Beauty
The indispensable category explained, justified and critically employed
Patrik Schumacher, Tongji, Shanghai 2024
Published in: Architectural Intelligence, Springer Nature, November 2024
Abstract:
Beauty as the manifestation of aesthetic responses and valuations is a human universal. All societies operate with (a version of) the category of beauty. We all navigate the world aesthetically. Architecture and the design disciplines together shape the outward appearance of the social world. Therefore, beauty as the engaged response to appearances should be an indispensable category of all design discourses, including architectural discourse. However, beauty is an increasingly embattled and by now nearly extinct category within a conscientious architectural discourse that is rightly aspiring to rational accountability and evidence-based propositions. Beauty has been eliminated from the discipline’s discourse because it is seen as subjective and irrational, as an irresponsible diversion or distraction from architecture’s societal tasks. However, beauty is clearly not being abandoned by the end-users of design. Nor are aesthetic choices absent from actual contemporary design practice. Beauty is just no longer being explicitly referred to.
Introduction
This paper argues that the characterization of beauty as subjective or irrational is fallacious, and that the abandonment of the category is a grave mistake that impoverishes architectural discourse and practice. This paper will justify the category of beauty by explicating the way aesthetic sensibilities and valuations function and how they contribute to both the efficiency and success of the designer’s efforts as well as to the life of the end-users. The thesis of this paper is thus that aesthetic responses are, more often than not, beneficial, life-enhancing responses. By demonstrating this, and by identifying the conditions of this functional rationality of beauty, this essay hopes to rehabilitate the category of beauty and integrate it into our conscientious contemporary discourse within the design disciplines. The paper will also discuss how to engage both critically and constructively with aesthetic values and sensibilities within contemporary architectural discourse and practice.
The paper thus defends beauty against its “progressive”, conscientious detractors by making its rationality and utility explicit, while also defending it against its regressive, dogmatic-conservative protectors.
It should be noted that this paper does not consider the increasingly rarefied, artificial realm of art that often preoccupies discussions of aesthetics. The focus here is on the aesthetic responses to the objects and environments that frame and facilitate everyday life. This includes the aesthetic consideration that operate within the design processes of these objects and environments. The artworld and is far removed from the everyday functioning of social life and has developed its own peculiar logic of evaluations. This exclusion of art, especially of contemporary art, from the scope of the theory of beauty presented here will become clear after the theory has been stated.
The Riddle of Beauty
Beauty seems to be wholly subjective. Beauty is indeed no inherent quality that resides in the object itself. This truism has to be re-stated, due to the fact that many attempts to defend beauty work with just such a reification of beauty. Such attempts to defend the category of beauty by taking it uncritically for granted, implying its reification as something irreducible, can be found in a recent publication entitled ‘Five Critical Essays on Beauty’ (Williams, 2023). Wendy Earle’s attempt to defend beauty in her essay ‘Lifting the Spirits’ (Earle, 2023) works with just such a reification of beauty as something given. A second article in the same publication, Rachel Jordon’s ‘The Truth about Ugliness’ (Jordon, 2023), operates with a similar uncritical, objectifying approach. Such attempts to defend beauty by taking it for granted and simply celebrating it will surely backfire. In contrast, we must rather start with the acknowledgement that beauty is not a substance but a relation between object and subject. This relation consists, first of all, in individual responses or acts of appreciation and selection. However, this, in itself, does not make beauty something merely subjective or arbitrary. Neither is it merely an intersubjective convention. The problem is that the act of aesthetic choice happens intuitively, spontaneously, instinctively, without any rational deliberation. (This also has its advantages, as will be argued below). Further, we are usually unable to rationally account for our aesthetic choices when asked. We rather respond to queries by saying something like “I just like it”, or simply: “its beautiful”. In everyday conversations, including routine professional architectural discussions, there are no rationalisations of beauty at play. This lack of explicit rationality leaves us with the (false) impression of a merely subjective statement.
Contemporary architectural theory and discourse is abandoning the category of beauty because it seems to resist rational accountability and because the concern for beauty seems to run counter to architecture’s concern with architecture’s functions. The premise of this paper is that aesthetic valuations would indeed have to be rejectedif they were merely arbitrary, subjective responses. To defend architecture’s concern with beauty by simply insisting that rational accountability must be suspended to give “the ineffable” it’s due, or because “life is more than utility”, does not constitute a legitimate rational defence. The author also rejects the idea that beauty is a pleasure or value in its own right that deserves appreciation and is worth some sacrifices in utility.
