Which Beauty Will Guide Us?: Seeking a Reflective, Sustainable, Socially Engaged Visual Culture

摘要

Beauty matters to architects, and thus to all citizens, as inhabitants of the built environment that they contribute to shaping. Aesthetic judgement often guides architects throughout their design process: they step back and check if things look good and match their chosen visual references. But, depending on what precise understanding of beauty they deploy, this mainly aesthetic evaluation may preclude or interfere with other considerations, such as environmental and social impacts of their work. In this regard, contemporary, digital designers are not much better than Modernist ones: they still base their assessment of quality, fundamentally, on geometrical achievements. And so we get yet more 'volumes brought together in light', as per Le Corbusier's dictum.1 Should beauty, then, be discarded, because it may mislead us to confuse the tools (geometry, space or composition) with the goal of making a better, more sustainable and accepting environment? Or can beauty, instead, be a guiding force towards sustainability and engagement with citizens? Here it is argued that it is indeed possible and it should be attempted, but what needs reworking is what kind of beauty is required.