Architecture, Life, and Habit

ANDREW BALLANTYNE

Architecture, Life, and Habit

i. background

When we discuss architecture, we make buildingsthe focus of our attention, but that is an unusualcondition. The buildings that are involved with ourdaily lives are part of our system of habits, and welive our lives with them in the background, un-problematically, as unconscious of their role aswe are of the air that we breathe or the timethat is passing. In order to understand the re-lationship that we have with buildings, we needto take note of the way habits are formed, andhow they become part of who we are. Walter Ben-jamin made this point, or something like it, in hisessay on the work of art in the age of its tech-nological reproducibility, where he contrasts theperson who concentrates on a work of art and isabsorbed by it with the consumption of art by the“distracted masses” who “absorb the work of artinto themselves.”1 “This is most obvious,” he says,“with regard to buildings.”2 A tourist who is vis-iting a famous building for its aesthetic interestwill give it concentrated attention and will takephotographs of it to help preserve the memoryof having been at the place, which will be experi-enced for only a brief interlude. If we are beinginvited to value a building’s aesthetic qualities,then it is usually presented in order to appeal tosuch a view. Architecture books abound in finephotographs of buildings, nearly always withoutpeople in them, and we are invited visually to ap-praise the composition of form and void. This wayof appreciating buildings has its roots in the art-world, where we expect to focus our attention onartworks and to derive some benefit by doing so.This approach has a very powerful appeal, andit is not to be wished away, but it is not the fo-cus of this article’s attention. The alternative view

in Benjamin’s schema, which is explored here, isthe way that we come to know the buildings withwhich we are very familiar, which is rather throughhabit than from focused visual attention. Whenwe have made ourselves thoroughly habituatedto something, through many repetitions, we cancease to be conscious of it and can perform rou-tine tasks without giving them much attention atall, even tasks of considerable complexity.3 In re-cent years there has been some attempt to broadenthe range of sensory perceptions that inform aresponse to architecture, including discussion ofbuildings’ acoustic effects or their appeal to thesense of touch, but such studies belong in the firstcategory above, giving the building concentratedattention, tending to involve consideration of thebuilding as an artwork, albeit an artwork that dealsin a range of sensory experiences.4

However, for the buildings that we use everyday, this mode of contemplation is unimportant.If everything is going well, we do not focus onthe building but rather on what we are trying todo in it. This is the case even where the build-ing has a definite presence in the artworld: in itsroutine use, the building is more or less ignored,and what matters about it, for its inhabitants, iswhether their life-habits are conveniently accom-modated.

In this regard, the appropriate conceptualmodel for the building is not the artwork, butthe tool, and the aesthetic appreciation of thebuilding cannot be separated from what it does.This article argues for a pragmatist aesthetics ofarchitecture, where the sense of the building-in-use is given weight and where an ethical aspectseems inescapable. This in no way undermines a“contemplative” appreciation of buildings, whichhere is characterized as the tourist’s gaze; but if

c© 2011 The American Society for Aesthetics

44 The Aesthetics of Architecture

we want to understand how buildings come to bemore closely implicated in people’s lives and iden-tities, then we need to understand something ofthe bond that is established through habitual use.A pragmatist aesthetics can allow us to value thethings about a building that matter to us when weare using the building and it is working well. Thetourist’s gaze removes such things from consider-ation, preferring visual spectacle, and it has domi-nated the way that architecture is presented. Thisarticle, by considering the idea of habit, takingcues from Samuel Butler and Eileen Gray, seeksto focus attention on the building as a support forlife and to see that focus as a legitimate part ofaesthetic analysis.

