As costly and spectacular art museums have proliferated since the opening of Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim, some critics have complained that âflash and bravura win out over contemplationâŠand architecture triumphs over art.â1 Hal Foster has even declared that museums like Gehry's Bilbao âinflate the contemporary museum into a gigantic spectacleâspace that can swallow any art, let alone any viewer, whole.â2 The problem is not that bold exteriors outshine the art, but that strange curves, odd angles, or enormous heights inside may generate a âspectacleâspaceâ that interferes with our attention to the art.3 For example, a number of the acutely angled gallery walls of Daniel Libeskind's 2006 Denver Art Museum addition slant inward or outward in ways that many people have found intrusive. But other critics have been willing to overlook functional defects in favor of audacious formal qualities, even if not all would go as far as Phillip Johnson's âif the architecture is as good as in Bilbao, fuck the art!â4 These conflicting responses to dramatic art museum architecture seem to reflect two deeper intuitions about architecture in general: it seems only natural to expect aesthetics and function to complement each other in architecture, yet it also seems natural to overlook functional defects when aesthetic qualities are outstanding. In this article, I will suggest a way to reconcile these two intuitions by outlining a perspective I call âmoderate functionalism.â Moderate functionalism tries to avoid the faults of two polar positions on aesthetics and function in contemporary philosophy of architecture. One position, going back to Roger Scruton's Aesthetics of Architecture and recently updated by Edward Winters, accepts the necessity of function in general but denies the aesthetic relevance of particular functions, a position that would justify those who give priority to formal audacity in art museum architecture.5 At the opposite pole, Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson's âfunctional beautyâ proposal would make aesthetic appreciation directly depend on a building satisfying its âproperâ function, a position that would support those who champion the priority of a museum's exhibition functions.6 In what follows, I criticize both the separatist and functional beauty approaches and then show how a moderate functionalist position can unite the intuition of a desirable concord between aesthetics and function and the intuition that spectacular aesthetic achievements may override functional faults. Before beginning a critique of the separatist and functionalist beauty positions, I need to outline some preliminary assumptions. The first is that the aesthetic experience of architecture is not only about the contemplation of visual form, but is also multisensory and immersive, involving the volumes, textures, and sounds that determine how a building feels as we move through it.7 Of course, we do experience many buildings only visually from the outside. In fact, the âspectacleâ art museum controversy has arisen partly from the desire of some museum boards to have an iconic building whose external appearance will draw paying crowds. The importance of such issues as iconicity and symbolism suggests that our concept of aesthetic experience also needs to include a cognitive dimension. The cognitive aspect of aesthetic judgment seems especially appropriate to contemporary art museum architecture, which includes not only sculptural designs (Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Libeskind) but also works influenced by conceptual art (Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio) or deconstruction (Peter Eisenman), whose formal and sensory satisfactions may be less important than the way they embody certain ideas. Like the concept of the aesthetic, the concept of function is not only unsettled but is also inflected by its application to architecture.8 Early modernists sometimes interpreted Louis Sullivan's âform follows functionâ to refer to âstructuralâ function (form should reflect construction), at other times to refer to âpracticalâ function (form should reflect human needs). But architecture theorists have also written of many other architectural functions: urban, environmental, social, ethical, symbolic, even aesthetic.9 The fact that there are many kinds of functions means that aesthetic and practical functions are almost always found intertwined with other functions, among which the symbolic and social are especially important for art museum architecture. Symbolic functions obviously concern architectural meanings, whether understood in terms of âexemplification,ââallusion,â or in some other way.10 Historically, one of the most important symbolic aims of art museum architecture has been to express the value of art itself. In the nineteenth century, this concern gave us those familiar classical temple forms with their grand stairways, spacious reception halls, and sumptuous materials, whereas today's âspectacleâ museums try to send similar messages by means of radical shapes, dramatic massing, acres of glass, and unusual materials. Social functions in architecture concern the way buildings affect such things as our sense of wellâbeing, our sense of place, or the quality of human interactions within them. Arthur Danto has called attention to the way Steven Holl recently designed a stairwell in a faculty office building at New York University to invite chance meetings, thus creating âa remarkable aesthetic experience while solving a sociological problem.