Apollo's Own: Geoffrey Scott and the Lost Pleasures of Architectural History

The intention of this paper is to analyze the view of architectural history formulated in Geoffrey Scott's The Architecture of Humanism . While Scott's views have commonly been placed in the tradition of empathy-based aesthetics, this paper will argue that most of Scott's arguments are dominantly motivated more by aesthetic formalism. Scott's book is thus an important statement regarding the application of the formalist program in architectural history. In order to present the full implications of this program, Scott's views will be compared with the conception of art history exposed by Hans-Georg Gadamer in his Truth and Method .