountable quantity ofoperations within even a modestly sized object. Theintricate structures of computational architecturealso encourage the same middle-distance viewing,the same perceptual oscillation between part andwhole. Their effect, although, is quite different:they offer not the overwhelming, negative pleasureof the sublime, but the playful, positive delight ofthe beautiful. We must then devise a new, hybrid

6. Greg Lynn, Kleiburg Housing Project, Bijlmermeer, Netherlands, 2006. (Courtesy of Greg Lynn.)

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term to describe their effect: ‘‘mathematicalbeauty.’’

The Genius of AlgorithmsKant’s discussion of aesthetic judgment comprisesonly the first part of the Critique of Judgment, thesecond being devoted to teleologicaljudgment—that is, judgments about nature. Whiledivided in Kant’s presentation, the two forms ofjudgment are, conceptually, inseparable—PaulGuyer has described the structure of the thirdCritique as ‘‘a pair of motors working intandem’’—and it is works of art that best reveal thecoupling of aesthetics and teleology.17 If, for Kant,works of art are defined by the precariousexperience of Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck, theexemplar of this state is nature itself. However,Kant’s is not an aesthetics of simple mimesis—artimitating nature—for we find that he believes thatit is essential that when judging nature we think ofit as if it were the product of man, as if it wereartificial. Or, as Kant famously puts it: ‘‘Nature, wesay is beautiful [schön] if it also looks like art; andart can be called fine [schön] art only if we areconscious that it is art while yet it looks to us likenature.’’18 Within Kant’s theory, there is a specialpower that is summoned to perform the feat ofcreating works of art that appear natural: genius.Genius enables the great artist to create works thatdo not literally imitate nature, but that nonethelesspossess the complexity and unity of natural entities.

In contemporary design, the algorithm hastaken on precisely this role. Although the rules ofcreation, as stated in computational code, are moreprecise than ever before, the exact relationshipbetween these rules and the final form is ofteninaccessible—both to a viewer and, to great extent,even to the designer. Thus the use of algorithms inthe design process produces a new solution to thedilemma presented by Kant’s demand that abeautiful form stimulate a search for a determiningconcept, but without ever allowing itself to becaptured by that concept. With computational

design, the concept determining the form isconcealed—literally encoded—so that, standingbefore one of these forms, we are left in preciselythat searching state described by Kant as theexperience of beauty. Moreover, with these newmeans of production, we stand at least partiallysecure from the threats to purposiveness withoutpurpose described in section sixteen. We nowconfront a form of the beautiful that is neithernatural itself nor directly mimetic of nature, so thatthe insidious question of the form’s natural purposedoes not arise. Likewise, the question of the artist’spurpose, which haunts Kant’s theory, is avoided, atleast in part, because the artist is only indirectlyresponsible for the final form. The new technologydistances the designer not just from materialfabrication, but from the delineation of the designitself. The algorithmic generation of formsimultaneously seems to remove the artist’s handand to create forms that, in their intricacy, mimicthose of nature. In short, the algorithm becomesthe genius behind contemporary design.

Yet, while Kant relies on a humanistic notion ofgenius to establish a connection between thenatural and the artificial, he does so withcharacteristic circumspection, always insisting thatwe judge nature as if it were artificial, and art as ifit were nature. He does not ultimately collapse thedistinction between the two spheres. In contrast,computational architecture often works in theopposite direction—naturalizing the artificial ratherthan humanizing nature—and via this naturalizationoften willfully, or negligently, collapses thedistinction between the two. (This suggests thatthere is more than a formal resemblance betweenmuch computational architecture and thetranscendentalism of an earlier figure such as LouisSullivan.) Further, as Zammito has taken pains topoint out, Kant’s theory does not surrender artisticproduction to genius, but puts genius in its place:as nature working through the artist, geniusfurnishes the material of art, but this must be givenform by training and reason.19 With regard to the

role of computation, Lynn has held a similar view,suggesting that

Instead of approaching the computer as...nature, the computer might be considered as apet.... Just as a pet introduces an element ofwildness to our domestic habits that must becontrolled and disciplined, the computer bringsboth a degree of discipline and unanticipatedbehavior to the design process.20

How this model—suggested by both Kant andLynn—of artworks produced through the taming ofnature squares with Kant’s conceptualization ofbeauty is a question I will have to suspend until myconclusion.

