FORM AND FUNCTION

The maxim, ‘form follows function,’ might be one of the most widely-known misinterpreted maxims across the design professions. It was coined by American architect Louis Sullivan, who meant function in much broader, more romantic terms than the narrowly focused utilitarian definition that the Modernists extrapolated years later.1 Early Modernism sought liberation from old ideas in new technologies and materials, embracing ideals of practicality and simplicity as honorable goals for a modern life. This also came with calls for radical aesthetic change, characterized by boxy masses, stark white walls, and unadorned columns. The denouncement of ornament and decoration was perhaps the most extreme break from previous historical styles. Adolf Loos’ famous essay Ornament and Crime, even asserted ornament to be a mark of the degenerate and uncultured.2

The Modernists, though, found their functionalist ideology at odds with the formidable aesthetic they created for themselves. In many cases, outward aesthetic display trumped logistical efficiency. More than performance, Modernists wished for their architecture to speak to its inhabitants, to serve as “stage sets for actors in an idealised drama about contemporary existence.”3 Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, though it may have looked like a ‘machine for living,’ was uninhabitable. Its flat roof started to leak only a week after the Savoye family moved in. The empty house now serves as a monument to Modernism’s lofty aspirations as well as its fateful shortcomings.

The other issue with function-as-pure-utility, is that despite its straightforward question, the answers are endless. Adrian Forty illustrates this with a cup: “...All objects with the same use should look the same, but this is patently not the case, as a glance at, say, the history of ceramics will show: cups have been produced in an endless variety of designs.”4 What’s more, judging a cup by its usefulness will not help when one has to choose between two incredibly different but perfectly functional cups. There must be another criteria by which design can be evaluated, because function can only get one so far.

Today, architecture mostly categorizes ‘function’ into either structural function, or programmatic function. While the underlying structure of the building tends to remain relatively static, its program is dynamic, as the use of the building is subject to change. The form often outlives its proposed use, which then undermines any aim to bind ever-evolving function to form. Aldo Rossi observed this in the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, noting, “In particular, one is struck by the multiplicity of functions that a building of this type can contain over time and how these functions are entirely independent of the form. At the same time, it is precisely the form that impresses us; we live it and experience it, and in turn it structures the city.”5 What then, is this murky relationship between form and function? And if function is fleeting, what should form follow?

Yeah. So sheltering is something else. So feeding people is something else.

The function of food, I guess, is distilled into nourishment. Then, taste can’t be the only function, because you don’t need it to taste good to eat it.

You just need to eat it. And so for that reason, there’s things to learn from both camps.

Yeah. But there’s still something that tells me like...for instance, talking about beauty relating to architecture and beauty relating to art are super different.

But thats why the word beauty in architecture is blurry.

But I guess learning from art, something you experience, you see, it’s similar in scale, lasts in time... You might get a way easier connection with art and architecture than with food and architecture.

I think actually architecture is more similar to cooking than it is to art. Because art...

Oh, ok I see where you’re going.

Because they’re both a science and art, they have both a function and a form. It’s got the two conflicting things that somehow come together to create food or building.

Pause.

SCIENCE & ART

Architecture, unlike a painting or sculpture, needs to keep the rain out and the heat in. Unlike precise and exact sciences, it can be messy and instinctual. Architecture “is a muddle of irreconcilable things and categories,”1 which is what makes it at once a frustrating and attractive field. The profession’s dual personality shows especially in its structure, which arises out of mechanical laws but also heavily informs the building’s visual make up. The Salginatobel Bridge, for example, clearly showcases a seamless overlap of structural logic and aesthetic concept. However, complete harmony between the aesthetic and the technical is not the only way the two can interface. Henri Labrouste’s details for the Bibliotheque SainteGenevieve present an ambiguous alternative: there are apparent structural elements and ornamental elements, but the way Labrouste integrates both makes it difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. Technical and aesthetic concerns are clearly bound to each other, but what is intriguing is the varying nature of their bond. English architect, Geoffrey Scott, explains, “the aesthetic efficacy of structure does not develop or vary pari passu with structural technique. They stand in relation to one another, but not in a fixed relation.”2

Their relation has come into question in the last couple of centuries, when a lean towards science and reason began to take priority over beauty and feeling. While fine arts such as painting and sculpture could maintain their autonomy by claiming ‘art for art’s sake,’ architecture was much more susceptible to the forces of the scientific method.3 Scott laments, “Architecture, founded, as it is, on construction, could be rendered, even more readily than the rest, in the terms of a purely scientific description; its aims, moreover, could easily be converted into the ideals of the engineer. Where mechanical elements indisputably formed the basis, it was natural to pretend that mechanical results were the goal.”4 Referring to the classic Vitruvian Triad, structure and function have not only withstood the challenge of modern scientific scrutiny but have evolved with modernization and technological advances. Beauty, however, has struggled to keep apace.

