Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1
Professor, Department of Interior Architecture, School of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Art, Tehran, Iran.
2
Ph. D. Candidate in Architecture, Department of Architecture, Fuculty of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Art, Tehran, Iran.
3
Ph. D. in Sociology, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tehran University, Tehran, Iran.
10.22059/jfaup.2026.412603.673177
Abstract
The experience of architecture almost inevitably leads to aesthetic evaluation, yet the mechanisms underlying this process remain theoretically fragmented across philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Although taste has long been used to explain architectural evaluation, it has variously been understood as an individual disposition, a universal aesthetic faculty, or a socially conditioned preference. Consequently, no integrated conceptual framework adequately explains how architectural experience becomes aesthetic judgment through the interaction of individual agency, architectural objects, and social structures. This study therefore employs taste not as its primary object of inquiry, but as a theoretical concept for explaining this evaluative process.
The study therefore aims to reconceptualize the notion of architectural taste by integrating philosophical, psychological, and sociological perspectives into a coherent conceptual model. More specifically, it addresses the following question: How does the experience of encountering architecture become transformed into aesthetic evaluation through the interaction among individual agency, architectural objects, and social structures? Answering this question requires moving beyond disciplinary boundaries and reconsidering taste not as an isolated mental property but as a multidimensional aesthetic practice emerging within lived experience.
Methodologically, this study adopts a qualitative, interdisciplinary approach based on conceptual analysis and comparative review of theoretical literature. It synthesizes classical and contemporary scholarship in philosophical aesthetics, empirical aesthetics, environmental psychology, cognitive psychology, sociology of taste, and cultural theory. Philosophical perspectives are examined through debates on aesthetic judgment, psychological studies through perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and embodied processes, and sociological theories from Bourdieu's concept of social distinction to contemporary approaches emphasizing agency, practice, and embodiment. Particular attention is given to Arsel and Bean's Foucauldian concept of taste regimes as a framework for explaining the social production and reproduction of aesthetic norms.
The analysis demonstrates that architectural taste cannot adequately be understood from any single disciplinary perspective. Philosophically, taste provides the conceptual conditions through which architecture becomes meaningful and aesthetically judged. Competing architectural theories and aesthetic traditions shape different criteria for evaluating architectural works and therefore influence the intellectual framework within which judgments are formed. Psychologically, taste is not merely a subjective preference but an embodied cognitive process involving perception, emotion, memory, prior experience, cultural background, and learned aesthetic competencies. Architectural evaluation emerges through the interaction between the perceiving individual, the physical environment, and contextual factors rather than from the architectural object alone.
From a sociological perspective, the study argues that taste functions simultaneously as an aesthetic practice and as a social process. Earlier sociological theories, particularly Bourdieu's, interpreted taste primarily as a marker of social distinction and class position. Contemporary scholarship, however, increasingly shifts attention from asking what taste signifies toward examining how taste is socially produced and reproduced. Within this perspective, architectural taste develops through continuous interaction between individual agency and broader cultural structures rather than being determined exclusively by either. Individuals actively cultivate aesthetic competencies, while institutions, educational systems, media, markets, brands, digital platforms, and professional discourses collectively organize the conditions under which architectural judgments become possible.
Drawing upon Arsel and Bean's interpretation of Foucauldian theory, the study further conceptualizes architectural taste through the notion of taste regimes. Taste regimes are understood as discursive, normative, and structural networks that organize aesthetic practice by defining desirable forms of perception, evaluation, and engagement with architectural objects. These regimes operate through interrelated mechanisms of problematization, ritualization, and instrumentalization, thereby transforming dispersed individual preferences into socially meaningful aesthetic practices. Rather than directly determining individual choices, taste regimes establish the conditions within which aesthetic agency is exercised. Consequently, architectural taste emerges through an ongoing reciprocal relationship among social structures, individual actors, and architectural objects, each continuously shaping and reshaping the others.
The principal contribution of this study is the development of an integrated conceptual model that reconstructs architectural taste as a dynamic process rather than a fixed attribute of either individuals or buildings. The proposed framework identifies three inseparable dimensions of architectural experience: individual agency, architectural objects, and social structures. Architectural evaluation is interpreted as the outcome of the continuous interaction among these three dimensions, rather than the product of any single one of them. This reconceptualization expands the theoretical scope of architectural taste beyond traditional debates concerning beauty, preference, or social distinction by emphasizing aesthetic practice, embodied experience, and the social production of evaluation.
The study concludes that architectural taste should not be understood simply as an individual's preference, a property of architecture, or a direct reflection of social class. Instead, it represents the aesthetic process through which architectural experience acquires meaning and value within specific social and cultural contexts. By integrating philosophical, psychological, and sociological approaches into a unified conceptual framework, the study provides a theoretical foundation for future empirical investigations of architectural taste and offers a broader understanding of contemporary architectural experience, particularly regarding the interaction between agency, materiality, and the social organization of aesthetic judgment.
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