Aesthetic Boredom in Everyday Architecture

Abstract

I defend that saying in everyday parlance that an architectonic space is ‘boring’ can be an aesthetic judgement and, in such cases, we can talk about a form of aesthetic boredom about spaces. As an emotion (rather than a mood), aesthetic boredom would be the negative or opposite emotion to what might be called our aesthetic excitement about a space. The latter would be our emotional response to what I call the aesthetic quality of inhabitability: the quality of a space which we experience as being responsible for 1) creating possibilities which are significant for us (regarding what we can do and how we can do it in that space), and for 2) enhancing (qualitatively) the experience of realizing those possibilities. Unlike (simple) boredom about a space, aesthetic boredom would be boredom due primarily to the absence of inhabitability thus understood. As to the frustrated desire which, as it is commonly understood, is constitutive of boredom, I will argue that this desire is the one revealed by our constant active search for inhabitability in the spaces in which we find ourselves, or for greater inhabitability when we choose them. Our frustration is a response, not simply to not encountering possibilities, but rather, to realizing that there are none where we expect some. This would explain the considerable strength of our (negative) response to boring spaces. We experience aesthetically boring spaces as spaces that deny both significant possibilities and the enhancement of the felt quality of the experience of realizing them.