This shift is not without consequence. To sever architecture’s tie to beauty is to sever its tie to emotion, to expression, and to any notion of aesthetic meaning. It further constricts the agency of the architect, stripping them of the little artistic credibility they have left.

Ok, what are we doing right now? We’re trying to make a claim that deliciousness is to food like beauty is to architecture. Why? Because we think beauty in architecture is essential.

Wait. You think it’s essential, but you can’t define it?

You can’t define it, but you should be able to talk about it.

How can you say something you don’t know, is essential?

If we create a metaphor for something that is essential, showing how it’s analogous in a different industry or different discipline, and it has a name...

Mmhmm...

Yeah. Perhaps beauty is the word that is most aligned with the idea we are after, but we’ve lost the ability to talk about it because we’ve lost it to casual use. It’s such an umbrella term that we need to refine it or perhaps throw it away altogether?

Beauty Is Essential

This project grounds itself on the premise that beauty is essential. Despite our imprecise and wavering notions of what beauty is, means, or looks like, imagining a world without it is overwhelmingly bleak. This larger sense of beauty has nothing to do with individual taste, but more that beauty is something that humans naturally seek in life.1 In The Abuse of Beauty, Danto contrasts two living conditions: the paradise landscape of the Garden of Eden, or the cold prison of a guerilla camp. He says, “Choosing which of these conditions is preferable is not a matter of taste! Offered the choice, everyone would choose Paradise over jungle hell...[Beauty] connects with something inherent in human nature, which would explain why aesthetic reality is as important as it is.”2 If beauty is necessary for life, then our fundamental need for beauty is perhaps most evident when we are faced with moments of incredible suffering. Why else are we compelled to leave flowers at a grave? Beauty’s ephemeral nature reassures us with the promise that, though pain is inevitable and beauty will fade, one day there will be another beautiful moment to look forward to. On this, Pallasmaa notes, “Beauty is in human experience. It maintains optimism, and that also creates the authentic ground for an interest in the future.”3

If we accept that beauty is needed for life, can we also accept that beauty is needed in architecture? Considering that much of our lives are spent within and around buildings, it seems we should. Architecture is the “unavoidable art,”4 the art that we don’t have to line up to see, the one that nonchalantly mixes with the boring, casual, routine of the everyday. Zeki offers a scientific answer, saying, “In our daily activity... we seek the beautiful to nourish the emotional brain since, from a neurobiological point of view, all areas of the brain must be continually nourished in a way that corresponds to their specific functions...When one considers that decision-making is also linked to activity there, one reaches the inevitable conclusion that beauty must be a guiding characteristic in all designs that aim to enhance the human experience.”5

1 Danto, The Abuse of Beauty.

2 Ibid.

3 Reisner and Watson, Architecture and Beauty.

4 Smith, The Dynamics of Delight.

5 Zeki, “Beauty in Architecture.”

But there’s still the thing where....Let’s say I walk into a building and the sun is well-aligned, it’s a sunny day. A plant just bloomed, and I get the feeling that everything is perfect at that specific moment. It’s such a moment-specific thing that you can’t even control, of course it’s impossible to talk about it. Whereas if you’re talking about aesthetics, like not the feeling of space, but aesthetics? It is going to be really different. Otherwise you’re going towards phenomenology. But maybe you don’t wanna go there? So really you’re talking about aesthetics in architecture, so the beauty in how it looks.

But I think that beautiful moment is part of it too.

It’s hard to defend that because it is a moment...you can’t defend it unless you can say, ‘go into my building and experience it.’

But that moment was created through the aesthetic of the building. That was one factor that played into it.

One of the factors. But then the fact that it was a sunny day, the fact that you were not sad, the fact that...all the facts that are beyond your control. The thing you can talk about is aesthetics, which has to do with sight.

Same with deliciousness in food.

But the chef can control the environment, he can control everything. You can’t as the architect, control everything.

You can try to anticipate as much as you can, and that’s how you make a good building. Same as a chef, you can’t control everything.

That’s why I’m saying it’s not...

It’s what?

Experiencing architecture is so personal.

But same with food. Some people...

So you say just taste it and you will see.

