Aesthetic Boredom in Everyday Architecture

Author: Abel B. Franco
Year: 2023 (Journal of Boredom Studies 1)
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/franco-2023-aesthetic-boredom-everyday-architecture.md

Summary

Franco defends a concept of "aesthetic boredom" about architectonic spaces: saying a space is "boring" can be an aesthetic judgement, an emotion (the negative counterpart of "aesthetic excitement") that results from the absence in a space of what he calls inhabitability — the aesthetic quality of a space experienced as (1) creating possibilities significant for us regarding what we can do and how, and (2) enhancing the felt quality of realizing them. Boredom arises from our frustrated, always-ongoing "demand for meaning" (a constant search for inhabitability). The paper reads architecture chiefly as created space (not visual object) experienced through everyday use.

Key Claims

• Architecture as created space: "The creation or formation of spaces to live (i.e., to realize human activities) defines and distinguishes architecture"; everyday aesthetic evaluations are primarily evaluations of created spaces, not perceivable visual objects.
• Inhabitability as the aesthetic quality of spaces: a space's aesthetic value lies in inhabitability — affording significant possibilities for action and enhancing the felt quality of realizing (or anticipating) them. "Inhabitability is what we look for when we look for aesthetically valuable or preferable spaces." It is always "for me, at this moment of my life, in relation to certain activities."
• Aesthetic boredom defined: "boredom due primarily to the absence of inhabitability" — the negative/opposite emotion to aesthetic excitement. It is a situative (not existential) boredom ("boredom that is due to something specific in a situation"), an emotion with a frustrated desire at its core: our "constant active search for inhabitability."
• Distinct from object- and activity-boredom: our relation to a space is closer to our relation to a situation; spaces are "better carriers of affective powers" than individual objects. A "boring" car differs from a "boring" space.
• Fittingness: inhabitability results from the three-sided fittingness between (1) the activity we are doing in the space, (2) our perception of the space (sensible features and their meaning), and (3) our ideal of life; aesthetic boredom emerges "from their conflict." Hopper's paintings exemplify the "out of place" feeling.
• Atmosphere (Böhme): physical qualities "ecstatically" fill/qualify space (Böhme's atmospheres); boredom can "emanate from everything" in a space — though inhabitability rather than atmosphere names the aesthetic quality sought.

Connections

Concepts: Aesthetic Boredom · Everyday Architecture · Atmosphere · Dwelling · Everyday Life
Authors: Abel B. Franco · Gernot Böhme
Debates: (aesthetics and the everyday)
Related source notes: Architectural Atmospheres (Borch) · The Big Rethink (Buchanan)

Direct Quotes

"[I]nhabitability [is] the quality of a space which we experience as being responsible for 1) creating possibilities which are significant for us ... and for 2) enhancing (qualitatively) the experience of realizing those possibilities."

"[A]esthetic boredom would be boredom due primarily to the absence of inhabitability thus understood."

"[O]ur relation to a space has more in common with our relation to a situation than with our relation to an object per se."

"We experience aesthetically boring spaces as spaces that deny both significant possibilities and the enhancement of the felt quality of the experience of realizing them."

Open Questions

• Does "inhabitability" offer a user-centred, everyday aesthetic criterion that can be set against both the iconic image-economy and modernist function — and can it ground an architectural ethics of the everyday?