architecture: the door to well-being and beauty

Christina Grattan

The morning was frigid. I stood in Pershing Square, about to depart on a historical walking tour of Los Angeles’ architecture. Initially, I viewed the tour as a leisurely way to pass the time over a weekend. Yet, I soon discovered a more profound truth that loomed within the city and its built environment that gave meaning to this tour.

I looked upon a city tyrannized by modern rectangular high rises filled with black mirror-like one-dimensional glass windows. I sought to find life and joy, but I found myself in an urban wasteland. My eyes fixated on the former City National Bank building, a modern international style high rise. It was practically a tall white rectangular box decked with small windows and white overhangings that regarded humans as only cogs in a machine. Other edifices strove for the futuristic space-age, where translucent turquoise solitary structures boasted of progress and technology sacrificing human individuality for an automaton-like existence. Amidst such monoliths, devoid of humanness, I realised how small and powerless I was. The mere realisation deprived me of a sense of wholeness and belonging.

In a long tradition, facades were built for beauty, whereas now only for utility. I was perplexed by what went wrong. During the tour, I wished that my sense of unease and confinement produced by such a spiritless and desolate cityscape would perish.

Naturally, I gravitate towards buildings hailing from antiquity built for unity, rather than the spartan blunt architecture manifested in downtown LA. While visiting Westminster Abbey, the luminescence of space, the symmetry, and poise of the intricate ribbed vaults and balanced archways evoked the epitome of harmony and order. A time for solace and a moment for reflection, I found calmness, and the insatiability and chaos ceased within my heart. A truth resonated with me: beauty in architecture is pivotal to enabling flourishing within the human experience.

Perhaps the need for beauty found in traditional architecture is not merely a matter of taste or an elite pastime, but rather universal to the human experience because it is rooted in our psychology. Architecture has the power to affect one’s emotions, to bring one to heights of peace or depths of despair. The Norway University of Life Sciences conducted a study using virtual reality technology presenting videos of different contemporary (60’s and later) and traditional public spaces (prior to 1930’s) to participants in Oslo, Norway, to see whether traditional architecture significantly affected one’s emotions and well being.

Participants viewed traditional buildings - characterized by more ornamentation and symmetry - more positively than contemporary styles. They produced a more pleasant, relaxing, safe, and exciting disposition. Divorcing psychology and beauty from the building process can be detrimental. For example, critics of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, located in St. Louis, Missouri, contend that the wide-open spaces between its modernist high rises stifled the cultivation of community, possibly causing a rise in crime and poverty, alongside a breakdown in social cohesion. Elaborate arts and culture and government buildings of many towns light up vibrant city squares. However, in my hometown Brea, these departments are condensed into one building called a civic center. We have a police station, art gallery, performing arts center, city council, a library, and a Chamber of Commerce. Significant parts of my life were centered upon this one complex. As a child, I participated in library activities and multiple plays in the performing arts center. As I grew up and took more responsibility, I volunteered at the library and interned at the Chamber of Commerce. People were proud of our civic center.

Nevertheless, I always felt an emptiness there as the building was dull and lifeless, made of gray reinforced concrete and black windows. The brunt of modernist architecture is not unique to downtown LA. There was no sign of ornamentation, except for the stains on the concrete that came with age. The complex had a dark underground parking structure to save space, which reflected the mood of its exterior. There was always something missing from it that stifled creativity and my vigor for life. The steps I ascended evoked gloom, coldness, and isolation, far from Rome’s beautiful, lively Spanish Steps I once visited, full of joy. Yet this experience was not subjective to me but inherent in its architectural style. Roger Scruton, a late British philosopher, describes this phenomenon as “architectural individualism,” where there is “no reality beyond the individual purposes which gave rise to it. This causes the observer to find the building as

Architects are anthropologists and their view of human nature influences their design preferences. Architecture goes beyond the building and lies in the architect’s idea of the world, which can profoundly impact the people who dwell there. My civic center was not exempt from this truth. Built in 1980 based on an architectural style called Brutalism which arose in the 1950s, it is a product of the post-war years. Brutalist architecture is infamous for its extensive use of concrete and its “monolith block appearance.” This creates an unsettling and unwelcoming effect, making it not as livable.