And maybe they still won’t like it.

Because they’re picky eaters. They don’t like...

Peas.

Peas, and you never knew that. Or the texture reminds them of something they don’t like.

But I can prove it to you because I can make you taste it. In a building, if I’m telling you my drawings are gonna be like, perfect— again and again. again and again. again and again.

(laughs) He’s ignoring my point.

—you gotta build the building to prove your point. Whereas the chef only has to have the person eat it, hence the difference in scale. Because a building doesn’t take thirty minutes to build, it takes five years.

And that’s the problem with the industry, not with the metaphor. That’s the problem of trying to talk about beauty in architecture. Like cooking, it’s based on precedence, and experience of things that have already been built or created or cooked.

Maybe people do talk about it, but in different ways. Because you do end up with buildings that are beautiful and stuff. There’s an aesthetic quality to shit. So even if architects don’t talk about it, they make things that make people feel...

Yeah. But the weird thing about beauty, also, they say, is that a beautiful thing makes you wanna copy. You wanna remake, you wanna duplicate. But for buildings, if you were to remake a building somewhere else, it doesn’t become a one of a kind anymore.

Yeah, but then if you look at classical buildings, they were copied all the time. There was a duplication of what they thought was beauty. The same way you look at a village and all the houses are kind of similar because they would copy one another. So yes, that exists in architecture, too. Except now we have that whole thing where each building should be different because we’re all fucking “geniuses,” and we’re gonna make the one building thats gonna be so revolutionary.

So maybe that’s right, that’s another thing we learned. Beauty can be copy-able, so we should just copy our work again and again.

So you don’t need architects. You just need to copy a building that people appreciate.

So the metaphor kills the discipline.

Yes!

Laughter.

But then you could use the same argument to kill the chef.

So then, why do architects and chefs still exist?

Pause.

Coordination? You need an architect to coordinate the big construction of a building.

But you could get a project manager in the kitchen, and they would have the same effect.

And that’s what most architects are actually doing. So maybe the job of architecture is...

...is already dead.

Yeah.

So there are no architects. We’re all gonna graduate and be like ‘oh, design was all a joke.’

Laughter.

No, because people end up liking shit whether or not the architect tried to make it beautiful. People just get used to it.

Pause.

Like my mom loves her hideous green frame on her windows. She loves it, it makes her feel good. Who are you to tell her that she doesn’t feel good?

But maybe it’s actually beautiful? Why are you ascribing her taste as...?

No, I’m saying why do you have to try to make something beautiful if people are gonna find beauty in shit no matter what? You don’t need to try.

But it’s not anything. It’s not anything. Like, it’s so great your mom has this hideous green thing that she loves, and it gives her joy. We need to do that for more people. Whether it is hideous or not.

No, but the building was made by some random dude, she moved in, she added that to make her feel better about herself. The architect doesn’t exist in that mix and she can make beauty for herself. Architects are not needed for beauty, hence they don’t have to talk about it.

Fancy chefs aren’t needed for good food, too.

I guess the biggest difference is that you need architects to build a building, whether or not beauty exists. But the chef makes such fancy food, and so the chef’s job is not comparable. Whereas the architect has to be able to do all kinds of architecture.

But you have chefs in regular-ass restaurants, making regular food.

But they probably talk less about beauty.

I don’t know, my friend is a cook in a kitchen, and he cares about good food. Their industry also has all these great Netflix series, so they’re well-versed in talking about what’s good and what’s bad...

Danto categorizes the beauty of architecture as the beauty of the ‘Third Realm.’1 The Third Realm is a vast, and mostly uncharted territory between the realm of artistic beauty and the realm of natural beauty. Danto points out that beauty of the Third Realm “plays a far greater role in human conduct and attitude than either of the (philosophically) more familiar kinds, since most persons have little occasion to think about the fine arts, or to gaze upon natural wonders.”2 It is essentially the hard-to-explain, subtle beauty we encounter in our commute to work, in our backyards, while sitting in waiting rooms, standing in line at the store, or while lying in bed. This often overlooked Third Realm is, as Scruton would describe, “an aesthetics of everyday life.”3 Though most of the public thinks of ‘beautiful architecture’ as the iconic art museum or library, equally valid is the beauty in townhouses, laundromats, and neighbourhood bars. By nature of proximity and accessibility, the beauty of the latter arguably most influences our shared sense of aesthetic taste, and thus on culture and humanity as a whole.

1 Danto, The Abuse of Beauty.

2 Ibid.

3 Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture.

