Resumen de Gottfried Semper: between poetics and practical aesthetics
The writer discusses the “practical aesthetics” of the 19th-century German architect and theorist Gottfried Semper. In his magnum opus, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder praktische Ästhetik (1860–63), Semper presented an innovative theory of the origins and development of art and a poetics that enables one to understand architecture not as a formal or stylistic phenomenon but as a creative interpretation of human life and action. A deep tension inherent in his work lead Semper to abandon his insights into the poetic capacity of art in favor of a “method of invention,” a practical aesthetics based on strictly scientific criteria. His project was to offer a complete comparative science of architecture and art. He saw art as an inscrutable source and symbol of meaning but sought to turn it into a transparent and accessible object for the scientist-historian. He started with a concern for the ontological significance of art, its meaning for human existence, and ended with a purely epistemological construct dominated by the question of how to acquire scientifically legitimate knowledge of its production.
