The term function refers to the practicality of a product, while design refers to its aesthetic aspect. When this terminology is used, the beauty of a product is understood as an ornament or added value to its practical function, and design is interpreted as constituting beauty as an ornament. Tracing the genealogy of this interpretation of design, we come to Kant’s concept of attached beauty.

According to Kant, there are two kinds of beauty. One is ‘free’ and the other is ‘attached’. Free beauty is the beauty that does not presuppose any concept of what the object is, while attached beauty presupposes such a concept and is subordinate to the completeness of the object. By conceptual fulfillment of an object, Kant means the degree to which a certain concept is fulfilled by a work, its performance, function, or specifications, and the degree of fulfillment is measured in terms of what Kant calls ‘mechanical skill’.

For example, a building (a church, a palace, an armory, a pavilion) must fulfill the conditions and performance as a machine, a means to realize its practical purpose. If the building is beautiful at the same time, then its beauty is the one attached to its practical performance. If a building is beautiful even though it is useless as a ‘church’, it is no longer a church but a huge sculpture.

Kant’s distinction between free and attached beauty corresponds to the distinction between pure (fine art) and applied art (crafts) in the 19th century. Pure art (sculpture, painting, music, etc.) is the object of pure taste judgment and is a ‘mechanical beauty’ that competes based on the beauty of form alone, irrespective of the practicality of the object. Applied arts, in contrast, are decorative techniques that are added later to specifications that can be measured based on concepts. Thus, applied arts, or crafts, as the name suggests, are a mixture of mechanical and beautiful art. According to Kant, this admixture of mechanics in beauty hinders the purity of the judgment of beauty. In the 19th century, this impurity, combined with capitalism’s desire for commodities and imperialism’s desire for national prestige, distorts beauty and beautiful human relations. William Morris, who was active in the latter half of the 19th century, criticized severely such distortion and corruption in the design of the time. It can be said that he provided the opportunity for subsequent design to overcome design as an applied art and shift to design as functionalism.

(Toru Koga)