The premise that beauty stands opposed to utility in the sense of an unavoidable trade-off, although a wide-spread assumption, is a fundamental fallacy that plagues our discipline. The thesis put forward here, in contrast is – as will be elaborated below – that beauty and utility go often enough hand in hand, often enough to give aesthetic responses the benefit of the doubt, and to recommend the hypothesis of beauty’s functional underpinnings as well as the related heuristic principle of searching for the implicit functional rationality in case of given aesthetic commitments.
The premise here is that rational-functional probing, explanation and justification should, in the final analysis, indeed be the condition for accepting or rejecting categories and their related human practices. This rationality test (functionality/utility test) must also be guiding architecture’s critical self-reflection. There is no other way to constitute a credible, academic, discourse-led professional discipline. Therefore, again, if beauty were indeed inherently ineffable, rationally indefensible, or outright irrational, then it would indeed have to be cast aside. If aesthetic judgements and choices are to have credibility, they must be explicable via the rational reconstruction of their operative values, and thereby would be in principle reproducible.
The Programme of Rational Reconstruction
The concept and term ‘rational reconstruction’ was first put forward by the philosopher Rudolf Carnap, in the context of the philosophy of science. Carnap introduced the concept in his 1928 book ‘The Logical Construction of the World’, and defined the concept (in the 1967 edition) as follows: “By rational reconstruction is here meant the searching out of new definitions for old concepts. The old concepts did not ordinarily originate by way of deliberate formulation, but in more or less unreflected and spontaneous development. The new definitions should be superior to the old in clarity and exactness, and, above all should fit into a systematic structure of concepts.” (Carnap, 1967, p.v). The concept and programme was then most prominently picked up and generalised by the philosopher and sociologist Juergen Habermas. Habermas is pursuing a “rational reconstruction of competences and structures of consciousness hitherto operative in history. The work of reconstruction can then link up with functional approaches and empirical explanations.”(Habermas, 1996, p.3)
This concept and programme starts with the presumption of an implicit functional rationality in observed practices, for instance prevailing scientific practice, or prevailing morality, and then moves on to a functional explication of those practices. However, rational reconstruction does not rest with mere explanation. Rather it goes beyond a mere explanation that makes a given functional rationality explicit, towards a critique that points to inconsistencies/deficiencies in the prevailing practices and thereby turns normative proposing a reformed, systematized and upgraded version of the practises in question.
Rational reconstruction operates here on two levels that should be distinguished: The first level concerns the legitimacy of the very category of beauty and the very practice of aesthetic valuations and choices. The rationality of this category and practice must be explained. The second level concerns historically and culturally specific aesthetic regimes. With respect to architecture and the design disciplines this level reconstructs the historical rationality of the epochal styles. For instance, the author has elsewhere explained how the particular features of Baroque architecture make sense in terms of the urban and architectural tasks of the era of absolutism, namely the compositional integration of large building complexes with commensurate legibility from a distance, and how Renaissance architecture was failing in relation to these tasks. More generally, on this level the whole sequence of styles must be reconstructed, with special attention to the transitions, and how at each step a shift in repertoire and aesthetic values responds to changing historical tasks and/or changing technological means. This level-two detailed reconstruction is ultimately necessary to flesh out and corroborate the level-one reconstruction formulated in more general terms. The required detailed reconstructions would go beyond the scope of this paper. However, the author has delivered this necessary work elsewhere (Schumacher, 2010 & 2012). Here some interspersed illustrations must suffice.