ii. design for life

Samuel Butler made “habit” the key principle inboth his understanding of life and in his Lamarck-ian theory of evolution, set out in various works,including, most importantly, Life and Habit, wherehe uses the example of learning to play a trickypiece of music on the piano. We have to pick ourway through it, hesitatingly and painstakingly atfirst, with many repetitions, until the sequence ofnotes is thoroughly ingrained and one can concen-trate on nuances of expression rather than track-ing down the next key. Butler uses this as a modelfor the many other habits we acquire and which wesubsequently perform unconsciously.5 Each newpiece demands this kind of attention, so that al-though we learn it as a habit, we remain awareof the process, whereas we can more or less for-get how we acquired a skill like writing, learnedin childhood with laborious effort and much con-centration on the formation of letters and words.When we write as adults we form our letters un-consciously and think about the sense we are try-ing to convey with our writing, not about howto shape the individual letters. Butler’s theory ofevolution led him to believe that things we havedone unconsciously all our lives (by instinct)—things like seeing, growing, or breathing—wereonce learned with difficulty, not by any recent rel-atives, but by very distant prehuman ancestors.Butler knew that this notion did not belong to sci-ence, and he explicitly repudiated that claim: itwas, he said, an experiment in thought.6 The samecould be said of his novels. Darwin’s properly sci-entific idea of “natural selection” is the preferred

model of the mechanism that is at work here. Inevolution it is unlikely that the things learned byan organism can find their way into its DNA, butin an individual’s life, habits that are firmly ac-quired remain in place as characteristic patternsof behavior and make possible uniquely intelligentand “human” activities, even the most advanced.Wordsworth said that “the child is father of theman,” and in that unscientific sense we might besaid to “evolve” from infant to adult, by way of amechanism such as Butler describes.7 Perhaps histheory is best seen as a vast anthropomorphism,stretching back across millions of generations, thathas some intuitive plausibility because it resonateswith personal memories of earlier iterations ofoneself. It is this “poetic” version of his theory thatis helpful here, seeing the habits acquired in child-hood as producing the adolescent and the habits ofyouth as the means of producing the adult. Shake-speare crystallized the sequence into “seven agesof man,” which could be redescribed here as seven“generations” of habits in the “evolution” fromcradle to grave.8

What interests me in Butler’s argument is how,along the way, he redraws the barriers betweencategories that would normally be kept distinct.The boundary between organic and inorganic en-tities is dissolved, as is the boundary that makesan individual’s identity distinct from that of a pre-vious generation or from its surroundings. Everypart of our bodies is composed of elements thatcan be analyzed as inorganic. We do not think ofcarbon as organic when we find it in diamonds,or calcium as organic when we find it in rocks,but we ingest carbon and calcium, iron and oxy-gen, and metabolize them. We inherit our instincts,and when we find ourselves in situations that ourinstincts recognize, they tell us what to do. Wemight recognize this at a conscious level when wesense danger and our adrenalin starts to raise ourmetabolic rate, but Butler suggests that there isa similar kind of ingrained “habit” at work at amolecular level, when the cells in an ovum findthemselves in circumstances where they respondby developing into something that previously theywere not.9 Somewhere in their evolution, mol-lusks appeared with the habit of building housesfor themselves from minerals in their environ-ment, and the modern mollusk continues this prac-tice—instinctually, without conscious thought—this“intelligence” is distributed through the body atthe cellular level in its DNA, so the building is

Ballantyne Architecture, Life, and Habit 45

constructed from what is at hand, making adwelling to shelter and protect the creature withinand allowing it to lead its life. However it hap-pened, and however many millions of genera-tions ago, the mollusk’s body began producing thishard shell by ingesting calcium carbonate and se-creting it with a changed crystalline structure asaragonite.10 The means of production are now soprofoundly embodied in contemporary mollusksthat, by this innate property, which one couldcall an unconscious instinct or (as Butler did) a“habit,” they produce these houses. “Habits” and“instincts” shape all animals at a biological leveland make possible the activities characteristic ofevery species.

