Beauty

Definition

Beauty is the quality that pleases in the experience of an object or environment. In Kant's aesthetics, the judgment of beauty is disinterested — it pleases without reference to a concept or a purpose — and yet it lays claim to universality, positing that others ought to agree. For architecture, beauty has historically been one of the three Vitruvian aims (firmitas, utilitas, venustas), but its status is contested: Derrida lists the "pursuit of beauty/harmony/completeness" among the four foundations architecture must deconstruct, while Morgan reads Kant as opening an "expanded notion of architecture beyond mere beauty" through the sublime. The question of whether architectural beauty is an autonomous formal quality, a socially-constructed value (as Csikszentmihalyi shows "visual values as socially constructed"), or a metaphysically-loaded ideal is a live tension across the wiki's sources.

Key Thinkers

• Immanuel Kant — the disinterested judgment of beauty; the beautiful vs. the sublime.
• Diane Morgan — beauty and the sublime in Kant's relevance for architecture.
• Jacques Derrida — beauty/harmony as one of architecture's metaphysical foundations to deconstruct.
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — visual values (including beauty) as socially constructed.

Related Concepts

• Sublime — the aesthetic category that exceeds and qualifies beauty.
• Aesthetic Judgment — the faculty that issues judgments of beauty.
• Aesthetic Experience — the sensuous encounter within which beauty is felt.
• Ethics — Harries argues ornament/decorations bear on the ethical function of architecture beyond beauty.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Kant for Architects — beauty, the sublime, and Kant's aesthetics.
• Design and Order in Everyday Life — visual values as socially constructed.
• The Classical Language of Architecture — the classical alternative to Kant: beauty as "a demonstrable harmony of parts" secured by proportion ("harmony analogous to musical harmony"); Summerson's caution that "a vast amount of pretentious nonsense has been written about proportion."