Perhaps this dehumanizing architectural style is derived from the lack of beauty that architects sacrificed to the ideal of “social utopianism.” Brutalist architecture epitomizes the need to wipe out antiquity and wisdom of old for something greater to reengineer humanity. It exalts progress over tradition. During de-Stalinization, Soviet architecture prided itself on Brutalism, building concrete stone slabs and block-like shapes, symbolizing its scientific and technological progress breaking into the modern age. But as with all utopias, they miserably fail due to their inconsistency with human nature, and this architectural movement did as well. Many Brutalist buildings face demolishment today.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab conducted a study on how city spaces affect individuals’ bodies and minds. In East Berlin, the average participant reported their mood and physiological condition lowest at the “socialist building,” a bare minimalist, industrial style building from the soviet era. There is something within the human soul that finds buildings devoid of beauty and ornamentation, such as Brutalist architecture, ghastly. Certain Brutalist buildings, including a “concrete and glass” castle at Yale University, evoked Stockholm syndrome in students. Similarly, the Tricorn shopping center in Portsmouth, England, was reported as a “mildewed lump of elephant droppings,” voted by BBC listeners as Britain’s worst building. The general public sought to demolish both complexes.

Yet as with my civic center, not many get to choose the architectural environment they interact in. My city requires each neighborhood and business complex to commission a piece of art for its “Art in Public Places” project. It is an attempt to provide our city with more culture, but not all the pieces built are beautiful. I remember my mom running down the street to protest these large black steel, one-dimensional cutouts of eagles installed on pillars at the entrance of my neighborhood. Taxpayer dollars funded these stark figures, and they disrupted the equipoise of the space. My mom left unsuccessfully, only to have the embarrassment of a presumptuous designer telling her that she did not know what “good art” was.

It is difficult to make a case for beauty in architecture when there is a lack of consensus, but there is hope. It is hard to deny the sense of awe that beauty evokes within one’s heart when standing outside in nature. My family visited Zion National Park last summer. Thousands of individuals flock there every year to take in the sublime massive stone canyons painted with vibrant hues of red, green, brown, and yellow that mimic a rainbow. Water from the narrows breathes life into

the lush green trees and filament that grow upon such impending cliffs. Hikers, children, and everyday travelers glean joy from such a marvelous sight and the ecstasy it produces.

We all know how it feels to find peace and tranquility in inherently beautiful panoramic spaces such as these. Yet, what if beautiful architecture embodies the flawless state of beauty that touches the soul found in nature’s greatest treasures? We long to discover beauty in nature and are intensely inspired by it. Therefore, it should be no arbitrary feeling, but both natural and proper, that I or another should be so willing to be psychologically shaped by a beautiful edifice or merely admire the sight of it. The Judeo-Christian tradition recognizes God as a majestic artist, capturing how the basic tenet of being human is acknowledging the beauty found in creation. Since humans are co-creators recognizing the beauty set before them, the beauty they forge through craftsmanship reflects the ingenuity of God’s handiwork.

Scruton wrote that “to see beauty as nothing more than a subjective preference or a source of transient pleasure, is to misunderstand the depth to which reason and value penetrate our lives…there is right feeling, right experience, and right enjoyment just as much as right action. The judgment of beauty orders the emotions and desires of those who make it.”2 Beauty is essential, and it is something that all humans should experience. It is never merely an idea or simply a preference, so it should be manifested where people live, work, and dream.

Fortunately, the effort to bring back more traditional style architecture is not impossible. During the architectural tour in downtown LA, one building that astounded me was the Sentry Building, part of the former PacMutual Life Insurance Company. Built in 1921, hailing from the Beaux-Arts style, it incorporates classical features such as ornamental Corinthian columns separating the windows and rosettes. I remember standing under the archway of the building, admiring the coiffured ceiling and intricacy of the design. With such a marvelous sight, I assumed it would be impractical to build.

Yet, I learned that the building was actually made of terracotta-local materials while still mirroring the grace of an ancient temple in Greece. There are innovative ways to build that can still provoke inspiration and beauty. As with timeless ideas, books, and art that withstand the ages, we need architecture that is not restricted to an epoch of time dictated by the ideologies of a few, such as the Brutalist style. Instead, we should appreciate buildings that can stand for centuries for their beauty. Not because it is an aesthetic preference limited to the viewer but because it is rooted in our nature and pivotal to our well-being. As Dostoevsky once wrote, “only without beauty is (life) impossible, for there will be nothing left in the world.”3

At the end of the tour, at the top of Angel’s Landing, I observed the view of the LA skyline for a few minutes. I reflected on architecture as a map of the human story, pondering how people ordered their lives based on the built environment. Was there joy from so many modern high-rises, or did it create dread and alienation?

Christina is a senior political science student at Biola University and is from Orange County, California. She loves to read Russian novels and political theory, bake cookies for her family, and spend quiet time in reflection - whether running or tucked under a tree.