iii. shell versus machine

At a level much closer to commonsense intuitionwe can find the Irish designer and architect EileenGray thinking about her furniture along similarlines. She had a problematic involvement with LeCorbusier, who was fascinated by the house thatGray designed and had built at Roquebrune, onthe shore of the Mediterranean. Gray’s lover, JeanBadovici, an art dealer who also edited the journalL’Architecture vivante, encouraged Le Corbusierto paint murals in the house, which he did. Grayfound them overassertive, upsetting the harmo-nious balance of the interior, and this judgmentreflects their different approaches to architecture.She explained that her conception of the housewas entirely different from Le Corbusier’s. Forhim the dwelling was a “machine a habiter,” whichled him to look for ways to make houses take onthe qualities of mechanical structures—airplanes,grain silos, ocean liners, and suchlike.11 Gray re-pudiated the idea: “A house is not a machinea habiter. It is man’s shell, his continuation, hisspreading out, his spiritual emanation. Not onlyits sculptural harmony, but its whole organization,every aspect of the whole work combined, cometogether to make it human in the most profoundsense.”12

In Butler’s conception of the organism, thereis a more developed sense of these ideas, but itcomes with problems, for example, because it isdifficult to imagine the volition that sets the pro-cess in motion. Gray’s conception of the house isidentical but without the evolution. There is thesame sense of a blurring of the boundary of the

individual, which takes in the surroundings andthe way of life, and the same sense of the unself-conscious habits of life being reified into spatialconfigurations, items of furniture, and enclosedvolumes of building. These arrangements antic-ipate a certain range of habits, accommodatingsome of them closely and directly, others moreflexibly. For example, the main space of the houseat Roquebrune has basically a linear configura-tion, with one side facing the sea, and that side isglazed and has a terrace along it, while the otherside is closed. It seems to be a sensible way to orga-nize the house, and one needs to restore a histori-cal perspective in order to sense how remarkablydirect and clear-sighted an approach this was whenit was adopted in the late 1920s—in the immediatewake of Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nou-veau and his white cubic villas. Gray prioritizedthe habits of living that she wanted her house topromote, but paid little heed to the habits of de-signing and building that would have been knownto the local craftsmen. It is remarkably unclut-tered by the conventional trappings of domestic-ity of the time and of her background, which wasaristocratic. It is an expression of freedom, mak-ing a shelter that enabled a comfortable life besidethe sea, but with the building making a minimalsupport for that life, not in the least taking on thequalities of a monument or a sculpture.

Going back to the idea of designing aroundhabits: it is clear that Le Corbusier’s machine ahabiter, insofar as it was being considered as amachine for producing the conditions for life, wasactually quite compatible with Gray’s ideas. Theirdifferences lay in what they saw as appropriate inthe expression of what was happening in the houseor, rather, which aspect of the house each thoughtshould count as “architecture.”

iv. organized beings

Le Corbusier defined architecture as “the mas-terful, correct, and magnificent play of volumesbrought together in light.”13 He praised the “engi-neer’s aesthetic” and promoted it as an expressionof truth in construction. It was evident in bridges,airplanes, automobiles, and grain silos, and onewould look to the engineer for advice on howto construct, but the proper deployment and au-thoritative use of form is clearly the architect’sprovince. It is plainly a visual aesthetic, sculpturaland determined, and it has had wide currency.


By contrast, Gray’s dictum remains underex-posed, it being formulated in a private letter, nottrumpeted in a manifesto, though she is far frombeing alone in thinking along those lines. It isperhaps closer to the ad hoc of vernacular tra-ditions, but making use of the new materials andprocesses that the twentieth century brought herway. She felt a need and, when she was design-ing, closely analyzed the need, and then like ev-ery other organism, made shift with the thingsavailable to her, which included traditional tech-niques—lacquer, leather, carved timber—as well astubular steel and experimental plastics.