The presumption of an underlying functional rationality is a very general heuristic principle the author subscribes to. All of the author’s theoretical pursuits are guided by the probing quest for functional explanation with respect to persistent categories and professional practices. This quest for functional explanation also pervades biology and – significantly – sociology. To be sure this principle must be understood as heuristic principle, not as a priori axiom claiming that all artefacts and all their features are indeed functional. Further, even when we find a specific function that can be ascribed to a specific feature, we must not therefore presume that the feature was consciously designed with this function in mind. Often features assume latent or hidden functions, unnoticed by end-users, and unintended by the designers. One important example is the semiological functioning of ornament which is often neither intended, nor understood. This misunderstanding about ornament led to the modernist abandonment of ornament, and thereby to the communicative impoverishment of modern architecture. Therefore, the search for functional explanations that goes beyond the obvious is a fertile pursuit in all domains that have been subject to a long evolutionary history. Another set of examples of evolved functionality are the climatic adaptation we find in the various vernaculars around the world. These adaptations emerged via trial and error and can now inspire a science-based reconstruction and rationalisation as sustainable passive systems, in a research programme that closely resembles the broader bio-mimetic research programme.
This concept and programme of rational reconstruction can also be applied to a discipline like architecture, as well as to specific component practices of this discipline like the practice of aesthetic valuation and choice. The rational reconstruction of the concept of beauty and its attendant practices is the aim of this essay. The fitting of this concept/practice into a coherent system of concepts/practices called for in Carnap’s definition quoted above was provided by the author in his comprehensive discourse analysis and rational reconstruction of the discipline of architecture ‘The Autopoiesis of Architecture’, where beauty was already a precisely located part of the reconstructed system.
The author’s theoretical work – here and in general – is a project of rationalisation, guided by what might be termed the pervasive presumption of ultimate rationality. That means all of architectural practice, without residue, should be subject to rational reconstruction, critique and upgrading. The motivation is not only pure theory here, but the agenda of applied theory: the ambition to design and build high performance environments where, again, all features are functionally motivated. This is of course an infinite project. This is both an important and fertile research and development programme in a field like architecture that evolved over many centuries but to this day has not developed a sophisticated scientific culture. Those areas that were more easily susceptible to scientific treatment – the aspects of technical functionality – were split off to become the engineering disciplines. What remained, namely all aspects of social functionality, did persist in operating largely in either a craft-like or in an intuitive manner. This by itself does not invalidate architecture’s ways. But it’s an invitation to functionally probe, explicitly validate, and where called for, reform and upgrade architecture’s ways of working. The author has classified the aspects of the built environment’s social functionality into four task domains for the rationalisation and upgrading of architecture’s competency: spatiology, phenomenology, semiology and dramaturgy. In all these domains aesthetic valuations play an indispensable part in the designer’s work. While aesthetic values play no role in the science of engineering, they might still, to some extent, guide the designing engineer’s intuitions and sense-checking. They certainly come into play in the architect’s engagement with the engineering results and their compositional orchestration. Just as we all inevitably navigate our everyday world aesthetically, so must designers navigate their design world when in the thick of developing a design, calling for myriads of rapid design decisions that cannot all be explicitly rationalized in the heat of the moment. Aesthetic sensibilities must be relied upon here. This is rationally defensible if the underlying sensibilities, values, principles and creative methods have been scrutinized and confirmed in a prior critical investigation.
In establishing this principle of ultimate rationalisation, we must be wary of rationalist hubris. We should give long standing practices the benefit of the doubt even if they are not explicitly underpinned by rational argument. We must avoid brushing aside traditional categories and practices too quickly and too impatiently, just because they don’t come with ready-made explicit functional justifications. The mere fact that a category is uncritically taken for granted and practiced in accordance with tradition does not imply that it is to be cast aside as irrational superstition. This was the mistake of the first phase of the enlightenment. And this is the mistake of our current bashful abandonment of beauty. Traditions are evolutionary survivors and therefore, even if dogmatic or prima facie irrational, deserve at least the benefit of the doubt, and some investment in a search for a functional explanation. The pervasive fact of relying on aesthetic evaluations, both by end-users and by designers, should have alerted our contemporary conscientious architects that they might be missing something. In a different context Rem Koolhaas formulated this heuristically useful reminder: The persistent pervasiveness of a phenomenon implies that it must mean something. Hegel used the memorable dictum “the real is the rational” to express the same insight (although in his case it was underpinned by a false pre-Darwinian metaphysical faith). The intellectual aspiration should be to query and then, if possible, rationally reconstruct and explain the hidden function and benefit of pervasive practices that are not self-transparent and seem prima facie inexplicable. Again: The dictum “the real is the rational” is only a heuristic principle for generating promising hypotheses, not an axiom.
