Challenge and Comfort

Definition

Challenge and comfort is Goldberger's name for the central tension of architecture as art. Great art "exists to challenge, not to coddle" — Jeanette Winterson's creation against consolation — but architecture must also shelter and console, and its obligation is unavoidable because it is omnipresent and must protect us. Unlike a novel or a symphony, architecture "cannot live with… constant challenge." Goldberger's resolution is not compromise but synthesis: aesthetic challenge and physical comfort "should be considered entitled to coexist," with the greatest buildings startling and reassuring at once. He argues that "comfort" is a better criterion than "function" — closer to the needs of the people who actually use a building, and capacious enough to include visual pleasure, since "is not visual pleasure… a kind of function, too?" A hospital that moves patients efficiently but feels cold is, on this account, a functional failure; Goldberger reads the evidence-based design movement as pursuing exactly this corrected priority. Deconstructivism's deliberate production of dislocation and unease is his example of challenge pursued to the point of abdicating the synthesis.

Key Thinkers

• Paul Goldberger — formulates the synthesis and prefers "comfort" to "function" as the architecture of use.
• Louis Kahn — "need is just so many bananas"; desire, not need, produces great art, and "A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, go through measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must be un-measurable." (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• Alain de Botton — The Architecture of Happiness: architecture's sway over our emotions, and its limits — "The noblest architecture can sometimes do less for us than a siesta or an aspirin." (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• Jeanette Winterson — art as creation rather than consolation; "an energetic space that begets energetic space." (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• Peter Eisenman (with Eric Owen Moss and Coop Himmelblau) — the Deconstructivist refusal of comfort, cited by Goldberger as the position his synthesis rejects.

Related Concepts

• comfort — the everyday register of the consolation pole.
• sublime — the affect of the challenge pole at its most intense.
• commodity-firmness-and-delight — the triad in which the tension is contained.
• architecture-as-object — delight redressed as "emotional intensity."
• aesthetic-experience — the domain in which the challenge pole operates.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/goldberger-2009-why-architecture-matters — ch. 2 (pp. 41–56) builds the synthesis from Villa Savoye, the Farnsworth House, the Glass House, and Kahn, and contests "form follows function" (pp. 49–50).

Open Questions

• If the synthesis is only available to the non-resident observer (the Savoyes and Edith Farnsworth lived inside the work of art and were miserable), is Goldberger's synthesis an aesthetics of spectatorship rather than of dwelling?
• Does replacing "function" with "comfort" abandon the measurable in favour of the subjective, or does evidence-based design make comfort measurable after all?