THESIS ON BEAUTY
Afterword to: ‘Five Critical essays on Beauty’ Edited by Austin Williams and Patrik Schumacher, Machine Books, London, Fall 2023
Beauty as the manifestation of aesthetic responses and valuations is a human universal. We all navigate the world aesthetically. Therefore beauty should be an indispensable category of all design discourses, including architectural discourse. However, beauty, seen as irrational, is an increasingly embattled and by now nearly extinct category within a conscientious discourse that is rightly aspiring to rational accountability and evidence-based propositions. Beauty has been eliminated from the discipline’s discourse despite the fact that beauty is clearly not being abandoned by the end-users of design. Nor are aesthetic choices absent from actual contemporary design practice. Its just no longer talked about. This bashful discursive muting of beauty, as I shall explain below, impoverishes our discourse and compromises our discipline’s effectiveness. To counter this loss is our motivation to put beauty on the agenda in this book series on critical issues in architecture.
Contemporary discourse is abandoning beauty, as an embarrassment, because it seems to resist rational accountability. In his contribution to this book Kevin Rhowbotham is defending beauty by posing the rhetorical question: “Must all the complexities of the human corpus be formed into a metric, into a measure?”[i] In my view this is no defence at all, because 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. If beauty were indeed inherently ineffable, rationally indefensible, or irrational, then it would have to be cast aside. However, we must be wary of rationalist hubris, and give long standing practices the benefit of the doubt. 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. 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.
Aesthetic responses are, more often than not, (unconciously) rational, i.e. 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.
Beauty seems to be wholly subjective. Ike Ijeh starts his contribution to this book with the truism that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”[ii]. Beauty is indeed no inherent quality that resides in the object itself. I would not have to re-state this truism, were not for the fact that Wendy Earle’s attempt to defend beauty in her essay ‘Lifting the Spirits’, in this very book, seems to work with just such a reification of beauty. This attempt to defend beauty by taking it for granted and simply celebrating it will surely backfire. 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. Rather - and this is my core argument - shared aesthetic responses, criteria 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. The 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.) 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 essay in this book that comes closest to sharing my understanding of beauty – without quite arriving at it - is Simon Allford’s ‘The Beautiful Art’. Here we read that “architecture can only emerge as a beautiful art in response to a use and a need.”[iii] The idea of beauty’s dependence on utility has been a staple theorem of the modern movement, and can also be found in earlier figures like Semper and Pugin. The understanding of beauty’s crucial connection to performance is not new but has rather ancient 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.”[iv] The crucial element missing here is the necessity of recurrent historical updating.
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.”[v] The virtue of this reduction to dogma is its cognitive economy, stability and easy transmissibility. 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 stabilize. When technological and social life-conditions, then high-performance urban morphologies change, and therefore aesthetic responses should (and will) 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 the 'modern functionalism'. The technological and social revolutions called forth an aesthetic revolution”[vi], establishing and aestheticizing non-classical proportions, asymmetry and seriality.
The anthropological and historical evidence that ideals of beauty 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, beauty versus ugly, is a highly abstract evaluative distinction that can be implemented or concretized by diverse sets of criteria. To become operational beauty requires historically evolving specifications, not every year or every decade, but in times of rapid historical transformation. 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 cannot blindly trust our aesthetic sensibilities. Instead, we should probe and query our aesthetic values, and if found maladapted, update them. Thereafter we can go back to rely on them. 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.
Beauty is a very abstract, empty, but historically programable and re-programable category. This allows the category itself to be resilient, ultra stable. The programs that in each socio-economic epoch specify the particular operational criteria of beauty are 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 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 ideal of architectural beauty. I have specified these new aesthetic values of parametricism in Volume 2 of my book ‘The Autopoiesis of Architecture’. A more elaborate presentation of my 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.”[vii] The theme of beauty is picked up again in Volume 2, chapter 8.6.3 ‘Beauty and the Evolution of Concepts of Order’[viii].
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 continuously updatable 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? By trying to make the aesthetic values underlying our operational sensibilities explicit, subject them to critical comparative evaluation, if necessary posit new values, and explain their functional rationality in connection with general salient aspects of the contemporary life-process. In my writings this has taken the form of concisely formulating the formal heuristics - both positive and negative heuristics - of parametricism. This style and its formal heuristics (as well as its explicit functional heuristics) is not my invention. I have rather been naming and formalising a sustained and widespread architectural movement. 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 I have been naming and explicating the latest ideal of beauty I am promoting: Tectonism[ix], the current phase of parametricism. A full book-length, illustrated account of this (subsidiary) style and movement, will be published this summer[x].
[i] Kevin Rhowbotham, Cometh the Scythians
[ii] Ike Ijeh, For the many, not the few
[iii] Simon Allford, The Beautiful Art,
[iv] Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, Institutio Oratoria, Book VIII. , quoted in: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part III, Section I, 1739-40
[v] Patrik Schumacher, The Work of Beauty & the Beauty of Work
[vi] Patrik Schumacher, The Work of Beauty & the Beauty of Work
[vii] Patrik Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Vol.1: A New Framework for Architecture, Wiley, London 2010, p.300
[viii] Patrik Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Vol.2: A New Agenda for Architecture, Wiley, London 2012, p.434
[ix] Patrik Schumacher, Tectonism in Architecture, Design and Fashion - Innovations in Digital Fabrication as Stylistic Drivers, Published in: AD 3D-Printed Body Architecture, guest-edited by Neil Leach & Behnaz Farahi, Architectural Design, Profile No 250, November/December 2017, 06/Vol 87/2017
[x] Patrik Schumacher, Tectonism – Architecture for the Twenty-First Century, Images Publishing – The arts Bridge, Melbourne 2023