Georg Simmel und die Ästhetische Theorie der Architektur

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the reconstruction and recapitulation of Georg Simmel's relationship to architecture and to the aesthetics of the field of architecture.  To this aim, a number of texts have been identified and discussed in Simmel's production that describe the urban dimension, as dimension of the city and of architecture as a modality of the construction of buildings, objects and places to inhabit the world and thus give it a certain configuration. From this discussion derives the plural field of oppositions in relation to the urban-architectural dimension, according to a view of Simmelian thought based on a kind of law of contrast, which can be exemplified in the following set of “oppositional pairs” found in Simmel's work: nature and culture (§ 2), hyperaesthesia and anaesthesia (§ 3), aesthetic “superadditum” and abstraction (§ 4), artistic will and practical functionality (§ 5), connecting and separating (§ 6), transience and eternity or, in architectural terms, temporary and solidity (§ 7), freedom and solitude - subjective culture and objective culture (§ 8). The paper proposes an attempt to trace this series of contrasts and to conclude with an initial assessment of the path traveled and some reflections on a possible convergence between aesthetic and social morphology (§ 9).