Beauty

Definition

Beauty is the quality that pleases in the experience of an object or environment. In Kant's aesthetics, the judgment of beauty is disinterested — it pleases without reference to a concept or a purpose — and yet it lays claim to universality, positing that others ought to agree. For architecture, beauty has historically been one of the three Vitruvian aims (firmitas, utilitas, venustas), but its status is contested: Derrida lists the "pursuit of beauty/harmony/completeness" among the four foundations architecture must deconstruct, while Morgan reads Kant as opening an "expanded notion of architecture beyond mere beauty" through the sublime. The question of whether architectural beauty is an autonomous formal quality, a socially-constructed value (as Csikszentmihalyi shows "visual values as socially constructed"), or a metaphysically-loaded ideal is a live tension across the wiki's sources.

Key Thinkers

• Immanuel Kant — the disinterested judgment of beauty; the beautiful vs. the sublime.
• Diane Morgan — beauty and the sublime in Kant's relevance for architecture.
• Jacques Derrida — beauty/harmony as one of architecture's metaphysical foundations to deconstruct.
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — visual values (including beauty) as socially constructed.

Related Concepts

• Sublime — the aesthetic category that exceeds and qualifies beauty.
• Aesthetic Judgment — the faculty that issues judgments of beauty.
• Aesthetic Experience — the sensuous encounter within which beauty is felt.
• Ethics — Harries argues ornament/decorations bear on the ethical function of architecture beyond beauty.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (Hope 1807/2006) — beauty's two-tier doctrine in the design-reform lineage's founding document (1807): every article of furniture unites "the more essential requisites of utility and comfort" with "a certain number of secondary attributes of elegance and beauty, which, without impeding the chief purpose of the object, may enable its shape and accessories to afford additional gratification, both to the eye and to the imagination" (p. 153) — beauty secondary to use yet "of such importance to the extension of our rational pleasures" that the trade's neglect of it ("totally destitute of those attributes of true elegance and beauty") is the reform's founding indictment; "principles of visible beauty" as a knowledge the upholsterer lacks and the cultivated designer possesses (p. 153); and beauty's economic effect — the well-formed article gains its pleasure "to the eye and mind" as "the most lively, most permanent, and most unfading enjoyment" (p. 154), against the expensive-but-not-beautiful ("more expensive, without becoming more beautiful," p. 154). The Vitruvian triad here at the furniture scale: utility and comfort essential, beauty the indispensable secondary.
• Kant for Architects — beauty, the sublime, and Kant's aesthetics.
• Design and Order in Everyday Life — visual values as socially constructed.
• The Classical Language of Architecture — the classical alternative to Kant: beauty as "a demonstrable harmony of parts" secured by proportion ("harmony analogous to musical harmony"); Summerson's caution that "a vast amount of pretentious nonsense has been written about proportion."
• Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — beauty's social-registration theory, against every disinterested account: "This shows how the link between ornament and beauty, which seems self-evident, is intelligible only through the mediation of order. The ornament is beautiful, even as mutilation, if it registers one in an order with implicit or explicit laws" (p. 316) — beauty not a property of the object nor a disinterested judgment but the effect of registration: the ornament is beautiful because and insofar as it assigns its bearer "a place in a social or cosmic order" (p. 316), the proof being the equivalence of registrants (bound feet, the Warhol print, the eighteenth-century Western man) and the limit-case of excess, where "magnificent" named largesse, not beauty (p. 321). The most radical claim in the wiki's beauty material: the beautiful is what the order beautifies by incorporating. See ornamental-ground-plan, aesthetic-judgment, corporeal-inscription.
• Why Architecture Matters (Goldberger 2009) — beauty as the third Vitruvian term and as the point where the ethical and aesthetic join: Alberti's 'Beauty is not the same as ornament' and 'a beautiful building is one to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken away' (p. 31); ordered surprise and the balance of 'familiar and new' (pp. 85–86).