Sublime

Definition

The sublime, in Kant's Critique of Judgment, is the aesthetic experience of that which is great beyond all comparison or powerful beyond all resistance — the "mathematical" sublime of immense magnitude (the starry sky, the infinite) and the "dynamical" sublime of overwhelming force (the storm, the precipice). Unlike the beautiful, which pleases directly through harmonious form, the sublime pleases through a negative movement: it initially overwhelms the imagination but then elevates the mind's rational, moral vocation, revealing the superiority of reason over nature. For architecture, the sublime offers an "expanded notion of architecture beyond mere beauty" (Morgan) — the capacity of built forms and spaces (the vast, the vertiginous, the monumental) to produce experiences of awe that exceed the merely pleasing. It connects to the spectacle critique, where the monumental "Wow" (Dyckhoff's Wowhaus) can be read as the sublime's commodified double.

Key Thinkers

• Immanuel Kant — the mathematical and dynamical sublime; the negative pleasure of elevation beyond sensible limits.
• Diane Morgan — the sublime as expanding architecture beyond mere beauty.

Related Concepts

• Beauty — the aesthetic category the sublime exceeds and qualifies.
• Aesthetic Judgment — the reflective judgment that recognizes the sublime.
• Aesthetic Experience — the sensuous-mental encounter within which the sublime arises.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Kant for Architects — the sublime and architecture beyond beauty.
• Internal disconnect: Material memory in the John Portman originals (Marinic 2018) — the interior sublime as the Portman originals' lost quality: "The qualitative permanence of these iconic structures – their monumental, austere, and sublime interior architecture – has been incrementally diminished"; "For the adventurous and architecturally sophisticated, Portman interiors were sublime and avant-garde, but for many, these grandly scaled spaces appeared stark and alienating rather than welcoming and conventionally luxurious"; and the renovated-away transition: "In the past, a dark and sublime space offered a powerful transition to the atrium." The sublime here is class-coded reception ("for the adventurous and architecturally sophisticated") and a material property of darkness, monumentality, and unfinished concrete — precisely what the "expectable aesthetic" of bright, neutral renovation erases (see brutalism, material-memory).
• Why Architecture Matters (Goldberger 2009) — the sublime as the affect of great space: Le Corbusier's 'ineffable space' and the haunting harshness of Kahn's Unitarian Church, where 'it is in their haunting quality that they achieve the sublime' (pp. 42, 104–107).
• source-notes/garofalo-khan-2018-sensorial-interior-landscapes
• source-notes/olsen-2018-on-technological-limits
• source-notes/qureshi-2018-spatial-therapies
• source-notes/treadwell-2018-oceanic-interiorities