BEAUTY editorial

Upon opening this journal, you are greeted by a scene painted by Claude Monet, titled Impression: Sunrise. The hazy, atmospheric quality of the scene is characteristic of Monet’s work, and that of other impressionist painters who worked with rapid brush strokes to capture the ephemeral qualities of light and color en plein air. The blurring of the painting’s subject—the port of Monet’s hometown of Le Havre—led him to give the painting the title Impression, as “it couldn’t really be taken for a view of Le Havre.”1

While the emergence of the Impressionist movement can be considered as reflective of a shift in stylistic preference in the late 19th century, a recent study suggests that something else was at play in its formation: the Industrial Revolution and associated proliferation of smog and air pollution in European cities. In that study, climate scientists Anna Lea Albright and Peter Huybers note the evident progression over time from object to blurred atmosphere in Monet’s paintings. They also cite letters by the artist himself expressing his interest in and creative reliance on fog (the term ‘smog’ had not yet been created), “[W]hen I got up I was terrified to see that there was no fog, not even a wisp of mist: I was prostrate, and could just see all my paintings done for, but gradually the fires were lit and the smoke and haze came back.”2

Viewing the endpapers of this issue may or may not feel different to you now, after becoming aware of this study. Does it matter if the impressionist haze of Monet’s paintings was smog, or that he was relieved by the renewed presence of air pollution, which, centuries later, has amalgamated to create the climate crisis we now face? Is Impression: Sunrise less beautiful as a result?

There is of course no definitive or correct answer, and our respective answers likely differ. Beauty as a term and concept is complex and enigmatic, and it evades concrete definition. It can be appreciated visually and intellectually, taking on different forms and meanings in different cultures and contexts. It is the elusive nature of beauty’s definition that serves as the point of departure for this issue of LA+

This issue opens with a piece by Mariagrazia Portera, in which she explores the philosophical evolution of our understanding of beauty in the context of biological evolution and our present climate crisis. As humans, we are deeply entangled within our environment – perhaps more so than any other species, as our efforts to shape it to meet our needs and desires grip the entire planet. In return, this planetary crisis will inevitably shape us and pose not only existential but also aesthetic questions and dilemmas as environments change and species migrate and evolve to adapt to a warming world.

Perhaps, then, beauty in our present time isn’t benevolent, peaceful, or comforting –the limited definition and framework simply does not accommodate the depth and breadth of unpredictable environmental change to come. Yet the notion of beauty as something other than peaceful or comforting also has its place in history and mythology, as Luke Morgan writes in his piece centered on the enchantress Circe.

2 Elaine Velie, “Did Air Pollution Inspire Impressionism?” Hyperallergic (February 7, 2023), https://hyperallergic.com/796492/didair-pollution-inspire-impressionism/; “‘I Find London Lovelier to Paint Each Day’ – Claude Monet in London,” Tate (September 12, 2017), https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-41-

In it, landscape beauty carries a negative connotation – one of a false paradise, false nature, and entrapment. Beauty becomes suspect: what is beautiful is also potentially dangerous.

The range of what may be considered a beautiful landscape is explored by Gretchen Henderson through her discussion of Utah’s Great Salt Lake and its tar seeps, a complex and harsh ecosystem surrounded by strip mines, military testing sites, and suburban sprawl. Henderson’s research into the aesthetics of place is specifically situated in between the binaries of beauty and ugliness so as to broaden our perception of what can constitute environmental beauty. In her work, as with many of the authors in this issue, we can start to see the emergence of a new kind of landscape beauty, one that picks up where Robert Smithson left off.

Nevertheless, old images of landscape beauty are powerfully lodged in the public imagination. But as Dan van der Horst and Saskia Vermeylen write in their study of scenic value and windfarms, the notion of what constitutes an “eyesore” varies greatly depending upon one’s frame of reference. In this regard, Sarem Sunderland writes of a massive early-20th-century Swiss hydroelectric landscape designed in its entirety to conform to an artist’s landscape drawing of a beautiful alpine lake.

Beyond exploring questions of what can be considered beautiful, this issue also questions whose interests ideals of beauty serve. In their examination of the 606 and the proposed El Paseo trail in Chicago, Winifred Curran, Michelle Stuhlmacher, and Elsa Anderson argue that today’s urban “green” development opportunities require disinvested landscapes, and thus reinforce socioeconomic and racial inequalities. (Dis)investment in communities of color is among the subjects Brandi Thompson Summers discusses with Libby Viera-Bland in their broader conversation on Blackness and beauty that also touches on questions of representation, appropriation, and the racialized philosophical foundation upon which perceptions of beauty are built. And in an entirely different urban context across the pond, Vincent Baptist writes of design attempts to spatially organize the sex work industry within European cities, and how these spatial organizations privilege some and marginalize others.

In addition to cultural constructions of beauty we also turn to the science of beauty. Mechanical engineer Adrian Bejan, for example, argues that the definition of beauty is—biologically at least—fairly straightforward and tied to the physical parameters of sight. Once understood and reduced as such, beauty can then, according to Bejan, be mass produced. On the other hand, Jeffrey Blankenship and Jessica Hayes-Conroy downplay the role of the visual, arguing that beauty is visceral – tied to bodily need and physical comfort. For Sanda Iliescu, the question of beauty is both embodied and visual. Through the discussion of her work Poem Drawing: A Little Less Returned for Him Each Spring, Iliescu explores the representation of landscapes and the capacity of drawing as a medium to represent the unfinished nature of landscapes as they change over time.

To bring these various threads back to landscape architecture LA+ spoke with Elizabeth Meyer, the author of several well-known texts on contemporary landscape aesthetics. Meyer speaks to how she became interested in aesthetics, the significance of entanglement for landscape architecture, and where she finds beauty and aesthetic innovation in the field today.

Nicholas Holm concludes the issue by proposing the concept of “Natural Cosmetics” as a framework from which to understand and evaluate ideals of natural beauty. Returning in some ways to provocations set forth by Mariagrazia Portera at the beginning of the issue, Holm questions how we might open ourselves up to new aesthetics in a denatured world.

The motivation for this issue of LA+ was a general sense that aesthetics are not adequately discussed in contemporary landscape architecture – that aesthetics are considered somehow secondary to other more pressing issues. I hope this collection shows that the two are not mutually exclusive: that issues are aesthetic and aesthetics are an issue.

Colin Curley Issue Editor

Mariagrazia Portera

Mariagrazia Portera is a research fellow in aesthetics at the Università di Firenze, Italy. Her areas of expertise and interest are the history of aesthetics (18th–19th century), the history of Darwinism, experimental aesthetics, and environmental and evolutionary aesthetics. Her work on epigenetics and evolutionary aesthetics has been published widely, including in The British Journal of Aesthetics

PHILOSOPHY, EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY, AESTHETICS

It is not obvious to answer the question “What is beauty?” Why do humans, from almost every culture in the world, invest so many resources in the beautification of their bodies, natural objects, and surroundings? Can we measure beauty? Are we biologically determined, as members of the species Homo sapiens, to find certain things invariably beautiful and others ugly?

Over the centuries, and within the framework of philosophical aesthetics, philosophers have championed an array of different hypotheses on beauty: some have argued that small, smooth, levigated forms are always and invariably beautiful (as opposed to angular and sharp ones, which are sublime; this is Edmund Burke’s view in his 1757 Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime). Some others have contended that beauty is no quality in things themselves; “it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”1 Turning the spotlight onto empirical and experimental research on beauty, attempts have been made to