Computational EpigenesisIf genius is the concept that Kant uses to explaincreation in the realm of art, he deploys the parallel,and etymologically paired, concept of epigenesis todescribe creation in the realm of nature. Originatingwith Aristotle and revived in the eighteenth century,epigenesis was one response to the challenge ofreconciling mechanistic Newtonian science withbiological development. As Kant describes thedilemma in the Critique of Judgment:

an organized being is not a mere machine. Fora machine has only motive force. But anorganized being has within it formative force,and a formative force that this being impartsto the kinds of matter that lack it (therebyorganizing them). This force is therefore aformative force that propagates itself—a forcethat a mere ability [of one thing] to move[another] (i.e., a mechanism) cannot explain.21

Epigenesis became the key to Kant’s latethinking on this theme, and his conception ofepigenesis was highly complex, especially inrelationship to his prior advocacy ofpreformationism. On the one hand, as noted,

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epigenesis was intended to reconcile a clockworkphysics with the immense differentiation producedby the self-generating and self-regulating systemsof the organic world. Yet, simultaneously, Kantrelied on epigenesis to preserve a qualitativedistinction between the organic and inorganicrealms, between living beings and merematter—what Zammito describes as Kant’sconsistent rejection of hylozoism.22 By the timeof the third Critique in 1790, Kant had reconciledthese opposed goals through a conception ofepigenesis as an emergent vital materialismguided by ‘‘internally purposive predispositionsthat were imparted to its stock,’’ or what hecalled ‘‘generic preformation.’’23 Kant was able togrant epigenesis a leading role only by mergingwithin this concept both the idea of self-generation and the caveat that this generationoccurred within the boundaries of fixed types(i.e., Kant’s epigenesis was not a mechanism ofcontinuous random variation, as in Darwiniandifferentiation).

Faced with the pseudo-spontaneous generationpossible within computational environments,architects have turned to genetic metaphors thattake up the issues of guided, or constrained,generation that occupied Kant and hiscontemporaries. Precisely, echoing Kant’s concept ofepigenesis is Lynn’s description of his‘‘Embryological House’’ (Figures 7 and 8):

The Embryological House was my first attemptto define the design task as neither an idealvilla with variations nor a random variety ofaccidental houses, but a coherent family ofhouses, none of which was more commodious,functional, or delightful than any other....

To begin such a design agenda, the first task isneither the design of an origin (Wittkover andRowe) nor the design of random constraintsand mutations (Charles Darwin) but the designof a generic primitive. The term ‘‘generic’’ wasfirst coined in conjunction with the term

‘‘genetic’’ by the nineteenth-century biologistWilliam Bateson. Generic information was thatwhich was yet to be specified; geneticinformation was the specifications. Both werenecessary to explain the unfolding of an adultorganism in its environment from a simplespheroid (like an egg) towards progressivelycomplex adult form.24

Obviously, the contemporary epigenetic turn isdriven not by nature directly, but by computationalenvironments that simulate natural complexity. Inpart, this explains the recurrence of this and otherKantian concepts: the issues raised wheneighteenth-century aesthetics confronted naturenow return as we confront the second nature ofcomputational models. This is a distinction thatshould be maintained, because it is one thing toface, as Kant did, the radical alterity of nature andanother to face mathematical models simulating thisalterity. At an earlier moment, Lynn himself raisedjust this issue:

There are a number of misconceptions aboutthe role of computers in the design process....The genetic, or rule-based, phenomenon ofcomputation should not be discounted. Yet, atthe same time, genetic processes should notbe equated with either intelligence or nature....the computer is not nature. Although it makesshapes that are temporally and formally opento deformation and inflection, those shapes arenot organic.25

Yet, as Lynn’s description of the EmbryologicalHouse shows, architects have often failed toexercise such caution. There has been a strongtendency in the rhetoric surrounding computationalarchitecture to take epigenesis—now understood asthe self-forming potential of computer models—asa literal, rather than metaphorical force. This standsin contrast to Kant’s use—as Helmut Müller-Seviershas observed, ‘‘for Kant epigenesis is nothing more,

7. Greg Lynn, Embryologic House, deformations of ‘‘generic primitive’’ closed spline curve, 1998-9. (Courtesy of Greg Lynn.)

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but also nothing less, than an analogy.’’26 By oftenspeaking as if computational code was in fact self-generative, boosters of computational architecturehave traded Kant’s description of our uncertainrelationship to an alien nature for the faux alterityof simulations of their own devising.

