332001). In aesthetic experience, the percipient is not classified
conceptually ‘as something’; instead, it is experienced in its
self-sufficient specificity, its distinctiveness, within the pleni-
tude of its characteristics (Seel 2000). Immanuel Kant defined
beauty as a pleasing quality of perceptual experience that
pleases us without stimulating desire. According to Kant, it
is a subjective judgement. But this subjective judgement is no
solitary affair; it can claim validity for at least some other
individuals.
Continual attempts have been made to determine the for-
mal preconditions for architecture using the criteria of beauty.
Not unlike the way in which Vitruvius sought support for the
concept of venustas (loveliness or beauty) in the characteris-
tics of proportion and order, Leon Battista Alberti grounded
architectural beauty in concinnitas, meaning the correct
number, relationship and arrangement of the members of
the building. From Alberti’s celebrated definition, we learned
that when a building conforms to concinnitas, nothing can
be added to it or taken away from it without destroying the
whole. For Alberti, concinnitas is the essence of natural per-
fection, a totality whose harmonious equilibrium is opposed
by a precarious fragility. While French architectural theory
of the grand siècle located the foundations of architectural
beauty in the rational comprehensibility of a composition, the
functionalist approach demanded a correspondence between
an architectural object’s appearance and its essence. Corre-
spondingly, beauty was held to be ‘the brilliance of truth’ (St
Augustine), and was attained not solely by virtue of a form
expressing function, but only through the manifest perfection
of this expression. Since divergent factors must be continually
united with one another in architecture, its success can be
traced back to the contrast and balance of opposites in a way
analogous to Heraclitus’ παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη (palintropos
harmonië): ‘The unlike is joined together, and from differ-
ences results the most beautiful harmony.’ (Heraclitus 1889,
fragm. 8) The art of fusing antagonistic demands, multiplicity