Plato's Account of Architect's Expertise

Although not his main topic, Plato’s account of the kind of knowledge architects possess is lucidly put in his dialogue Statesman. Plato introduces the likeness between their expertise of the statesman and the architect to illustrate an important distinction within kinds of knowledge. Contrary to what a contemporary reader may expect, Plato assigns to both the architect and the statesman a theoretical kind of knowledge. This may come as a surprise today because both architects and statesmen are routinely taken to be expert practitioners and not theoreticians. We will be focusing on the passage in the dialogue (258b5 – 261b5), where distinctions in kinds of knowledge are discussed within the context of the knowledge of an architect (ἀρχιτέκτων). However, this particular part of the dialogue occupies one of the pivotal points in the interpretative and explanatory disputes amongst scholars. Authors critical of Plato do not approve of this initial distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge, because it is either genuinely flawed and abandoned in the end (Sayre, 2006), or because theoretical knowledge in this case should be understood as pure and without any capacity to produce (Roochnik, 2005). This opposition to Plato aligns well with most contemporary architectural design theorists (Cross, 2006; Frascari, 2011; Glanville, 2014), who advocate a dominant role for practical knowledge, but insist that architectural design is a form of inquiry. They all draw their positions from Schön (1987, 1984), who sought to establish “an epistemology of practice,” using the architectural profession as a key example, outlining thus the marginal role of theoretical knowledge in architectural design and in architectural education. In this article, I argue that if we understand the nature of architectural knowledge to be essentially theoretical, but with productive capacity in practice, as Plato suggests, it will then become possible to claim that architectural design is a form of inquiry.