Architecture and beauty, A Troubled Relationship.
An evening discussion about my book.

Those outside the architectural profession often perceive a building to be brilliant for the aesthetic experience it offers. And yet bizarrely, from the advent of modernism architects have invented a multitude of strategies to absolve themselves from making visual judgments. 

The prevailingly impersonal nature of 20th century architecture resulted in the consistent reduction of our profession’s complexity; where cultural, artistic, poetic, or metaphysical aspects were questioned too often while rationality, economy, utility and technology were always deployed.

Objectifying the design process by enhancing its cerebral input and reducing any personal intuition eventually led to a lack of confidence in how much intellectual depth could be captured by intuitive architectural imagery. 

The ‘eye’ in particular, as a tool of judgment, was trivialized along with the subjective ‘I’ and only ever used as a secret, un-discussed and often concealed weapon.

The modern usage of ‘aesthetics’ meaning taste or ‘sense’ of beauty ties the term to personal attitude. Architecture with no personal visual discrimination, while commenting on a broader, collective cultural spectrum, deprives people of an emotional environment: since if there is no emotional input there is no architecture that touches people’s emotions. 

Now more than ever before it is our creative role to bring a new beauty to cities, and to substitute alienation with a wider the pallet of emotions.  

Text by Yael Reisner.