Abstract:
This thesis began as a study into the oft-overlooked Romanticist movement. This period, which spanned almost a century before succumbing to the modern era, held significant influence over a number of fields including fine art, literature, music, science and philosophy but which was not as clearly articulated in architectural theory and practice. During the research process, the notion of the sublime repeatedly emerged. The Sublime experience is arguably the most defining tenet of Romanticist literature and fine art and yet, the notion predates the epoch to as far back as the first century AD.1 It is thought that the sublime emerged first in the writing of Dionysous Longinous’ Peri Hypsous, a Greek text that detailed the sublime in relation to the practice of rhetoric.2 Seventeen centuries later, these words were translated into French and English, and the concept found resonance in a new generation of European philosophers and theorists.3 One such theorist, Edmund Burke, published his own treatise on the subject, “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” which is still regarded as one of the most comprehensive studies on the subject.4 It is through his words that the sublime is most clearly defined and separated from the notion of the beautiful.5 The beautiful, he suggests, relates to objects that are small, smooth and delicate and which offer pleasure and delight; and while the sublime may also delight, it emerges from vast, rugged and infinite landscapes and originates from a sense of terror and pain.6 From Burke we can understand that the sublime arrives from experiences of pain and terror but which in turn affect a sense of awe in the observer. It is this concept, which so importantly affected a shift from the rational to the emotive, unleashing a flurry of artistic expression that can be seen today in contemporary art and literature.7 And while architecture might not have been so greatly affected by Romanticism and the notion of the sublime experience during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this thesis seeks to examine whether the qualities to which other creative fields found influence could not be applied to contemporary architectural design. I will analyze the aesthetic underpinnings of the sublime as laid out by Burke and seek to examine its role within philosophical theory to understand how it might be employed to heighten architectural experience.