4 Quigley, “Practice of the Everyday.”

But if a kitchen student looks at those shows, they’d be like, ‘ugh, that’s not how it really is.’ The same way if someone likes the Nest, the architecture student would be like, ‘but they don’t get it. The Nest is not beautiful.’

But I don’t think it means to, like, say one person’s perception is wrong. That’s not the point.

It’s just that: it’s important. So coming back to your mom, it’s great she has something she likes...

And someone designed that ugly frame, too.

And whether it was accidental...Like, even if it was flavors that were tossed together that morning and left on the stove...

Yes, so architects are not needed for beauty. No, but...

Oh! I see, I see, so there’s other kinds of architecture that exists beyond the ones that architects do. Same way there’s kitchens that...yes.

I was just going to say, you can’t escape the question of beauty when you design and build something. Like, everyone that experiences it is gonna attribute a rating on a beauty spectrum. For literally everything. So if the judgment of beauty is a given already, then why don’t we talk about it so we can get ahead of it?

Because if you talk about it, you’re gonna have a whole city council that thinks that beauty is this and you propose something else and they’re gonna refuse you and choose another building instead.

It is funny how more often than not, architects and the general public wildly disagree in what buildings they find beautiful. What can the architect see that others cannot? Ultimately, it is a matter of knowledge - the more one knows about a subject, the more particular their opinion becomes on that subject.1 The architect is able to understand nuances within the building that most of society overlooks. This sense of intellectualized beauty is dependent on learned information. However, philosopher Nick Zangwill warns, “The scholar may know more, and the scholar may, as a consequence, appreciate deeper layers of the building’s beauty. But even the scholar was once a tourist.”2

That is to say, the architect’s developed sense of beauty still has foundations in a more primitive one. Zangwill even goes on to give primacy to the tourist’s “free” beauty over scholarly “dependent” beauty precisely because it is independent of specialized knowledge, and is therefore the basis for all beauty. He writes, “...without a conception of free beauty, no other beauty would be available to us... Our love of free beauty is, as it were, the ground from which our love of dependent beauty springs.”3

Paradox

Architecture, at its roots, is a material discipline. It has form, and therefore an aesthetic. To have an aesthetic is to have a capacity for beauty. The paradox lies in the fact that the architect must jump through an extraordinary amount of precisely calculated technical and structural hoops in order to achieve architectural beauty, an immeasurable quality that is much more than the sum of its dimensioned parts.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

But let’s say I have the language to talk about beauty. Then your hideous green thing is, in this language of what beauty is in architecture, something beautiful because your mom appreciates it. And if my mom wants me to design her a house I would also want to create these moments of beauty that she could appreciate...moments like what your mom has. Right now my mom lives in a townhouse that is so awkward and inconvenient because there’s so many doors that swing into each other. You need an architect that understands what beauty should be, who can orchestrate a space that possibly is more fitted to the occupant, versus someone who thinks of beauty as images on Pinterest.

But there’s no such thing as how beauty should be. It’s so subjective.

Yeah. It’s so subjective, but also we’ve almost lost it to just what is popular...?

There’s no way you can say what beauty should be, but because that is an aspect of any designers job, we are responsible for honing that tool, and that skill. We are responsible for how things will look, how things will feel, how things are going to be used. And because we are tasked with that responsibility, we need to own it, and we can’t just pretend it’s always some innate or accidental byproduct. Because that also takes away from the public’s ability to talk about beauty. If designers can’t talk about beauty, how does the public understand beauty? We, the ones with that job, can’t even talk about it ourselves.

I think the middle ground is, yes, it is our responsibility, but we don’t talk about it because it’s super hard, super subjective, and super ephemeral.

And it has to answer to so many other things...

Which doesn’t excuse it, I don’t think.

But it’s just one of the things you have to...Because it’s not as needed as cost or...

But I think beauty is totally necessary. It’s just hard. It’s the hardest one to pin down because you can’t pin it down. But that doesn’t mean you can push it off the table.

Justified

At the end of every semester, the architecture student prepares to undergo what is essentially, a public trial. In front of an audience of peers, professors, and occasionally strangers, the student stands before a jury to receive judgment. The open-jury format of critique forces the student into a position of defense, and what better shield to deflect skepticism than empirical evidence? The pressure to justify one’s design quickly discourages anything that can’t be reasoned, and “every instinct towards the inexpressible is displaced by a preemptive system of discursive evidentiary justification.”1 The problem, though, is the design process is seldom totally rational. It swings between moments of logic and moments of instinct, which together produce something ‘designed.’ Though it is a culmination of beauty and reasoning, architecture is judged for the most part, by reason.

