An email solicitation from a group called SARG (Spatial Analytics Research Group) ended up in my junk folder. I retrieved it on the same day of their Zoom meeting in which they asked to distinguish between architecture and building, i.e., they asked: “What is (not) architecture?” So I quickly sent off the following response:

The idea that architecture is something “added” to mere building presumes that the two terms (architecture and building) are different instances of the same class of objects, where, per Ruskin, architecture “impresses on [the form of the mere building] certain characters venerable or beautiful, but otherwise unnecessary.”

But this formulation is wrong, for two reasons. The first is the obvious one: Ruskin was thinking of literal decorative or sculptural “additions” to a structure’s masonry shell, so that the notion that such things were “otherwise unnecessary” could be sustained — the utilitarian functionality of such structures would certainly survive without such embellishment. But what of architecture without decorative embellishment? Ruskin’s argument falls apart when confronted with modernist aesthetics.

The second problem with the formulation, even abstracting from the requirement that what is added be “unnecessary,” is that manipulating formal constituent elements of buildings is ubiquitous, albeit within wide range of aesthetic formulations corresponding to the various class-based social and cultural strata within modern societies.

In other words, the distinction between building and architecture is simply the snobbery of connoisseurship, no different from the condemnation of any number of working-class preferences by elite tastemakers. Like Adorno’s condemnation of jazz.