Nelson Goodman and Modern Architecture

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.

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.