Thus, the critique format in its present state results in a fair amount of bullshitting.2 While thoughts on beauty, feeling, and affect may roam freely on trace paper, we warily replace these with more rational excuses in the setting of a formal review. Under these conditions, John May predicts a disheartening future, “We have made for ourselves a dismal science, which in every instance demands of our ideas that they finalize themselves as solutions to a problem; that they terminate, close themselves in, prove themselves, eradicating the mystical, the unspeakable, eradicating every last trace of poetic ambiguity, until every connection between life and architecture is reduced to the inarguable sovereignties of naturalism and automatism.”3 As beauty gets pushed further and further down in the private recesses of the discipline, most architects will no longer have the confidence or ability to explore beauty beyond the satisfaction of a well-resolved detail.

1 May, “Under Present Conditions our Dullness will Intensify.”

2 Frankfurt, On Bullshit.

3 May, “Under Present Conditions our Dullness will Intensify.”

Because it’s as essential as deliciousness.

It’s as powerful, I think.

But I think that’s why you could say, that today, most buildings being built in suburbs have that McDonalds plasticky look...

Delicious.

No, but, it’s cause you see it so much and that’s what people are asking for, and it’s seen as new and beautiful.

Is it seen as beautiful?

To the mass, I guess?

Yeah. I think there are quite a few people who are happy with their houses and think they’re beautiful. Which is fine.

The same way you have plastic greek columns in front of houses. They just bought them. It’s not functional.

But it’s not about saying it has to be functional, or saying that function is wrong.

No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that people are looking for beauty in their buildings. Thats why every fucking family is re-doing their kitchen every two months. Because they are looking for beauty.

So it’s something worth talking about then.

(to V) What are you arguing for?

I don’t think you need...what am I arguing for? That...

(laughs) You’re just a pantheist.

Power Struggle

Whether we are conscious of it or not, aesthetics have quite a large influence on the way we live, and the decisions we make. Its power lies in its ability to induce emotion, to sway us in a deep, unexplainable way. Aesthetics, and particularly that of beauty, have the capacity to both confirm our beliefs, and violently shock us out of them.1 Danto references the Afro hairstyle as a tool that challenged beauty standards during the 1960’s cultural movement, “Black is Beautiful.” The hairstyle conspicuously flew in the face of aesthetic norms, a glaringly visible act of defiance against social oppression.2 As much as we preach not to judge a book by its cover, there is power in appearances.

(to V) You don’t need an architect to create beauty because the subject can create beauty.

Well, I’m arguing you don’t need architects?

Ok, you’re twisting the whole conversation to ‘you don’t need architects,’ when the conversation is...

No, because we have a hard time defining what an architect is. It comes up in the debate. Because would you say that the guy who coordinates construction and needs to be an architect by the law, is not an architect? He is an architect. But he’s never going to talk about beauty because he’s coordinating engineering drawings all day.

But the conversation is about beauty.

No, the conversation is architects don’t talk enough about beauty.

But then you’re saying ‘you don’t need architects.’ That’s like saying, ‘chefs don’t talk enough about deliciousness and so you don’t need a chef.’

No, the architect’s job can exist without beauty.

That’s a different claim.

Then I’m saying, architects don’t need to talk about beauty. Yeah, that’s what I’m arguing for. Your argument is...architects need to talk about beauty? I’m saying they don’t have to.

Why?

Because you can do an architect’s job without needing to talk about beauty, ever.

But we need ways to talk about that moment your mom likes? Or the coffee table you drink at every morning...?

I don’t think those moments are part of architecture as it exists in the material work.

But you can design for them. They can happen by chance, but they’re also definitely designable, and intentionable.

That’s true...

And because it’s designable...

But I don’t think that’s beauty to me, because it’s an experience...

First you said that it’s an experience of beauty that architects...

I’m trying to understand as I’m talking! But I think that.........those moments..................................................................................................................................I

What is it then?

It’s a good design. The reason why the door is like this, the sun will arrive here, that’s all we talk about in school. So we just don’t say the word beauty, but all we want to design are those good moments. Like tweaking the wall, moving the window here, to make the experience better. That’s all we worry about.

Tweaking

But I think they mean to have a discussion, not just casually talk about it. There’s not a debate about the value of the creation of that moment, it’s more a debate on how to achieve that creation.

But isn’t that beauty? If you’re defining beauty as that moment, reaching that moment is all we talk about in architecture.