â11 When these kinds of social concerns inform specific practical functions in the design of schools, hospitals, or museums, spaces for teaching, healing, or exhibition can be transformed into something far richer than a neutral means to an end.12 This blending of social and practical functions also calls attention to their normative dimension, which has been so effectively described in different ways by Karsten Harries and Yuriko Saito.13 The normative dimension of functions is what makes us ready to criticize an otherwise aesthetically and symbolically exciting building for failing its practical or social purposes or, to criticize an otherwise functionally efficient building, for its sterility and lack of aesthetic vitality. With these general considerations in mind, we are in a better position to examine the separatist view that aesthetic and practical functions should be treated as simply parallel to each other. Roger Scruton and Edward Winters, reacting to extreme versions of âfunctionalism,â have claimed that a building's specific functions are irrelevant to its aesthetic appreciation.14 Scruton goes so far as to declare that the very idea of function is âfundamentally, and perhaps irremediably, obscure,â so that âall we can say ⊠is that buildings have uses.â15 Moreover, both he and Winters believe that even if we could somehow get a clearer concept of function, it would not make any difference since a building's functions are liable to change with time.16 What remains most important for Scruton is âto find meaning in appearance itself,â so that âaesthetic considerations ⊠must take precedence over all other factors.â17 But the separatist approach cannot do justice to the fact that most architectsâ aesthetic choices take into consideration practical and other kinds of functions in the process of design, so that a particular set of functional concerns becomes embodied in architectural form. Major encyclopedic art museums, for example, are likely to have specialized spaces for a variety of practical functions, such as reception (entry halls), exhibition (galleries), or halls), whose architectural forms will have also been for social, symbolic, and aesthetic The specific practical functions of and for example, are dramatic such as for the or for the Art whose architectural forms not only aesthetic responses but also at the a of from the even as they symbolic similar of aesthetic qualities with social, and symbolic functions in the museum gallery the between the and as we move from the and architectural has to the less dramatic forms and spaces may be to a for a for art not that the architecture as in with design for the in New architectural forms should be aesthetically in ways that complement the art even as those forms a for and aesthetic I believe at this of the social, and aesthetic of gallery design when he neutral works of art as as spaces that make the building into a of In for example, one through its dramatic the of the for seem like an Libeskind's radical in Denver sometimes with the art for our go to the other extreme and an aesthetically less for than for The between the aesthetic and practical functions for gallery architecture can be to what has about the halls, such as in or Frank Gehry's in their designs to of an experience architecture by means of the as the are for the quality of their so the gallery designs make of natural to the experience of for example, Louis for the for the Steven walls for the Museum or for the museum in that give it a and In what to be an to this of aesthetic and practical concerns in gallery design, the Frank who so to the function of to in has as the idea that museum architecture should be and not with the the Bilbao museum's than a with a by and be a âspectacleâspaceâ to swallow almost in this is not the at also designed a number of for and and sculptural for contemporary and of the at Bilbao are are most of intrusive. 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many buildings may also change over so that involving practical functions are in this than formal a separatist that we may not be to whether the concord between the aesthetic and practical functions of a museum's art is to the design or to choices the of how to and so it is that a may make of an architectural designed for art or a designed for art, in most it is not to out the architectural choices from the One of the Denver for example, Libeskind's that the a of of the function as as they their When the Denver museum first in for example, by from the walls and to be from their on the walls by of on the When I the museum two these been by on the walls to to and on the to at a if one accepts these there remains a to the idea of embodied practical functions: the fact that many important art museums have been in and in which it would be to that we something about the of practical and aesthetic functions from the way the buildings the of many buildings for as art museums have been to make 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