Is Architecture Art?: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Architecture - Paperback

by John MacArthur (Author)

Shortlisted for the Architectural Book of the Year Award 2025

Is architecture an art, like literature or music? Or is it more akin to science or engineering? Can buildings be artworks, just like paintings and sculptures, or does their fundamentally functional nature mean they cannot be considered pure works of art?

Questions of architecture, art, and aesthetics do not allow for simple answers. But by asking such questions, we can usefully reveal the ways in which the concepts and meanings of architecture have changed over the centuries, and how they continue to change in the contemporary era.

Is Architecture Art? explores the key conceptual questions about the aesthetic appreciation of architecture and its persistently contested status as an artform. It engages the work of thinkers ranging from Hume and Kant to Adorno, Tafuri, and Rancière, and draws on accessible and thought-provoking accounts of historical and contemporary architectural and art theory. Taking novel approaches to issues that will be familiar to the practising architect, it shows how aesthetics and art theory can open up and illuminate architectural theory, issue by issue. Is Architecture Art? will provoke discussion and debate among architects and architectural theorists, and force a new understanding of the purpose of architectural practice in the contemporary era as the concepts of 'art', 'the arts', and of the creative economy have shifted and blurred as never before.

Author Biography

John Macarthur (FAHA, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities), is Professor of Architecture at the University of Queensland, Australia, where he teaches history, theory and design. His research focuses on the intellectual history of architecture, particularly the aesthetics of architecture and its relation to the visual arts. He is the author or editor of twelve books and numerous articles.