The Antinomic Beauty of ArchitectureIf Kant’s aesthetic theory can provide importantinsights into the theoretic presumptions ofcomputational architecture, can it also help usassess this work—judge it? In order to pursue thisquestion, we need to return to Kant’s troublesomesubdivision of beauty into the two modes of freeand adherent, and to architecture’s place within thisdivided concept. Given the strange logic of thedivision, and its restriction to one section of thetext, it may be tempting to dismiss it merely as anintellectual fragment lodged within Kant’s theoryproper. Against this, I would argue that the verypeculiarity of section sixteen is evidence that itshould not be neglected: some serious issue musthave prompted Kant’s messy and incompletesubdivision of his optimal example of judgment(beauty, that is). As his examples demonstrate, theissue of conceptual determination in aestheticjudgment cannot be avoided, and, in fact,resurfaces, albeit without the terminology of freeand adherent, when Kant comes to a fullerdiscussion of art (§43-54). To think about the

implications of the Critique, especially forarchitecture, requires confronting, not avoiding, thedifficulties raised by section sixteen. (In contrast,the best-known consideration of architecture viaKant, that of Roger Scruton, only characterizesKant’s treatment of architecture as ‘‘odd,’’ beforequickly shifted focus to Kant’s ethics, therebyavoiding what he actually says aboutarchitecture.)27

Taking Kant’s division of beauty seriously leavesus with a deeply conflicted theory, so that divergentreadings are possible. In relation to architecture,one distillation of the ambiguity—the historicallydominant one—focuses on Kant’s exclusion ofarchitecture from the category of free beauty.According to this interpretation, the application ofthe tropes of genius and epigenesis to architectureis highly suspect, as is the presence in architectureof pseudo-natural forms of free beauty. The best-known version of this thinking is Adolph Loos’sexclusion of all useful buildings from the sphere ofart and his accompanying indictment of ornament(which recalls quite precisely Kant’s remark abouttattooed warriors). Before dismissing Loos as overlymoralizing, we should recall that his primary targetwas the Secession’s suffocating ideology of theGesamtkunstwerk, which he hoped to puncture inorder to open a space for the heterogeneity ofeveryday life and its actors. It is an argument HalFoster has applied to contemporary design, and

with which I agree in so far as the totalizing,hermetic, and naturalizing tendencies present withincomputational design ought to be resisted.28

By returning to Kant, I have attempted tooutline some of the deeper underpinnings of thischarge. The split between free and adherent beautyis surely convoluted, but it reflects anuncompromising struggle to maintain a distinctionbetween the cultural and the natural. In place ofKant’s precarious concept of purposiveness withoutpurpose, computational architecture has too oftenoffered only a mathematicized and totalizingextension of the purposelessness of nature, whichignores architecture’s inescapably cultural situation.To pursue further this Loosian reading ofarchitecture’s place within a Kantian frameworkwould entail taking seriously the mode of beautythat Kant largely neglects: adherent beauty. Itwould also imply limitations on architecturalautonomy and the acknowledgment of a central rolefor a concept of purpose. Essentially, what would berequired is an aesthetics of adherent beauty;but—because free beauty is clearly his preferredmodel of aesthetic experience—Kant himself givesus little to suggest what this theory would looklike.29

One concern about a theory of architecturebased in adherent beauty would be the risk ofdescending into dogmatic functionalism—thatzombie ideology of modernism, which another form

8. Greg Lynn, Embryologic House, six members of the ‘‘family’’ of possible houses, 1998–9. (Courtesy of Greg Lynn.)

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of architectural computing, has revived yet again inthe guise of Building Information Modeling and itsrhetoric of efficiency. However, Kant’s ownpresentation of purpose suggests that this need notbe the case. In fact, he introduces the concept ofpurpose, as end or causa finalis, exactly inopposition to deterministic causality. Thisunderstanding of purpose is reflected, althoughunexplained, in his description of architecture,where purpose is given a typological, not functional,determination: ornament is banned from Kant’sarchitectural examples not because it wouldinterfere with their literal functioning, but because itis inappropriate to what they are as types. Loos’sthinking reflected this attitude precisely: theSecessionists were repellent because they attemptedto treat buildings (and furniture and clothing) assomething other than what they were.