With longstanding cultural practices and traditions, we can usually presume to find some underlying functional rationale. However, uncritical traditional practices display inertia. This means that the practice continues to be reproduced even if the life-conditions with respect to which the practice in question represents a functional adaptation might have disappeared. The cultural practice has then lost its functional justification, and runs idle, might be comparable to rudiments we find in organisms. Practices will probably persist as long as there are no competing alternative practices as challengers. As example we might cite the practice of transmitting epic stories via highly formalized and structured speech involving rhythm, rhyme and meter, as we can find in ancient epics and dramas, but also in many later works of European literature, all the way into the 19th Century. The functional rationale of this phenomenon and practice is mnemotechnical and the stabilisation of oral reproduction and transmission of important societal founding myths and epics, especially important in pre-literary, and to some extent also in literary civilisations prior to printing where literacy was not widespread. Thus, here we have a functionally grounded practice that might seem to be motivated by an inexplicable investment in beauty, but also one that has displayed inertia and lingered on long beyond its functional necessity, and indeed became a feature imposing dysfunctional friction.
Solution of the Riddle
The core argument put forward here is that shared aesthetic responses and ideals of beauty have the function – not conscious purpose – to discriminate the beneficial from the detrimental.
How is this achieved? There are often systematic, though not fail safe, external clues of an entity’s functionally relevant capacities, and there are processes of cultural evolution as well as individual learning mechanisms that form well-adapted aesthetic sensibilities. These aesthetic sensibilities are then generating reflex-like differential responses (attraction or repulsion) to encountered (beneficial or detrimental) objects, places and persons, on the basis of the stimulus provided by the external appearance of the respective object, place or person. This function of aesthetic sensibilities is latent rather than manifest. In evolutionary theory the concept of function is applied to a feature, mechanism or behaviour if its effect contributes to its reproduction. This ‘selected effects’ definition of ‘function’ is also pertinent with respect to cultural evolution. This definition also fits with respect to the function of aesthetic sensibilities because the reproduction of these sensibilities depends on their beneficial effect.
In its most basic form aesthetic sensibilities involve attraction and repulsion as conditioned reflexes. Although not reducible to these, the appreciation of beauty in aesthetic judgement is connected with such conditioned gut reactions, delivering an instant intuitive discrimination of the beneficial. The core thesis put forward in this essay is therefore that our sense of beauty, our being drawn towards the beautiful, is our conditioned, intuitive way to recognize and choose the useful. This is the underlying rationality of beauty, the solution of the riddle of beauty. To cast this into a succinct formula: Beauty is the outward appearance of utility.
Here is an example that also exemplifies the conditions and limitations within which beauty signifies utility: As example may serve us the classical ideal of architectural beauty that originated in ancient Greece and Rome, to be picked up again in the Renaissance, and once more in 19th Century neo-classical architecture. The classical system of proportions regulates the ratio of column height to inter-column spacing and column width, i.e. it insures the avoidance of long spans and buckling. It further gives a vertical shape to the windows and pulls them away from the building corners, thereby allowing for a sufficient stretch of solid wall to absorb the horizontal forces originating in the window arches. All these features are structurally sensible under the premise of masonry construction and determined by experience, and finally conventionalised into a rule system and ideal of beauty that allows both designers and end-users to visually and intuitively identify and be attracted to structurally sound constructions. The same applies to details like column bases, capitals, arches etc., as well as to the imposition of overall symmetry. The latter is not only symbolising the integrity of the structure but is indeed structurally called for to balance weights and thereby to avoid cracks due to uneven settlement of foundations. A composition that violates these rules would look ugly and thereby signal a lack of reliability. The shift from masonry to steel and concrete construction undermined the rationale of the classical way of composing. It had become a meaningless formalism, as was finally – much later than structural functionality would have suggested – called out by the modernists, dismissing all historical styles and ideals of beauty. The aesthetic revolution initiated by Art Nouveau and Expressionism, and finally delivered by the heroes of modernism in the 1920s, in a by then long overdue coup de grace, spelled the end of classical beauty and the beginning of the modernist ideal, as canonized by Hitchcock Russel and Johnson in ‘The International Style’ in 1932. Fifty years later this ideal disintegrated and finally, after 20 years of experimentation through postmodernism and deconstructivism, a new system of principles emerged, soon to be christened and canonized as parametricism. This latest shift in aesthetic values is, again, underpinned by underlying conditions of functionality.
