Rappel au désordre: Performative Aesthetics and the Ethics of the Sublime

Over the last decades, an increasingly competitive market economy has led to what is often referred to as a general aestheticization. The responses to this conditional change within the fields of architecture and urban planning have varied. On the one hand, it has been embraced as a final recognition of architecture's symbolic potentials. On the other hand it has caused strong contestation, articulated aither as a new urbanist return to a natural urban form or as claims for a "rappel a l'ordre", a return to a geuine tectonic order, thus revealing an unresolved tension between aesthetics and the spatial disciplines. This paper therefore tries to bring into attention the more complex and spatially critical aspects of aestheticization, proposing a reorientation of architectural aesthetics in the direction of the intermediary and performative