It would be possible to describe Le Corbusier’sbuildings in these terms, and no doubt there wasan element of this kind of thinking in the workthat he did, but he gave his account of architec-ture along very different lines. His “poem of theright angle,” for example, extols the purity and ra-tionality of pristine geometry, opposing it to thefunctional “way of the donkey,” where form is gen-erated by muddling through expediently.14 Goingback to Walter Benjamin’s ways of experiencingarchitecture, Le Corbusier clearly gives priorityto sight, whereas by contrast Gray gives priorityto body and habit, grounding her sense of archi-tecture in the life of the organism rather than inthe contemplation of pure and authoritative form.The organized being extends as far as it organizes.The house is an extension of the person—actuallypart of the organism. The house cannot be under-stood without the person.

Curiously, it is in the aspect of the house asa machine that one would expect Gray and LeCorbusier to be in agreement if one has beenreading Butler, for whom organic and inorganicmechanisms were equally mechanical. For my pur-poses, however, the significant difference betweenthem is how they conceptualize architecture. ForLe Corbusier the house as machine a habiter isa functioning mechanism, which belongs in theworld of function and engineering. What makesit architecture is altogether different: “the mas-terful, correct, and magnificent play of volumesbrought together in light.” It is when the machineis contemplated that it is found to be architec-ture, not when it is being used. By contrast, Gray’sconception of the house as a continuation of itsinhabitants makes it inappropriate to judge it inLe Corbusier’s terms. To see the house as a play ofvolumes is to miss the point of the house: it sup-ports life, is imbued with life, and is inseparable

from life. For Le Corbusier, the architecture is inthis volumetric play, but for Gray it manifestly wasnot.

v. forgetting

Therefore the appropriate aesthetic response inthis frame of reference is not one that derivesfrom disinterested contemplation of forms, butone that derives from the satisfaction of experi-encing the building in everyday use—a pragmatistaesthetics. A house as a sequence of spaces andforms does not in itself have an ethical dimension,but the organized entity that is the dwelling-and-its-occupants certainly does. The “good house”is inseparable from the “good life,” which thebuilding would be caught up in as a fundamen-tal support and shelter.15 The ideal rapport be-tween a dwelling and its occupants might be closeenough that their ethos would find expression init, whether in the grand design or in the detail.

Beyond being a shelter, the dwelling is caughtup in our projects of self-invention that seem socharacteristic of the modern age, at least in fairlyaffluent liberal democracies. There are premoni-tions of it in Montaigne, but it is at its most heroicin Nietzsche and is made into a settled part of thecurriculum by John Dewey.16 We use our dwellingsto tell others, and ourselves, who we are and whatwe aspire to be, and we do not use them in iso-lation but in connection with our behavior, ourclothes, our patterns of speech, choice of music,newspaper, or means of transport. These thingsare ingrained and habitual and are done or used orreached for unself-consciously on any given day,but they can be read gesturally. We would haveno trouble in recognizing what kind of person wasgoing through the events in a story because of thethings that a novelist or dramatist has that char-acter say and do, what clothes are worn, and inwhat surroundings the events unfold. I can see thisvery readily in other people, maybe very wrongly(because often there is no way of checking), butit is not normally how I would see myself. Ourdwellings are complex in parallel ways. They areinstruments that help us to do both the things wehave to do—sleeping, refueling, washing—and alsovarious things that we can choose to do or notto do. Houses are sometimes used to accumulatetokens of personal memories, objects of aestheticinterest, and things that we imagine will enhance