Aesthetic responses stand in a continuity with the most basic discriminatory response mechanisms of attraction versus repulsion we find in all mobile organisms as a basic survival mechanism. Even bacteria discriminate the beneficial from the detrimental and navigate their environment on this basis, by moving up the nutrician gradient. With respect to human life it is helpful to point to our gut reactions to attractive or repulsive smells and tastes because at this basic visceral level the functionality of the response in terms of approaching the beneficial and avoiding the detrimental is rather obvious and unproblematic. Even the seemingly most disinterested, elevated, culturally refined aesthetic judgement stands – or at least should stand – in a fundamental continuity with the basic attraction vs repulsion mechanism, lest it runs idle having disconnected with all distinction of the beneficial versus detrimental. The concept of “taste” – aesthetic taste, architectural taste etc. – is a useful linguistic trace of the continuity claimed here. There also exist highly sublimated cases of refined aesthetic judgement in highly rarefied conditions of connoisseurship far removed from the practicalities of everyday life. Such an rarefied practice has little significance in the life of society, or for that matter, within architectural discourse or within the life addressed and framed by architecture. To the extend that an untethered connoisseurship or self-referential aestheticism does exist within architectural culture, we should be rather critical of its influence. It is more likely to confuse and obscure rather than to productively guide architectural design.
The rationality of aesthetic responses involves two aspects, the aspect of recognition and the aspect of action motivation, i.e. perceptual-cognitive rationality (identification) and evaluative-motivational rationality (discrimination). Let’s consider, once more, the pervasive human practice of ornamentation alluded to above: It seems as if its purpose is to beautify, for the sake of aesthetic delight, as an end in itself. However, ornamentation is a human universal, i.e. there are no human societies in which ornamentation, including the ornamentation of the human body itself, is not pervasive, and indeed absorbs a very significant amount of resources, also in otherwise extremely poor societies. From this we can draw the conclusion that human society cannot function without ornamentation. No human group could have survived if it had just wasted such huge efforts on useless ornamentation. However, only those who invested in developing systems of ornamentation survived. This means that ornamentation is indispensable for human survival and flourishing. The explanation here is that human societies are increasingly large, differentiated, cooperative productive organisations that can only function if both the different social spaces and the social roles are legibly marked and distinguished. The designed environments and fashion systems deliver the semiological system necessary to sustain the division of labour and the attendant social order of society. The concept of semiology points us to the recognition aspect. The concept of beauty and the aesthetic sensibility sustaining it – which here also includes the sense of propriety – points also beyond recognition to the required motivating emotional investment. The reproduction of the semiologically functioning system of markings and demarcations become useful fetishes and are sustained by compulsive internalisations in aesthetic sensibilities.
The evolution of the general mechanism and practice of aesthetic valuations and choices goes deep into biological-genetic evolution, but also evolved further through a long cultural evolution. The evolutionary emergence of particular ideals of beauty has partly also genetically sustained components or aspects while being largely driven and differentiated by cultural evolution, especially in the realm of the built environment and architecture. Cultural traditions are transmitted via socialisation processes. However, individual learning based on direct experiences also shape individual sensibilities and tastes by way of conditioning.
The idea of beauty’s dependence on utility has been a staple theorem of the 20th Century Modern Movement, and can also be found in the writings of 19th Century architects like Gottfried Semper and Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. The modern functionalist architects insisted that beauty cannot be pursued directly but only emerges indirectly as a result of a functional pursuit. Le Corbusier presented utilitarian industrial structures like grain silos, ships, and air planes, and invited us to see their (unself-conscious) beauty, or rather he declared them to be beautiful in a revolutionary aesthetic manifesto.
The understanding of beauty’s crucial connection to performance, while mostly ignored or forgotten, is thus not new. It even has much older precursors. We find the central insight in David Hume’s ‘Treatise on Human Nature’, where he quotes a paragraph from Quintilian’s ‘Institutio Oratoria’ that already clearly expresses the core insight: “An athlete whose muscles have been developed by training presents a handsome appearance; he is also better prepared for the contest. Attractive appearance is invariably associated with efficient functioning.” (Hume, 1740). The crucial element missing here is the necessity of recurrent historical updating of ideals of beauty.