But I think you’re not defining beauty as that moment. That moment is just something you find beautiful. You’re trying to go one level higher, and say ‘ok if you think that’s beautiful, what is the larger concept of beauty that that falls within? ’

But how do we do that? This is an argument for a linguistic inception into the profession, for redefining a word that we thought was common and understood, but is actually alien and we should question what beautiful actually means. We generally have associations of what beautiful is, and we say ‘of course the building should be beautiful,’ but we don’t understand it so that’s why it’s been sidelined.

No, it’s being sidelined because you need to respond to cost, to coordination...

I’m saying all those things also concern beauty. The constraints to building are also factors of beauty. How well did you play within your constraints? Same with cooking. But the reason why more importance is not given to beauty in design, is because we don’t have a way to talk about it, and we don’t have an understanding of what beauty actually means for our industry.

I think we’re also concerned with so many other things. And it’s fair. Politics? So important. Human rights? Very important. Environment? Super important. And all these other very urgent things have completely taken over the discourse and architects are trying to save the world like, well architecture is political, architecture is environmental, it can do all these things.

“The architect’s ever diminishing power and his growing ineffectualness in shaping the whole environment can perhaps be reversed, ironically, by narrowing his concerns and concentrating on his own job. Perhaps then relationships and power will take care of themselves.”

But that’s school though, right?

Yeah. But at the same time, why is school like this?

Because beauty ends up talking about phenomenology so much, and it’s hard to do that in a school setting.

But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be.

Shouldn’t be hard?

Shouldn’t be done.

And what happens at school is quickly changing the top voices in the discipline and it’s like a vicious cycle in North America of like, what is “good.” And what we should strive for. And while buildings don’t change quickly, the discipline could. Faster than the buildings themselves. So it’s dangerous. It’s like a caution. And to talk about beauty is to bring the discussion back to what is important. Not to classical ideas and stuff, but to those conversations.

Essentially this the conversation I want in four months. This is the goal.

Just give the jury some THC gummies.

Laughter. Rap music in the background.

Yeah, but I still don’t...I’m not 100% over the bridge.

More laughter.

That’s fair. Pause.

Like, part of it is retraining architects, and part of it is you need a client who is willing to go in a more beautiful direction, so to speak.

I think so.

And the only reason they would do that, is if people using the space demand it. There needs to be a nonarchitectural societal shift towards like, valuing beauty and prioritizing beauty.

Yes. But I think that also begins with the designer. Like not just architects, but the creative fields in general need to bring that to the public discourse.

Pause.

Do we not talk about beauty or do we not talk about...f-form? We talk about experience, we talk about function, like..all those things that contribute to creating a beautiful experience?

I think often the goal is not beauty, though. For a lot of people.

There’s some really ugly architecture.

But the objective of creating the best experience possible was what all the crits in Comprehensive studio were about, right? That was the goal. Given those constraints, how can you make the best buildable experience? That’s all it was about, right? So, if you’re talking about beauty, there’s gotta be something about aesthetics that is related more to sight and form.

Yes. I think form will come into play a lot. But I think...there is still something holding me back about making GP just form? Because I don’t think it’s just form.

I mean, I think beauty definitely isn’t just form, but form is the part of the equation that we are least comfortable talking about.

Yeah, true.

(to L) When you talk about beauty, are you only including visual beauty that you perceive or is it beautiful experiences?

I think it hopefully all culminates in a beautiful experience?

But I think it’s primarily about the visual experience, for you. Because like, we talk about other experiential things, but not the way it looks.

So it’s all about the visuals.

So how do you judge the visuals?

By talking about it more. So you’re going to be critical about it, and it’ll be part of the conversation.

But what does it mean to be critical about a visual thing?

Same way you would be like, ‘I don’t think this door works with this because you’ll enter and see that.’

Because it feels right? Like there’s a composition, there’s more balance? There’s ways to talk about the way it looks. But we don’t criticize the way it looks because we don’t have the ability to talk about it.

Yes.

Because we talk about all the rest. And then we don’t know how to criticize aesthetics because we don’t actually address it.

I don’t think it’s just about aesthetics.

What else is it about?

It’s about phenomenology.

But you can’t say we don’t talk enough about that. If your argument is we don’t talk enough about...

Right, right right. If it’s about the conversation, then yes. We talk about phenomenology a good amount. But we don’t talk about...aesthetics...enough? And aesthetics being...aesthetics is the study of beauty?

Perfect. That’s what you’re doing. I think aesthetic and beauty is a part of what makes phenomenology work, but it’s the part that people take out.