our status in the eyes of the people we want toimpress; they can be used to nurture friendships,family, or career contacts. Often the things we dowith our houses blur or confound these categories,as the pleasures of entertaining are often insepa-rable from establishing status in society. There areso many things going on in a dwelling, at so manylevels, that it is a wonder we manage to keep ev-erything going. We do manage, however, and wedo it by establishing habits that persist and takeus along one trajectory of self-actualization or an-other. From time to time the trajectory may bereviewed and adjusted, maybe gently, by learn-ing to do something new or, maybe drastically, bysetting entirely new goals and deciding, in fact, tobe a different person by deliberately adopting newhabits, inferring a new telos for the organizing thatI extend into my world. So for a dwelling—and byextension any building that I know through myhabits of engagement with it rather than as a vi-sual spectacle—a pragmatist aesthetics involves anengagement with the ethos of the place, and that isenabled by the building, but driven by the peoplewho must not be separated from it. Insofar as thejudgment is aesthetic rather than ethical, it willconsider the rapport between the dwelling andthe life—the stronger the rapport, the better thefit, the more aesthetically satisfying the achieve-ment. However, if the ethos is bad (however thatjudgment is made), then it would probably seemto be an abdication of some wider responsibilityto see as highly admirable a design that was con-figured so as to support evildoing. The occasionwhen such design can be admired without moralproblems arising is in the case of the design ofscenery for drama. A stage or film set can put inplace an idea of a room that is an aesthetically sat-isfying lair for a villain, expressing the malign per-sonality and its power through the decor. We canappreciate the effectiveness of the design withoutseparating it from the (imagined) life and withoutendorsing the evil. When the evil feels real, thenexpressing enthusiasm for the skill of the designcan easily be misunderstood as endorsing the eviland is impolitic. It is certainly safer to foster theidea that evil and kitsch keep company, and thereis some evidence to support that idea.17 There isenough counterevidence to repudiate the case, butit is more challenging to make it. Robert van Pelthas published the architects’ drawings for the gaschambers at Auschwitz, which had organizationalrationality and compositional skill to recommend

them, but to dwell on their aesthetic achievementsin the presence of their utterly abhorrent reasonfor being is to fail as a human being.18 The build-ings do not look remarkable, certainly not remark-ably evil, but then that could hardly have been thedesigners’ intent. Few of us cast ourselves as vil-lains in our own lives. If we were able to visit thesebuildings as tourists, we might come away havingtaken photographs that looked quite pleasant. Ifwe were to consider engaging in the building’s life,we would be overcome with revulsion. Sometimesa building’s aesthetics are not the most importantthing about it, and even to mention aesthetics asan aspect of the building seems to show a lackof judgment. A pragmatist aesthetics makes the“life” inescapable, so one need not cauterize moralrevulsion as inadmissible to aesthetic discourse.

The occasions when we can securely make aes-thetic judgments about buildings in the absenceof “life” are when the building’s life has long van-ished. Therefore, for example, the ancient Colos-seum in Rome seems impressive without feelingmorally dangerous, because the barbaric activitiesthat it supported have long vanished. The prestigeof ancient monuments in our culture has madethem the focus of much contemplation, but weshould not derive a general theory from them, asthey are special cases. The general theory shouldcome from the ordinary cases of everyday life andexperience. In contemporary life, the Colosseumis experienced through the tourist gaze, and onespends more time in its cool vaults than in thescorching arena. A digital evocation of its heydayis in circulation (in Ridley Scott’s film Gladiator),but the building itself will not in any foreseeablefuture be a support for gladiatorial bloodshed. Itis now a place from where horse-drawn carriagerides begin and where ice creams are sold. Theethos of the modern life that surrounds it is drivenby benign leisure pursuits, an idea of cultural pres-tige, and the desire to maximize tourist revenue,not by bloodlust.

vi. living architecture

Moving to a new house is notoriously one ofthe most stressful events in a life, and part ofthe reason for that is that it involves abandoningthe habits that attached to the earlier dwelling.Hotels around the world that are aimed at thebusiness community all have very similar facilities