The Universality of the Category of Beauty & the Historical Relativity of Particular Ideals of Beauty
Here is how I explained beauty in an article from 2001, in the context of architecture/urban design: “The aesthetic judgement of cities and buildings is rational in as much as it operates as an immediate intuitive appreciation of performativity, short-circuiting first hand comparative experience or extended analysis. Aesthetic judgement thus represents an economical substitute for experience. It depends on a tradition that disseminates accumulated experience via dogmatic rules. This dogmatism is the virtue as well as the limit of aesthetically condensed experience.” (Schumacher, 2001). The virtue of this reduction to dogma is its cognitive economy, stability and easy transmissibility. (Analysis, rational explanation, and verification, can be skipped.) Its limitation is its inertia in the face of rapid transformations in the conditions of life. The condition of beauty’s proper functioning is thus a certain stability of life conditions, so that there is enough time for well-adapted morphologies to evolve and enough time, moreover, for respectively well-attuned aesthetic sensibilities to form and spread.
When technological and social life-conditions, change, then high-performance urban morphologies change also, and therefore aesthetic responses should (and will eventually) change too. “With the development of society what once was an accumulated wisdom becomes an irrational prejudice that has to be battled on the ideological plane of aesthetic value. Such a battle was waged and won by the heroes of ‘modern functionalism’. The technological and social revolutions called forth an aesthetic revolution, rejecting the classical canon and establishing and aestheticizing non-classical proportions, asymmetry and seriality.” (Schumacher, 2001). Buildings that were admired as beautiful are now seen as ugly monstrosities, and buildings that would have been monsters in the eyes of those socialized into the classical canon are now the height of pristine elegance. That’s comparable to the self-declared ‘revaluation of all values’ that Nietzsche tried to enact in the realm of moral values. (The analogy between aesthetic and moral sensibilities as functional adaptations to the respective historical conditions of human life is indeed pertinent.)
The architectural historian/theorist Viollet-le-Duc, anticipating the stance of modernism, was, already in his 1863-72 architectural treatise ‘Entretiens sur l’architecture’ (Discourses on Architecture), clear that the attribution of beauty depends, or should depend, on functional performance and therefore must be updated with technological progress: “We admire … a sailing vessel; we perceive that there is in this work of man … not only a wonderful product of intelligence, but also forms so perfectly adapted to their purpose that they appear beautiful …; but however beautiful these forms may be, as soon as steam power has supervened, they must be changed, for they are not applicable to the novel motive force; hence they are no longer good; and … will no longer be beautiful for us.” (Viollet-le-Duc, 1877-82).
The anthropological and historical evidence that ideals of beauty (just like moral or behavioural ideals) are malleable and culturally evolve is clear. Thus, while the category of beauty is a human universal, no particular ideals or aesthetic sensibilities are universal. Like good versus bad, the distinction beauty versus ugly, is a rather general, highly abstract evaluative distinction or discrimination mechanism that can be implemented or concretized by diverse (small) sets of criteria, or (large) sets of paradigmatic examples. To become operational beauty requires historically evolving specifications, and new paradigmatic sample sets, not every year or every decade, but certainly in times of rapid historical transformation. Different eras with different technologies and life processes require different functional morphologies that in turn will elicit appeal. As the sequence of images (1 – 3) illustrates, typical solutions become time-bound ideals of beauty that displace each other as civilisation progresses. Once a new cycle of adaptive morphogenesis has arrived at viable form exemplars, designers, and eventually end-users, can be trained on the new exemplars, like AI systems. In the case of designers this might be supported by descriptive, canonizing (not necessarily explanatory) specifications or criteria to identify exemplars as well as by recipes to create new exemplars.
The Critical-constructive engagement with Aesthetic Regimes and Sensibilities
As rational, self-critical, self-determining agents we should not indulge in our aesthetic predilections as something unchangeably given, as something to satisfy without question. We might be captured and held back by nostalgia for dysfunctional environments. We thus cannot blindly trust our aesthetic sensibilities and emotional responses. Instead, we should probe and query our aesthetic values, and if found maladapted, update them. To be sure, to overturn and update one’s ingrained aesthetic sensibilities is psychologically not always easy, even after one has gained some critical analytic insight. This probably takes some auto-suggestive effort and some time. However, these difficulties are surmountable. It would certainly help, if this is a collective effort, as in an avant-garde movement. Youth is probably also conducive. The key is that new insights eventually translate into new sensibilities delivering fail-safe, intuitive, passionate judgements.