Still, there are those freely beautifulcurlicues—and their digital descendents—toconsider (Figures 9 and 10). If, as I have argued, atendency toward simulated vitalism, epigenesis, andpseudo-natural complexity is inherent tocomputational representation, then any theory ofcontemporary practice cannot simply deny thistendency. Moreover, the intricate forms of

computational work also have an importantrepresentational role, serving as signs of the culturewithin which architecture is made. Assessing theearliest presence of computation in architecture,Alan Colquhoun made a similar point, concludinghis famous 1967 defense of typology with theconcession that, nonetheless, ‘‘mathematicaltools.... provide the context within which weoperate.’’30 So although a Loosian emphasis onadherent beauty and the accompanying notion oftypologically defined purpose is needed as acorrective to computational architecture, we mustalso take seriously Kant’s attempt to presentarchitectural examples of free beauty, howeverdifficult. Therefore, rather than seeing the troubleddivision of beauty into free and adherent varietiesas a contradiction that must somehow be solved byfavoring one term over the other, I propose that wereread it as an example of that other,characteristically Kantian, type of conflict: that is, asan antinomy.

Which is to suggest that the conflictingimplications of free beauty and adherent beautycannot in principle be resolved. Instead, as anantinomy, it is their conflict itself that defines thespace of beauty, of aesthetic value, for architecture.Rather than reading free beauty as preferred andadherent beauty as compromised, we shouldunderstand architectural beauty as an antinomicconcept. I believe this reading is supported by thevery entanglement of the arguments that Kantpresents about beauty, art, and nature and by theconcept of Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck itself.(What I am describing as the antinomy of beautyalso parallels the third antinomy of purereason—which concerns the irresolvablecontradiction between mechanical causation andfree will—as well as the teleological antinomypresented in the second part of the Critique of

Judgment—which deals with mechanical causationand purposes.) The difficulties of free anddependent beauty arise in our culture just as thepractice of architecture becomes open-ended—which is to say that we expect architecturesimultaneously to continually open onto somethingnew, and to remain, somehow, recognizable, andcognizant of itself, as architecture.

More specifically, I want to suggest that forarchitecture, the antinomy of beauty can be definedby the tension between autonomy and typology.Thus far computational architecture has largelyavoided this complexity by disregarding historicaltypologies and postulating an artificially isolated,natural-technical generation. From a Kantian pointof view, the self-assurance of this approach hasbeen only a consequence of its limited horizon,which falsely forecloses what should be theirresolvable, and productive, tension of architecturalthought. In contrast, an architecture of antinomywould construct itself toward this tension, towardthe entanglement of typology and autonomy.Importantly, as an antinomy, this entanglement isinstable and ultimately Romantic and must bedistinguished from a Classical attitude that wouldstrive for a balanced negotiation betweenconflicting pressures (for example, of beauty, use,and economy). It should also be distinguished fromcertain Modernist attitudes that would attempt toground creation in a single source (for example,function, materiality, or structure). Antinomicarchitecture would seek tension rather thanresolution through negotiation or simplification.

Returning at last to Lynn’s unbuilt SlavinHouse, I suggest that this project exemplifies thenotion of an antinomic architecture. The projectdemonstrates a drive toward autonomous form-making precisely through the complex—one mighteven say rococo—curvilinearity that Kant identified

10. Greg Lynn, selection of flatware designed for Alessi, 2006. (Courtesy of Greg Lynn.)

9. Rococo lock, Hospitalkirche, Königsberg. (Adolf Boetticher, Die Bau-

und Kunstdenkmäler in Königsberg, 1897, figure 189.)

Beauty, Genius, Epigenesis 50

with free beauty. Lavin—imagining Lynn’saspirations for their house—writes that here ‘‘therepeated effort to see the thing would make youstronger rather than exhausted’’—a fine renderingof the mental state described by Kant’s formulationof beauty.31 Yet, in contrast to the hermeticisolation of the Embryologic House, the SlavinHouse suggests a shift toward the entanglement ofsuch form-making with a giventypology—specifically, Le Corbusier’s MaisonDomino diagram, the primitive typology ofmodernist house. As such, the Slavin House extendsa historical trajectory running from Colin Rowe’sinterpretation of Le Corbusier through PeterEisenman’s union of that interpretation with thelessons of Giuseppe Terragni.

Looking back at this trajectory, I would furtherargue that both the idea of phenomenaltransparency elaborated by Rowe and RobertSlutsky, as well as Eisenman’s interest in conceptualambiguity were attempts to produce througharchitecture the experience that Kant calls freebeauty. More importantly, both cases entangled aversion of architectural free beauty with atypologically focused conception of architecturebased on Le Corbusier’s Domino diagram. For Roweand Slutzky, Le Corbusier’s interwar villas achievetheir aesthetic interest by placing this type intension with a painterly idea of transparency.32 Inthe case of Eisenman, the concept of antinomicarchitecture allows us to discriminate between hisearly projects—such as House II—in which the driveto autonomy is still in tension with the house as apurposeful type, and later projects in which thepseduo-autonomous processes are fully detachedfrom typological concerns.