and spatial layouts, whether they are in New Yorkor Indonesia, whatever the indigenous architec-ture is like. It is a way to minimize the inconve-nience involved in regular travel, but it also ironsout the things that would give the particular placestheir distinct character. The negative side of habitis that once patterns of behavior have worked theirway into the unconscious, they can be difficult tochange.19 For as long as conditions continue with-out need of serious change, the formation of habitis an advantage, as we can do more without hav-ing to think about it. If we have good habits thenwe can continue to be good through habit, evenin the absence of actual virtuous intentions at agiven moment.20 If one is trying to design to ac-commodate anticipated behavior, then it can be acomfort to know that one is designing for someonewith fixed habits, whose movements can be antici-pated. But if circumstances change once habit hastaken a hold, then we might find it impossible toadapt. Where patterns of thought have settled intoplace, we might find ourselves incapable of mak-ing mental leaps that are not part of our settledroutine—reverting too readily to common senseor the repetition of ideas that have become dog-matic and therefore unable to come up with thefresh insight that the new situation demands. Themental space that we have built for our thoughtsthen turns into a prison, but in its positive aspect itis an architecture of our minds, while conversely,the walls that frame our actions have the role ofthe unconscious.21

Without its inhabitants investing the dwellingwith their ethos, the building becomes preciselyas lifeless as an empty shell, which is not withoutinterest—it can be used to decorative effect—butwe can reasonably infer that it was not the mol-lusk’s unconscious “reason” for making it. EileenGray moved on from her house in 1932 when sheleft Badovici. He died in 1956, and the house hasbeen little occupied since then. It has been in poorrepair, and its last owner, who sold the originalfurniture, was murdered there in 1996.22 It mightsoon be restored and opened to public view, butunoccupied it will not be the “architecture vivante”that it once sought to exemplify. Its siting and itssculptural qualities will be admired, and a patternof life might be inferred from the traces that re-main. However, the point of the house was thelife by the sea, and it is as if we were being invitedto admire the plinth of a sculpture or a painter’seasel. By then it will have been enlisted in the

ranks of the buildings that we appreciate by eye,rather than by habit, and will therefore be judgedby a different set of values. If we go along withGray and Butler in seeing the house as a part ofthe organized being, then we should be lookingfor its effectiveness in promoting vitality and ingiving expression and support to the ethos of theplace.

For the category of “places that we come toknow through habit,” the appropriate aestheticqualities have an ethical aspect.

To sum up, buildings can be contemplated asartworks, and this article does not attempt to ar-gue otherwise. Such contemplation, however, is a“special case” and is not remotely like the waythat one normally engages with buildings in ev-eryday circumstances. Aesthetic analysis is neces-sarily contemplative in character, but if we are toapprehend a building’s everyday character (as op-posed to its character for the tourist’s gaze), thenwe need to understand it by way of the habits of ev-eryday life. The building will support some habits,and might obstruct others, but crucially the thingthat makes it satisfying is the match between thebuilding and the life that goes on in and throughit. The role of aesthetics can be to articulate an ap-preciation of the fitness of the match between theplace and the ethos, to see the building through thehabits of daily life. By doing so, it becomes possibleto see how the boundary between a space and itsoccupants can blur, so that the “organized being”has an identity that extends beyond the organicbody into its territory. The building is normallynot the focus of attention, but the thoroughly ha-bituated background for life, which does not meanthat it cannot be discussed, but does mean that it isbetter understood if it is not discussed separatelyfrom the life. By making such a move, one claimsfor aesthetics a viewpoint that can be that of aninhabitant of a building, rather than a tourist.

ANDREW BALLANTYNE

School of Architecture, Planning and LandscapeNewcastle UniversityNewcastle upon Tyne, UK, NE1 7RU

internet: [email protected]

1. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age ofIts Technological Reproducibility,” trans. Harry Zohn, invol. 4 of Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1938–1940, ed.Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (HarvardUniversity Press, 2003), pp. 251–283, at p. 268.


2. Ibid.3. Ibid.4. Juhani Palaasma, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture

and the Senses, 2nd ed. (London: John Wiley and Sons, 2005).5. Samuel Butler, Life and Habit, 2nd ed., ed. R. A.