Once this critical upgrading and re-learning has been achieved we can go back to rely on our aesthetic sensibilities and judgements. Indeed, we cannot avoid relying on them. Without the cognitive shortcuts afforded by aesthetic sensibilities we would not be able to navigate or cope with the world. What applies to us as end-users of designed environments, also applies to us as designers moving rapidly and intuitively through myriads of design decisions. Here too we must rely on the cognitive shortcuts afforded by our aesthetic intuitions and sensibilities. We must be “thinking fast” in the urgency of practical action. However, we must also set aside time for critical reflection, for thinking slow, i.e. we need to invest in slow, very slow, even book-length, analytic thinking to critique the old practices, as well as experiment, select, innovate and develop new viable practices and forms which then can become the basis for developing new fast short cuts, by conditioning new operative aesthetic sensibilities we can, once more, rely on to identify the beneficial and reject the dysfunctional.
Beauty is a very abstract, empty, but historically programable and re-programable category. This allows the category itself to be resilient, and indeed ultra stable. The programs that in each socio-economic epoch specify the particular operational criteria of beauty constitute the aesthetic regimes of the epochal styles. Architecture responded to and participated in the transformation from 19th century laissez-faire capitalism to 20th century Fordism via the transition from 19th Century historicism to 20th Century modernism. Currently architecture is, or rather should be, responding and participating in the transformation from 20th Century Fordism to our 21st Century Post-fordist Network Society, via the paradigm shift from modernism to the new epochal style of parametricism. This, once more, implies a revolution in the discipline’s and society’s aesthetic values and its ideal of architectural beauty. This new ideal of beauty also applies to all the other design disciplines from urban design to product, graphic and fashion design. The author has specified these new aesthetic values of parametricism in Volume 2 of ‘The Autopoiesis of Architecture’. A more elaborate presentation of the author’s theory of beauty can be found in Volume 1 of AoA, in section 3.8 ‘The Rationality of Aesthetic Values’. The thesis (THESIS 17) heading this chapter reads: “Aesthetic values encapsulate condensed, collective experiences within useful dogmas. Their inherent inertia implies that they progress via revolution rather than evolution.” (Schumacher, 2010, p.300). The theme of beauty is picked up again in Volume 2, chapter 8.6.3 ‘Beauty and the Evolution of Concepts of Order’ (Schumacher, 2012, p.434).
There is, at the moment, no substitute for the aesthetic navigation of the world which thus should not and indeed cannot be eradicated, at least not until AI systems substitute for our fast operating, but only slowly updating, aesthetic sensibilities. The same applies to design practice. Here too is, at the moment, no substitute for well-adapted aesthetic sensibilities as guides to make rapid intuitive design decisions or choices when confronted with the increasing abundance of (AI generated) design options. While more and more computational analysis and optimisation tools become available that empower and further rationalise the design process, these tools each address only a single partial aspect of the overall, increasingly complex, multi-objective task. Even if the designer (the wet-computing neural network) can reduce or eventually eliminate his/her reliance on aesthetic (intuitive, non-discursive, non-analytic) choices – a big if – then architects will still have to anticipate, reckon with, and steer the ineliminable aesthetic discriminations of their end-users. Therefore, architectural discourse is, on more than one count, deficient if it ignores the operation and function of our sense of beauty and of aesthetic values.
How then should architectural discourse engage with beauty? The answer implied here is: By first trying to make the aesthetic values underlying our operational sensibilities explicit, then by subjecting them to critical comparative evaluation, and, if necessary, by positing new values, and explain those with respect to their functional rationality in connection with general salient aspects of the contemporary civilisation. In the author’s writings this has taken the form of concisely formulating the formal-aesthetic heuristics – both positive and negative heuristics – of parametricism. To show that these new formal principles (formal heuristics) are congenial with current societal life-process requirements, they have been paired up with the complementary functional heuristics that guide or should guide our contemporary understanding of architecture’s explicit functional-programmatic side.
