/lit/ - Literature

>>22252121
great post, and painting of course
reading just a little about the philosophy and art of architecture helped connect a lot of disparate dots across many domains

Goethe's brief pamphlet 'On Gothic Architecture' is a good one for new anons
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Several factors set Goethe’s essay apart from the general eighteenth-century
interest in the Gothic revival. Goethe is not interested in the Gothic cathedral as
an actual building with specific purposes. Instead, he discusses the cathedral as if
it were a work of art, and explores its powerful effects on the subjectivity of the
beholder. The innovative thrust of Goethe’s essay must be sought in the way architecture rather than painting or poetry allows him to discuss the effects of a work
of art. In this respect the brief pamphlet far exceeds its various contexts and
becomes legible as an important contribution to aesthetic theory, asserting a profound paradigm change in the arts. Goethe turns to architecture as the model
object of art when art is no longer to be considered primarily a matter of representation. At stake in this essay from 1772, as well as in Goethe’s later essay “On
Architecture” from 1795, is the programmatic exploration of aesthetic experience
through architecture as a medium of emphatic presence

Both On German Architecture and “On Architecture” consider the effects of
architecture on the beholder. The earlier piece focuses on the subjectivity of the
beholder; the latter on the beholder’s sense of embodiment. To reconfigure the
function of art, Goethe introduces architecture as an art that is situated in threedimensional space and bound up with a particular place. The polemical turn
against the then-reigning representational paradigm becomes even more evident
8 Grey Room 35
in a review of the work of the well-known art critic and philosopher Johann Georg
Sulzer, which Goethe wrote around the same time as On German Architecture.