Investigation of aesthetic experience as a potential functional aspect of architecture

This research investigates the potential influence of the aesthetic experience and the functional aspect of architecture on each other. Accordingly, this study aims to present a philosophical investigation of the emergence of aesthetic experience in relation to the functional aspect of architecture as well as its potential of being an architectural function. It is possible to claim that humanity can interact with its environment through the functional aspect of architecture. There are discussions that the relationship between users and architectural spaces can go beyond benefiting from the necessary physical conditions that architecture provides for its users to execute their required and desired actions. An architectural space having a sensuous impact on its users supports the existence of certain experiences. Philosophy discusses such phenomena with phenomenological thinking as one of its branches and psychology studies them with perceptual and cognitive science. The user-architecture relationship and its intellectual and psychological causes can be considered as a case of aesthetic experiences. Therefore, at the point where quantitative properties of architectural spaces achieve non-measurable qualities, the user-architecture connection can be moved to the field of aesthetics discipline as a form of communication, recognition, and a way of knowing. The overall focus of the discipline of aesthetics has been the study of the experience and the judgment of taste that occurs as a result of the interaction between the aesthetic subject and the aesthetic object. It is possible to claim that, in architecture, the aesthetic subject resembles the user and the aesthetic "object" corresponds to the space that architecture defines and its overall form. To be able to investigate the aesthetic relationship between the user and space through the functional aspect of architecture, the concept of appropriateness is explored. This concept argues for the emergence of an aesthetic quality from what is made appropriately to its intended use. This understanding originates from the philosophers of Antiquity, yet it is also possible to see architects throughout the history of architecture stressing the notion of being appropriate in their practice. It is possible to see this consideration through the form-function relation as well as user-function relation in architecture. This indicates that function-related investigations can be conducted through concepts of aesthetics. Accordingly, this research articulates aesthetics' potential place among varying functions that architecture possesses by conducting philosophical investigation and explores its functional characteristics.