Saul Fisher: "Architectural Ontology"

Saul Fisher, Mercy University: "Architectural Ontology: What We’re Trying to Explain and How Nominalism Fails"

Abstract
The central puzzle of the ontology of architecture is this: All around us are the built structures existing in space and time that we conventionally call ‘architectural objects’ in a generally exclusive sense yet, for some, there are reasons pulling us to thinking of architectural objects as abstracta. In this, there is some analogy with like puzzles in other ontological debates relative to different artforms, where abstractists run free—music and literature, notably. But, in comparison, architecture raises the stakes for the abstractist because the domain and practice are so clearly associated with the utility of the concrete objects: the historically primary goal of doing architecture, independent of whatever other goals motivate the practice, is to create shelter and serve other such functions. So, paper or theoretical architecture notwithstanding, the aim of architectural practice and everyday life with built structures point us toward a concretist ontology and away from an abstractist alternative. Yet questions of architectural ontology have been historically misconceived—and in ways that prejudice us toward the concretist. In particular, and to distorting effect, our folk ontologies have reflected claims about architectural objects (a) where those objects’ utility is taken as their paramount feature; (b) irrespective of those objects’ possible ranges of modalities and features; or (c) irrespective of the possible ‘lived lives’ of those objects, that is, their fullest phenomenal trajectories as objects in the world. After introducing where we’ve gone wrong with concretism in architectural ontology at the folk level, I argue that we tend to concretism given the range of things we broadly want our ontologies to explain, and that nominalism can’t account for the things we ought to be explaining. If we can dispense with such distortions and focus on the right ontological explananda, I suggest, abstractism about architecture rather than concretism emerges as the ontological view to beat.