In conclusion, I want to suggest that anantinomic architecture that utilized computationaltools to intensify the tension between pseudo-naturalistic freedom and typological purpose would

enact the full complexity of Kant’s aesthetics. Suchan architecture would resist collapsing this antinomyto either singularity: either techno-naturalism orfunctional-conventionalism. Instead, the notion ofantinomic beauty would maintain the difficult ideaof architecture conveyed by Kant’s aesthetic—architecture as the creation of buildings engaginglyat odds with themselves.

AcknowledgmentsI have presented early portions of this text at theUniversity of Chicago Department of Art History,the Princeton University School of Architecture, theStanford University Department of Art and ArtHistory, the Third International Alvar Aalto Meetingon Modern Architecture, and the 2008 Associationof Collegiate Schools of Architecture West CentralConference. I am deeply grateful to the organizersof these events and to the many respondents whooffered their questions and advice. My first (andvery preliminary) writing on this topic was for aHarvard seminar taught by Barbara Johnson. Idedicate this essay to her legacy as an exemplaryteacher and reader.

Notes

1. Greg Lynn, ‘‘Multiplicitous and Inorganic Bodies,’’ Assemblage 19

(1992): 32-49. Lynn returned to the theme of the ‘‘ideal villa’’ (and his

desire to reconfigure that theme) in ‘‘New Variations on the Rowe

Complex,’’ ANY 7 ⁄ 8 (1994): 38-43.

2. One publication devoted to this shift is Tomoko Sakamoto and Albert

Ferré, eds., From Control to Design: Parametric ⁄ Algorithmic Architecture

(Barcelona: Actar, 2008). See especially, the introductory essay ‘‘Never

enough (transform, repeat ad nausea)’’ by Michael Meredith, and the

concluding conversation between Sanford Kwinter and Jason Payne.

3. See Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 2011).

4. On the relationship of contemporary architecture and postwar art, see

my ‘‘Playing the Field: On Computational Architecture and Postwar

Abstraction,’’ Artforum (Summer 2011): 376-81.

5. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 1790, trans. Werner S.

Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), §16, 76–8.

6. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and

Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1987).

7. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §16, 76.

8. Derrida, Truth in Painting, 98.

9. Geoffrey Scarre, ‘‘Kant on Free and Dependent Beauty,’’ British

Journal of Aesthetics 21, no. 4 (Autumn 1981): 353.

10. Derrida, Truth in Painting, 96.

11. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §16, 76.

12. Ibid., 77.

13. Greg Lynn, ‘‘Greg Lynn on Calculus in Architecture,’’ filmed February

2005, TED talk, 18:58, posted January 2009, http://www.ted.com/

talks/lang/en/greg_lynn_on_organic_design.html.

14. Greg Lynn, ‘‘Intricacy,’’ in Intricacy: A Project by Greg Lynn Form

(Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania,

2003).

15. Lynn, ‘‘Greg Lynn on Calculus.’’

16. John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 136.

17. Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1997), xiii.

18. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §46, 174.

19. Zammito, Genesis of Kant’s Critique, 143.

20. Greg Lynn, Animate Form (New York: Princeton Architectural Press,

1999), 19–20.

21. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §65, 253.

22. Zammito, ‘‘Kant Against Eighteenth-Century Hylozoism,’’ Genesis of

Kant’s Critique, 189–213.

23. John H. Zammito, ‘‘’This Inscrutable Principal of an Original

Organization’: Epigenesis and ‘Looseness of Fit’ in Kant’s Philosophy of

Science,’’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 34 (2003): 96.

24. Greg Lynn, ‘‘Families,’’ in Greg Lynn Form (New York: Rizzoli, 2008),

174.

25. Lynn, Animate Form, 19.

26. Helmut Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and

Literature Around 1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 13.

27. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1979), 5.

28. Hal Foster, Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (London: Verso,

2002).

29. Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson have emphasized modern

aesthetics’ general neglect of this theme. See Parsons and Carlson,

Functional Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

30. Alan Colquhoun, ‘‘Typology and Design Method,’’ in Essays in

Architectural Criticism: Modern Architecture and Historical Change

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 50.

31. Sylvia Lavin, ‘‘Freshness,’’ in Greg Lynn Form, 20.

32. Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, ‘‘Transparency: Literal and

Phenomenal,’’ Perspecta 8 (1963): 45–54.

51 KELLER