Somehow we are able to talk about the way it feels... without the aesthetics.

And aesthetics is beauty to you so we’re not talking enough about beauty. Up to now, you have not been criticized for formal decisions, but you have been criticized for decisions that have led you to do that form. The critics never look at the form itself.

Right.

So that’s the part that is missing. Pause. At SALA.

But that’s the one part that I’m afraid...is it like a SALA problem? If it’s just our school, your whole thesis falls apart.

I think there’s enough people out there saying there’s not enough talk about beauty.

Ok, that means it’s not only SALA.

I think look at most of North America. It’s not only SALA. Look at the buildings around us. I remember in our studio last term, Marion’s concept was the aesthetics of lichen. And I was like, you can do a

I forget the language she used when she talked about it at her final...But I think that might have been the first person at SALA who was like, ‘my concept is to make a beautiful thing.’ project about aesthetics? Like, straight up, It felt like, senseofideasphysically. whoa. yeah, why not?

Maybe you don’t need to attack the global disciplinary problem about the lack of beauty in conversation in architecture.

Like if you apply it just to Vancouver?

Or a very specific instance of just one project. To show it’s possible to talk about beauty in a concrete way. Like if it’s at the global, abstract level...

...the conversation remains abstract.

Yeah, and it’s still incumbent on someone else to interpret it and do an intervention. Because architecture is ultimately physical, it needs to make sense of ideas physically.

What’s wrong with that?

Materiality

Beauty, though it may exist among other abstract, universal concepts such as Truth, and Goodness, is ultimately rooted in the material realm. Eco writes, “Beauty...[does] not lie solely on the side of some angelic spirituality, [it] also has to do with the universe of things that can be touched and smelt, that make a sound when they fall, that are drawn downward by the inescapable law of gravity, that are subject to wear and tear, transformation, decay and development.”1 Concrete, wood, steel, and glass each have their own specific properties, the intrinsic laws by which they must abide. The latent potential for beauty is born out of these material limitations.

But the GP2...that’s what it’s asking for. So I’ll have to do that regardless.

Wait. What did you get from Ms. Tak?

She said, the main disconnect though, is the site. The site is about the beauty of nature more than the beauty of architecture. So if I want to talk about beauty in architecture, it might not be the best, actually.

But I guess, I feel like...if it’s about the conversation we have around beauty, and like, if we are more able to have that conversation around nature, then situating your architecture beside something we are more willing to discuss the beauty of, could be an invitation to also use that same language and apply it to the building? It’s not about the beauty of nature, but your building challenges the fact we treat buildings differently in the discussion of beauty?

Siting it close to nature, you can start to build up a relationship with nature, the many different relationships with nature. What about being in nature is good for architecture? The sun, the rain, the greenery. Rather than just a good view. Maybe that’s a way to start?

There’s so many ways to start... start... start...

You can’t take like a thick, Swiss concrete building and plop it in Vancouver. It would feel... disconnected? So the architecture is essential to experiencing what is beautiful to Vancouver?

Does that kill your thesis, though? Because it’s a place where nature is so important and architecture is just a vessel to enjoy nature?

But that’s if the building is just a vessel.

There is also the danger that nature will become more of the focus of the thesis than beauty.

I think basically doing it in Vancouver is a more difficult thing to do, but if you pull it off it’s more convincing? Cause if you pick a shit piece of land, you can make a halfway decent building and be like, ‘see, isn’t that beautiful? That’s cool.’ And yeah you achieved that, but it’s not that difficult. Whereas if you do it in Vancouver and it’s successful, then your argument makes sense not only in the shit areas but even in an already beautiful place.

If you can escape the discussion focusing just on nature. Because if your building ruins nature...Like if you have a beautiful concrete Swiss block and it’s detailed perfectly, and there’s really nice moments in the building, it’ll just be a big ‘fuck you’ to nature. Even if the building is beautiful. Then the argument will become, ‘architecture needs to respond to its context.’

So whatever the building is at the end, the question is: is it beautiful?

No, that’s the question you spark the conversation with. It’s not the metric by which you succeed. The metric by which you succeed is if you are able to ask that question successfully.

