Abstract

Arthur Schopenhauer ranked the several arts in a hierarchy, with literary and dramatic arts at the top, music soaring in a separate even higher heaven, and architecture sinking to the ground under the weight of beams and bricks and mortar.1 The governing principle seems to be some measure of spirituality, with architecture ranking lowest by vice of being grossly material.Nowadays such rankings are taken less seriously. Traditional ideologies and mythologies of the arts are undergoing deconstruction and disvaluation, making way for a neutral comparative study that can reveal a good deal not only about relations among the several arts2 but also about the kinships and contrasts between the arts, the sciences, and other ways that symbols of various kinds participate in the advancement of the understanding.In comparing architecture with the other arts, what may first strike us, despite Schopenhauer, is a close affinity with music: architectural and musical works, unlike paintings or plays or novels, are seldom descriptive or representational. With some interesting exceptions, architectural works do not denote—that is, do not describe, recount, depict, or portray. They mean, if at all, in other ways.On the other hand, and architectural work contrasts with other works of art in scale. A building or park or city3 is not only bigger spatially and temporally than a musical performance or painting—it is bigger even than we are. We cannot take it all in from a single point of view; we must move around and within it to grasp the whole. Moreover, the architectural work is normally fixed in place. Unlike a painting that may be reframed and rehung or a concerto that may be heard in different halls, the architectural work is firmly set in physical and cultural environment that alters slowly. 1. See Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer , pp. 176-78. Nelson Goodman, emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is the author of, among other works, The Structure of Appearance, Languages of Art, Ways of Worldmaking, and Of Mind and Other Matters. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “The Status of Style” , “Metaphor as Moonlighting” , “Twisted Tales; or, Story, Study, and Symphony” , “The Telling and the Told” , and “Routes of Reference) Autumn 1981)