Architect, Dr Yael Reisner, TAB 2019’s head curator, was the two-day symposium’s convener, curator and main moderator.
The long term taboo and the first buds of new interest in beauty
Many architects still associate the use of the word beauty with shallowness, old world, or non-progressive values, a cultural bias that is expressed in architecture and also in politics, psychology, poetry and music. Paradoxically, the first measure of good architecture continues to be its capacity to create a great aesthetic experience.
The pursuit of beauty ceased to be a lead generator of architectural design in the early 1940s, when objective considerations were promoted as rational and pragmatic and subjective decision making seen as irrelevant.
Advances in disciplines such as neurobiology suggest that civilisation could not exist in the absence of pleasure, including the experience beauty. Beauty is part of the neurobiological structure that makes us not only happier, but healthier.
In parallel I dived into the world of Mathematics and its ongoing trust in beauty, and since 2018, I was drawn to the contemporary triple O movement in philosophy, (the Objects Oriented Ontology), particularly to Graham Harman – its founder – and to his numerous books and articles.
The first buds of a new interest in aesthetics are emerging in architectural discourse too. This cultural shift returns us to the individual’s role in generating new knowledge but increasingly in collaboration with technology and the logic of machine ‘thinking’, forming a new partnership for our post-digital era. Its influence on human intuition and decision making is coming to the fore in many disciplines, breathing new life into the status of aesthetics and beauty.
An Interdisciplinary Symposium
Listening to the symposium is an opportunity to catch up with the now in a number of disciplines including: architecture, neuroscience, neuroaesthetics, poetry, mathematics, artificial intelligence and digital technologies related to these fields. Symposium participants include both distinguished scholars and leading architects and designers.
The experience of beauty is similar in architecture, poetry, mathematics, music, and in the visual and performing arts, being characterised by qualities such as elegance, profundity, originality, clarity, seriousness, significance, ambiguity. The list goes on, because no one can define beauty in simple terms.It is quite striking when one considers the significance of visual thinking to intuition and good design, how subjectivity and intuition lead the way in creative activity, and how beauty is related to all of that.
Mies.TV’s Documentary Film : Why Does Beauty Matter?
The Film was taken during TAB 2019’s opening week . It’s a 27 min. document built up through the basic questions asked by its makers, featuring in-depth interviews with the head curator Yael Reisner, some of the participating architects: Space Popular,Sou Fujimoto, March Studio,KTA, Fologram, as well as Nick Luscombe (DJ), Graham Harman (philosopher), Ron Aharoni (mathematician) and Enoch Taylor (neuroscientist).
To Watch the Film Click On this Link:
https://youtu.be/JjZbmJddlzI
The four extra symposium’s moderators
Dr Fleur Watson, (curator, author and editor, Melbourne), Kaja Pae, (architect, physicist, and Maja magazine’s editor in chief, Tartu/Tallinn), and Prof. Martyn Hook, (Dean of Melbourne School of Architecture & Urban Design at RMIT University, Melbourne) and Barnaby Gunning(Architect, London).
