Nelson Goodman and Modern Architecture: A Belated Encounter

by Kasper Lægring

Overview

This book orchestrates a convergence of two discourses from the 1960s—Nelson Goodman’s aesthetic theory on one side and critiques of modern architecture articulated by figures like Peter Blake, Charles Jencks, and Robert Venturi/Denise Scott Brown on the other. Grounded in Goodman’s aesthetic theory, the book explores his conceptual framework within the context of modern architecture.

At the heart of the investigation lies Goodman’s concept of exemplification. While his notion of denotation pertains to representational elements, often ornaments, in architecture, exemplification accentuates specific formal properties at the expense of others, including color, spatial orientation, transparency, seriality, and the like. Supplemented by findings from phenomenology, the book traces these effects in buildings, notably those by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright—all key figures in the critiques of modern architecture.

Employing Goodman’s framework, the book aims to address accusations of emptiness and alienation directed at modern architecture in the postwar era. It illustrates that modern architecture symbolizes aesthetically in a fundamentally different way than architecture from earlier periods.

This book will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers, and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy, and aesthetics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032347431
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/26/2025
Series:	Routledge Research in Architecture
Pages:	298
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Kasper Lægring is a theorist of architecture and the arts, a curator, and currently a New Carlsberg Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History at Aarhus University. He is serving as the Second Vice President of the European Architectural History Network for the period 2024–2026 (with Panagiotis Farantatos). With research degrees in architecture (MS, University of Pennsylvania; PhD, The Royal Danish Academy School of Architecture) and art history (Mag.art., University of Copenhagen), he has received recognition such as the Gold Medal of the University of Copenhagen. His studies and research have been supported by numerous prestigious institutions, including the J. William Fulbright Commission, the New Carlsberg Foundation, and the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius. Some recent notable publications include contributions to A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries (Brill, 2022) and The Contested Territory of Architectural Theory (Routledge, 2022). This book is a revised and expanded version of his PhD dissertation.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Figures

Chapter 1: Introduction
Reckoning with the critique of modern architecture
A Goodmanian take on modern architecture and its critiques
Defining the object of study
Problems of demarcation
The ideological basis for modern architecture in functionalist theory
Current research into the praxis of modern architecture
Chapter 2: Applying Goodman’s aesthetic theory to architecture
Aesthetics and cognition
Aesthetics and language
Goodman as nominalist
Right or wrong rather than true or false
When does architecture take place? Goodman’s rejection of competing theories

• Languages of Art

Symbol systems and symbol schemes
Syntactic and semantic, notation, digital and analog

• Imperfect notational systems: Notational schemes

Allographic, autographic and the steps of the design process
Notational approaches: Score and script
Notation and mixed symbol systems in architecture
Denotation

• Fictitious denotation

Exemplification

• Exemplification in modern architecture

Expression (metaphorical exemplification)

• Feelings or moods?

Complex and mediate modes of reference: Allusion, variation, style

• Allusion
• Variation
• Style

Chapter 3: Symbolization in pre-modern architecture
Renaissance architecture
Mannerist architecture
Baroque architecture
Rococo architecture
Neoclassical architecture
Romanticist impulses
Historicist architecture
Chapter 4: Symbolization in the early phases of modern architecture
The Chicago School

• Wainwright Building

Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, Wiener Secession, and Catalan Modernisme

• Maison Coilliot
• Maison Horta
• Majolikahaus
• Casa Milà
• Willow Tearooms

Adolf Loos

• Looshaus

Expressionist architecture

• Het Schip
• Einsteinturm

Glass architecture
Chapter 5: The aesthetic implications of the critique of modern architecture
The International Style exhibition in 1932 as a compass
The aesthetically oriented critique of modern architecture, circa 1970
Chapter 6: Symbolization in modern architecture
The International Style: Mies van der Rohe and the minimalism of glass and steel

• Illinois Institute of Technology
• General means of aesthetic symbolization in Mies’ formalistic architecture

The International Style: Gropius, Bauhaus, and the factory aesthetic

• The Bauhaus building in Dessau
• Late works by Gropius
• Formalism and classicism in American federal and corporate International Style

The International Style: Le Corbusier and Purism

• Les Quartiers Modernes Frugès in Pessac
• The white, cubist aesthetic of the villas of Loos and Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier’s late works and the Brutalism of béton brut

• Unité d’habitation in Marseille
• Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp
• The imprint of Brutalism on late modernism

Frank Lloyd Wright and organic modernism

• Late works by Wright
• Fallingwater
• From Alvar Aalto to the notion of another modernism

Chapter 7: Conclusion
The hegemony of exemplification in modern architectural praxis
The architecture of formalism: symbolic rather than silent

Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"In this insightful and innovative book, Kasper Lægring draws on Nelson Goodman’s rigorous constructivist epistemology of symbol systems—especially Goodman’s logical typology for investigating their degree of “notationality”—to reassess the watershed transformation between premodernist and modernist architecture in the mid-twentieth century. Partly through shedding almost all “denotation,” or reference to an external object, modernist architecture could sometimes approach the formal conditions of a pure notation. Nonetheless, it continued to work representationally by way of privileging “exemplification” (as analyzed by Goodman), both literal and metaphorical, and in this regard its “aesthetic symbolization did not diminish.” Lægring carefully and convincingly assesses the “degree of exemplification”—which can be surprisingly various—in a range of different projects by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright. He shows not only that antimodernist objections to the formality and abstraction of high modernist architecture—alienating and even brutal—aren’t inherently misguided. But he also shows that its supposed ideal formality is not “meaninglessness”; rather, it creates a “choreographed appearance” that can be the vehicle of new forms of expression and allusion. Neither a defense nor a rejection of modernist architecture, Lægring’s subtle and sensitive analysis will appeal not only to historians and theorists of architecture and the modernist arts but also to philosophers, cognitive psychologists, and others interested in the symbol systems by which architecture and other arts help make our worlds.”

Whitney Davis, George C. and Helen N. Pardee Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and Theory of Ancient and Modern Art, University of California at Berkeley, USA

 

“Among the merits of this book is to give semiotics back its proper place in the theory of architecture. To this end, Kasper Lægring goes back to Nelson Goodman’s aesthetic theory of 1968. He rightly places Goodman’s concept of exemplification at the center of his analysis of classical modern architecture. Lægring shows how, on the basis of Goodman’s aesthetics, it is not only possible to profitably reassess modernist architecture and the canonized criticism of its protagonists. Beyond this on the basis of semiotics the book succeeds in recalibrating the architecture of the 21st century. How the author links the historical foundation of contemporary architecture with its theoretical conceptualization makes the book so enriching and timely.”

Jörg H. Gleiter, Professor of Architectural Theory, Technical University of Berlin, Germany

 

“Kasper Lægring’s book, Nelson Goodman and Modern Architecture, proposes that the concept of exemplification, as offered in Goodman’s understanding of art in Languages of Art, serves as a key aesthetic reference mode when experiencing modern architecture. This perspective can account for the distinctive character of modern architecture. Exemplification is one of the dominant features of symbol systems cited by Goodman, calling for both possession and reference as properties of aesthetic symbols, including buildings. Lægring’s study focuses on the symbolic features of individual buildings, and by bringing a phenomenological perspective to the study of modern architecture, he insightfully combines Goodman’s aesthetic theory with developments in architectural phenomenology. In this book, Lægring effectively applies Goodman’s take on modern architecture to advance our understanding of both architectural symbolism and Goodman’s critical insights into modern architecture.”

Curtis L. Carter, Professor of Philosophy, Marquette University, USA

From the Publisher