A World of Ideas: Selected Encounters in Architectural History and Philosophical Aesthetics, 1940–80

This article reconstructs a series of encounters between architectural history and philosophical aesthetics in the postwar decades by comparing the discourse of two journals: the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Shared hermeneutic concepts including “space,” “style,” and “symbol” gained new meaning as historians of architectural modernism drew on, and contributed to, developments within Anglophone analytic thought. For philosophers as well as historians of art and architecture, including early advocates of social history, Panofskian iconology introduced a tension between idealist and materialist approaches that reappeared in the work of figures bridging these discourses, such as James Ackerman, Nelson Goodman, Susanne K. Langer, and Paul Zucker. This tension was temporarily resolved, on the one hand, by a critique of architectural ideology inspired by the New Left, and on the other, by a politically conservative aesthetics of cultural training, most notably advanced by the philosopher Roger Scruton.