INTRODUCTION: ARCHITECTURE AND BEAUTY: A SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP

摘要

Why does beauty matter? Throughout most of the 20th century, in the visual arts and the humanities - including architecture, politics, psychology, poetry and music- beauty became a denigrated phenomenon, a taboo word. Yet the emotional experience of it has remained real, with people referring to it on a daily basis. This issue of identifies its resurgence. The most influential thinker on contemporary ideas of art and aesthetics, Immanuel Kant, writing in 1790, described aesthetic judgement as 'disinterestedly free' and beauty as 'purposefulness without purpose'.2 Four decades earlier, another German philosopher, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, in his work Aesthetics (1750), had defined the modern use of aesthetics and subjectivity as associated terms, in that rejection of one reduces the other. Architecture's aspiration to beauty was pre-eminent for thousands of years, triumphantly leading the visual arts until the 1920s when Early Modernism generated a significant new aesthetic. Architects' troubled relationship with beauty3 began in the 1940s, when objectivity ruled - as captured by Mies van der Rohe's statement on 'objective limits' and 'no subjective licence'.4 Since then, architectural discourse has evolved, with short periods of questioning the dubious approach towards subjectivity, and longer periods of trusting objectivity. In time the status of beauty was eroded as it came to be associated with old-world, non-progressive values. The only two disciplines that continued to acknowledge beauty's power in this period were mathematics and neuroscience, which have consequently contributed the most in recent times to our understanding of its relevance to human life and knowledge. Meanwhile, it seems that 100 years of neglect have reduced architects' ability to explore the real depth of beauty. When asked to describe beauty in architecture, most refer to the Renaissance ideal of perfection, and some to an elegant line or a neat detail, without reference to beauty's much deeper and enigmatic qualities.