Context

Our idea of visual beauty always exists within a context. It is heavily informed by nurture: where we grew up, how we were raised, and experiences we’ve had. All of this molds our individual sense of what it means for something to be beautiful. Palladio observed beauty in symmetry, balance, and order, while Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s saw it in a dimly lit, moss-covered Japanese outhouse.1

Palladio and Tanizaki each cultivated their aesthetic sense of beauty by observing and reflecting on specific examples of beauty that existed around them. The influences that shape the beholder similarly shape what is beheld. Beyond the particular tastes of the perceiver, how beauty materializes is dependent on where and when it manifests. In architecture, to consider the context is akin to thinking about the varying aspects of a site. A beautiful barn in the rural farmlands of northern Canada is very different from a beautiful office tower in a tropical urban downtown in Hawai’i. Implications of weather, history, landscape, and culture all begin to add specificity to what architectural beauty may look like in either place. Even in the most ‘siteless’ of projects, paper architectures that could never exist, even these works still respect the basic context of ground and sky. They still find themselves complying to the natural law of the world we live in.

It is pointless, then, to speak of “unattached beauty,”2 because beauty cannot be formed in a vacuum. So, the richer and more compelling discussion of beauty will ground itself in material examples, because our experience of beauty is intimately connected to the way it is represented. A conversation about the aesthetics of a door knob will be able to probe much further and reveal the enigmatic qualities of beauty to a level that a purely abstract, theoretical discussion will never be able to reach.

But that’s a dangerous question. Someone could just say, ‘I don’t think it’s beautiful.’

Yeah. So how to avoid that trap?

Make it so enough people think it is beautiful...?

I don’t think so. I think that’s too easy. I think you want the meta-conversation. You want the conversation to not be ‘is it beautiful,’ but ‘why do you think that it is or isn’t beautiful?’ So you need to make a building that first prompts people to discuss whether it is beautiful, which I think will be the subtext of the conversation anyway, but also somehow induces a conversation about why each person finds it beautiful or not.

And then the meta-meta-conversation is: why don’t we talk about beauty more?

So I think the GP2 already wants to be something that challenges notions of beauty. It might be beautiful, but very well might not be. So I would already set up a conflict...

But then could I come in and argue, ‘well your building, to me, is not beautiful because it doesn’t respect the image Vancouver has of nature.’ Like, say if I were to do a project in Fogo Island, the building would look beautiful because of the site it’s on. It’s gonna be talking about nature because it’s a building sitting in nature. If I take an urban context, where there’s buildings, the project will talk about buildings.

So at least your building is compared to other buildings, and whether it’s beautiful or not.

Depends what you want the conversation to be about. What kind of conversation do you want? The most essential conversation we should have about architecture, concerning beauty? Maybe context is important.

But then you’re gonna end up with a critical regionalism argument.

But you don’t want to fall into non-referential architecture, either.

Yeah, but arguments defending critical regionalism always take place where landscape is super important and the building compares itself with the landscape. Right.

That’s why Thena suggested something siteless, actually. She said, the site...is the conversation? Think of the conversation as the site. And then go from there. Which somehow makes sense? I have no idea how... but I think to focus on the conversation of beauty, rather than what is beauty, is key.

That means you need to design the conversation as soon as possible. And then, the design intervention needs to be an intervention on that conversation.

Yeah. So I need to figure out who the two...people, building, things...figure out who they are, figure out what the conversation is, and then base the project on that conversation they had.

But then, isn’t the point of the project to spark a literal conversation between people? So how can you start the project before having heard the conversation about the project?

(defeated) I don’t know.

I’m also returning to...what does the final project look like?

But that’s like...it will come to you. Don’t force it. If you know the outcome too much you’re gonna aim for it. You won’t learn anything.

The only thing I’ve had in my mind is that there is not one answer, but two things that are talking to each other. That’s the only thing I’ve ever known about the project.

Oh my god. My brain. End.

This project cannot argue for what beauty is, or what it should be. It does, though, attempt to offer beauty some grounds for its defense in a discipline that contributes so much beauty to human experience, yet no longer trusts in beauty’s value.

No matter the architect’s attitude towards aesthetics, the visual experience of architecture has a considerable impact on the lives of others, making aesthetics a fairly significant responsibility for the architect to bear. Though the question, “What makes a building beautiful?” is inherently unanswerable, it doesn’t mean it is not a question worth pursuing. If not for the architect’s sake, then for the sake of all who are subject to their work.

In the end, conversations on beauty are undoubtedly hard to have. Aesthetic debates spiral into dead ends, and fall into subjective holes, but they also reveal deeper reasons why people, not just architects, care about preserving empty castles, or find joy in a newly renovated kitchen. To talk about these things hint at an unquantifiable but much-loved aspect of architecture, and I believe this makes a hard conversation worth the trouble.