Do we take beauty for granted? What does it mean to behold beauty? Surely, it is both a sensory and cerebral experience. What I mean by that answer is, although it is stimulated by an outward experience, there is often an inward response. I have to admit I do get annoyed by that phrase, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" because, although technically that is existentially true, it allows a form of relativism that undermines any criteria by which we assess artworks, objects, and buildings as beautiful.
It has led to contemporary culture being careless about beauty, often dismissing it as a superficial concern or regarding it only as a particular or special focus of some art. It has meant that aesthetic quality is often neglected, seen as insubstantial and undeserving of serious attention. This has been manifest in many ways that affect society but perhaps the most disastrous and upsetting has been in the area of architecture. I have to admit I am constantly irritated and even angered by the lack of aesthetic quality of much of British post-WWII architecture.
It is not just me! The aesthetic failure of many buildings both public and private has been recognised, at least at one level, by the government who set up the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission whose last report Living with Beauty was published at the end of January this year. Chaired by the late right-wing philosopher, Roger Scruton, whom I knew in my university life as both an opinionated and sometimes feisty external examiner, the Commission had three principal aims:
To promote better design and style of homes, villages, towns and high streets, to reflect what communities want, building on the knowledge and tradition of what they know works for their area.
To explore how new settlements can be developed with greater community consent.
To make the planning system work in support of better design and style, not against it.
These aims are unobjectionable and there are now also many warm words about the quality of architectural design in the Government's White Paper Planning for the Future published in August. If, however, the rhetoric is to be turned into reality there must be Design Codes that have statutory status because one of the drawbacks for developers about aesthetic quality – 'beauty for the beholder' – is that it is likely to cost more.
The logic of demanding good design requires that there must be some understanding of what good design and beauty mean in practice. The nature of beauty was an important philosophical category, embedded in ancient Greek culture and analysed and debated throughout the European Enlightenment in the 18th century. The Greek philosopher Plato, in the Timaeus, recognised beauty as “the harmony and proportion of parts, made manifest in the ‘forms’ of the world”. His pupil Aristotle claimed that "the chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness".
So how could these definitions be quantified? For Euclid, the founder of geometry, beauty was identified with a particular idea of ratio and symmetry of parts to the whole, which was determined in the golden ratio of 1.6180339887... which was plotted by the Pisan mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci in the 13th century in what is now known as the Fibonacci sequence. The Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, a pioneer of modernism, used the golden ratio in order to describe the beautiful modernist building, "rhythms are at the very root of human activity", and echo "in man through an organic inevitability".
As beauty is observed we are absorbed in a pleasurable but demanding exercise of making a judgement. We need to stop being careless about aesthetic quality because when we examine the elements of beauty we value it and it enhances our lives. There is, I believe, a responsibility on the place-makers to ensure that society creates beautiful architecture in the environment both natural and constructed for everyone.
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