Negative formal heuristics paired up with negative functional heuristics:
- no pure platonic forms – no fixed stereotypes
- no simple repetition – no social homogenization
- no collage of unrelated entities – no segregative zoning
Positive formal heuristics paired up with positive functional heuristics:
- all forms parametric – all functions variable event scenarios
- all systems differentiated – all program domains differentiated
- all systems correlated – everything communicates with everything
These heuristics, this system of tabus and dogmas, delivers the operational definition of the epochal style of parametricism. The formal heuristics operationalize the aesthetic values of parametricism. It is important to comply without exception to the prohibitions imposed by the negative heuristics above, without compromise, so as to avoid sliding back into outmoded solutions. Especially in the avant-garde segment of the discipline backsliding is inadmissible. Only if applied without exception can the new style be really put to the test. With respect to the positive heuristics, it is important to understand that they offer, in contrast to traditional ideals of perfection, a recipe for continuous open-ended design improvement. There is always more that can be done: any form or element can be given further parametric degrees of freedom, any array or system of elements can be further differentiated, along more dimensions or more intensely along the already given dimensions. Finally, any system can be correlated with more of the other systems at play, as well as with further systems or elements in the nearer or wider context. This too offers an unbounded trajectory of design improvement. This open-ended game of correlation corresponds with the open game of the potential mutual relevance and affiliation of all programmatic offerings and events that come together in the dense synergy clusters that make up our cities in the age of the knowledge and innovation society.
These heuristics open up a huge new space of creative possibilities. Parametricism therefore offers more versatility of design problem solving and more diversity in the morphological range of its results than all prior styles put together. When this style finally achieves hegemony and admits all prior styles to the dustbin of history, this will not imply the end of diversity but it’s take-off moment.
This style is not the author’s invention. The author has rather been naming and canonizing a sustained and widespread architectural movement, by listing its most fundamental aesthetic values and by operationalizing these values into explicit formal heuristics, i.e. instructions cast into the form of dogmas and taboos that must be adhered to in every design move. These formal heuristics have been paired up with explicit functional heuristics, again both positive commands and negative prohibitions. This pairing delivers the explicit functional rationality of the respective aesthetic values.
It is the epochal styles of architecture that – in each socio-economic epoch – concretize the abstract concept of beauty via specific aesthetic regimes. Within each epochal style further progress might take the form of subsidiary styles, further refining and adapting the prevalent architectural ideal of beauty. More recently, since 2017, the author has been naming, explicating and promoting the subsidiary style of ‘Tectonism’, the current phase of parametricism, that evolved and matured over the last 15years. This style, while being captured by the general heuristics of parametricism presented above, has its own, distinct, visually recognisable characteristics and a further upgraded ideal of beauty. Tectonism pushes parametric variation, system differentiation and system correlation significantly further. At the same time it responds, to an unprecedented degree, to the latest, computationally empowered engineering logics, and is therefore marked by a significantly upgraded technical functionality. A full book-length, illustrated account of this (subsidiary) style and movement, has been published last fall (Schumacher, 2023). The morphological space of parametricism has been further enlarged by its latest distinct and superior phase of ‘tectonism’. The thereby much enriched articulatory versatility, if rigorously pursuit in the service of the designs’ communicative power, also implies a further upgrading with respect to social functionality. The morphological versatility of tectonism is being illustrated in the collage of images below. What becomes also evident here that the unity of principles and values that operates across the rich diversity of forms is recognisable as such.
Examples of Tectonism from Zaha Hadid Architects, ICD/ITKE, Antinio Gaudi, and Frei Otto. The latter are rare precursors. Despite of the morphological diversity displayed here, an unmistakeable unity can be recognized here across these differences. These forms adhere to the same set of aesthetic values.
To conclude:
Beauty is a very deeply engrained and indeed indispensable category, for end-users who must navigate the built environment aesthetically, for designers who cannot work but via aesthetic sensibilities, and for the discourse of architecture that must critically reflect and update these sensibilities and their underlying valuation criteria.
References:
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Earle, W. Lifting the Spirits, in: Williams, A. (2023). Five Critical Essays on Beauty. TR Publishing
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Schumacher, P. (2001). The Work of Beauty & the Beauty of Work. Published in: 3D to 2D – The Designer’s Republic adventures in and out of architecture with Sadar Vuga Arhitekti and Spela Mlakar, Laurance King Publishing
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