Streatfeild (London: A. C. Fifield, 1877; repr. London: Wild-wood House, 1981); and see Samuel Butler, “Quis Desiderio. . .?” in Universal Review, July 1888, repr. in Samuel But-ler, Essays on Life, Art and Science, ed. R. A. Streatfeild(London: A. C. Fifield, 1908), pp. 2–3.

6. Samuel Butler, Evolution Old and New (London:Hardwick and Bogue, 1879); Samuel Butler, UnconsciousMemory (London: Hardwick and Bogue, 1880); Samuel But-ler, Luck or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Mod-ification (London: A. C. Fifield, 1886); Samuel Butler, TheNotebooks of Samuel Butler (London: A. C. Fifield, 1912;repr. London: Hogarth, 1985). See also Gregory Bateson,Mind and Nature (London: Wildwood House, 1979).

7. William Wordsworth, “The Rainbow” (1802), inWilliam Wordsworth, The Complete Poetical Works ofWordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Macmillan,1928), p. 62.

8. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Alan Bris-sendon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 2.7.139–166. Ref-erences are to act, scene, and line in the Brissendon edition.

9. Butler, Life and Habit, p. 298.10. Lia Addadi, Derk Joester, Fabio Nudelman, and

Steve Weiner, “Mollusk Shell Formation: A Source ofNew Concepts for Understanding Biomineralization Pro-cesses,” Chemistry: A European Journal 12 (2005): 980–987.

11. Le Corbusier [Charles-Edouard Jeanneret], Vers unearchitecture (Paris: Cres, 1928), trans. John Goodman asToward an Architecture (Los Angeles: Getty Foundation,2008).

12. Eileen Gray, quoted by Peter Adam, Eileen Gray:Architect/Designer (New York: Abrams, 1987, rev. ed. 2000)p. 309. I have retranslated the French original.

13. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, p. 102.14. Le Corbusier, Poeme de l’angle droit (Paris: Teriade,

1955); Le Corbusier, La Ville radieuse (Paris: Editions del’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, 1935).

15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness

(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 6.421: “Ethicsand aesthetics are one and the same.”

16. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: LivingBeauty, Rethinking Art, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowmanand Littlefield, 2000); Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony,and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Michelde Montaigne, Essais (1580), trans. M. A. Screech, The Com-plete Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003); AlexanderNehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Harvard UniversityPress, 1985); Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: So-cratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (University of Cali-fornia Press, 1998); John Dewey, Democracy and Education(New York: Macmillan, 1916), chap. 22: “The Individual andthe World,” pp. 291–305; and see Dewey on habit in JohnDewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: ModernLibrary, 1922).

17. Peter York, Dictators’ Homes: Lifestyles of theWorld’s Most Colourful Despots (London: Atlantic Books,2005).

18. Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evi-dence from the Irving Trial (Indiana University Press, 2002).

19. Catherine Malabou, “Preface” to Felix Ravaisson,De l’habitude (1838), trans. Clare Carlisle and Mark Sin-clair, On Habit (New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. vii–xx,p. vii.

20. Ravaisson, De l’habitude, p. 69.21. On the mental prison, see Axel Honneth, Reification:

A New Look at an Old Idea (Oxford University Press, 2008).See also Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the NineteenthCentury,” trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, inWalter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1939; Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1999), p. 16; but Benjamin is appropriating a re-mark by Sigfried Giedion. See Irving Wohlfarth, “‘Construc-tion Has the Role of the Subconscious’: Phantasmagorias ofthe Master Builder (with Constant Reference to Giedion,Weber, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Benjamin),” in Nietzsche and“An Architecture of Our Minds,” ed. Alexandre Kostka andIrving Wohlfarth (Los Angeles: Getty Foundation, 1999),pp. 141–198.

22. For further information about Gray’s life and work,see Adam, Eileen Gray; Caroline Constant, Eileen Gray(London: Phaidon, 2000). The house at Roquebrune wasnamed E1027, and information about it is readily foundwith a search engine.

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Architecture, Life, and Habit