ARCH 643 Beauty Manifesto

What is Beauty?

How can one define beauty? Webster’s Dictionary defines beauty as the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit. French writer Stendhal refers to beauty as the promise of happiness. Synonyms for beauty include aesthetics, allure, radiance, delicacy, and desirability. But beauty can be defined an infinite number of ways depending on who you ask and what they are referring to. The beauty of watching a sunset - waves washing against your feet, breeze rustling your hair, almost making you chilly enough for a jacket, but knowing you don’t need one because the touch of the wind against your skin is too good to let go of - is different than the beauty of a soldier arriving home from war – deployed for almost a year, the embrace of his mother’s love despite all that he had been through, the loss of numerous friends in battle, an amputated limb to save his life, discharged because of PTSD, yet still a beautiful survivor. Beauty does not have a formula. Beauty looks different to every person.

Beauty gets a bad rap, for people often consider it luxurious at best, superficial at least, and harmful at worst. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept of beauty was a quality of association. “The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms – the totality of nature. Nothing is quite beautiful alone. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace.” Today we judge things – buildings, objects, people – in isolation. However, the entire makeup of our world is where this association comes from, whether we realize it or not. The idea that the parts should be integral to the whole actually comes from the origin of Western aesthetic theory, Aristotle’s Poetics, in which he demanded that the plot of a good play and the composition of any good work of art must have a distinct beginning, middle, and end: “For if any part can be inserted or omitted without manifest alteration; it is not a true part of the whole.” In other words, the work must be complete in itself – take away any piece, and the whole thing unravels. A flower is beautiful because it reminds us of the colors of the sky; the smell of a forest is beautiful because it reminds us of the scent of our grandmother’s favorite candle; the sound of crunching leaves under our feet is beautiful because it takes us back to our childhood in the woods. Louis Kahn once described his view on beauty.

“When sight came, the first moment of sight was the realization of beauty. I don’t mean beautiful, or very beautiful, or extremely beautiful.  Just simply beauty itself, which is stronger than any adjectives that you might find to add to it. It is total harmony without knowing, without reservation, without criticism, without choice. It is feeling of total harmony as though you were meeting your maker, the maker being that of nature, because nature is the maker of all that is made. You cannot design anything without nature helping you.”

Beauty in Nature

In nature, imagery and ecology are interwoven, and the aesthetic of a living thing emerges from and often echoes its surroundings. The spotted leopard with the dappled shade of the jungle.; fish are bright in the belly – seen from below, they blend with the sky beyond – but they’re dark on top, to disappear in the deep; alone in a field, an oak forms a thick, round canopy, but in dense woods, it stretches straight. Creatures adapt to what’s around them. Life is a shape-shifter. Yet nature expects nothing from us. We can be alone with our thoughts and hopefully find comfort in the presence of beauty around us. Helen Keller felt it wasn’t she but the sighted who are blind, “for they have no idea how fair the flower is to the touch, nor do they appreciate its fragrance, which is the soul of the flower.” How often are we unaware, or perhaps completely blinded, by the beauty that surrounds us every day, even if we have to change our perspective to see it more clearly?

Beauty in Design

“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” Architect Buckminster Fuller understood that aesthetic attraction is not a superficial concern, yet perhaps an environmental imperative. If we only hold on to things that we love or find beautiful, why not apply this thinking to our built environment? Forestry engineer Baba Dioum explains that “in the end, we only conserve what we love.” Perhaps we can replace the old mantra of ‘love it or lose it’ with ‘if it’s not beautiful, it’s not going to last.’ Beauty could save the planet if we start creating things that we find beautiful, because we won’t want to get rid of them so quickly. Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey sees nature not only as an inspiration for design, but as base for all that man creates.

“Go out to nature and learn from experience what natural structures men find beautiful, because it is among such structures that men’s aesthetic sensitivity evolved.  Then return to the drawing board and emulate these structures in the design of your city streets and buildings.”

If design is to act like nature, it should take our breath away. In the view of Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, “the task of architecture is to make visible how the world touches us.” Our built environment can return to a balance that respects the earth for its own sake, rather than viewing it as a resource to be exploited, if we see the beauty it contains.

“Design is not making beauty. Beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.” –Louis Kahn

Beauty in Life

Apollo 11 was the first manned lunar landing mission with a crew, placing the first humans on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969 and returning them back to Earth on July 24. However after the Apollo program ended, the writer Norman Cousins told Congress that the most dramatic event of the lunar voyages “was not that men set foot on the Moon, but that they set eye on the Earth.” Up until this point, no human eye had seen the Earth first hand. Photos had been taken of the earth by unmanned space crafts some twenty years before, but the crews of the Apollo missions were the first humans to ever lay eyes on the entire planet. “We came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home planet,” said Bill Anders, a member of an Apollo crew. When we begin to realize the magnificence of this planet we have been given, we begin to understand our place in the world and its place inside of us. Sustaining life is not just maintaining a pulse, but rather embracing all the things that make life worth living.

“The truly rampant diseases in our materialistic culture are not of the body, but diseases of the spirit. They arise from lack of self-esteem and mutual respect, being of value to our community, or finding meaning in our lives. These diseases have manifested in rape, substance abuse, addictions, violence, crime, obesity, isolation, depression, and despair – things possible in any culture, but overpowering in ours. They arise from the root violence of our deepest cultural values – our separation from the love of others caused by denying existence of the spirit world. Healing those diseases of the spirit requires that we give primacy to the emotional, energetic, and spiritual well-being of all.”

Beauty in Belonging

A space is successful when a person feels like they belong. Design can create moments of connection with a space. Not everyone feels the same connections through the same elements. A window itself isn’t beautiful, it’s the connection with the world that the window produces that is beautiful. A feeling of belonging can empower a person, making them feel purposeful and alive. It is beautiful to be in a small old house full of people you love rather than in a large decorated house full of strangers. A house of people you love is beautiful because you belong there. Architecture is a matter of relationships. A space itself isn’t what is beautiful. The feeling it creates inside of you is where the beauty lies.

Beauty in Struggle

People are amazing, and never so much as when they are facing an enormous challenge and feeling at their most vulnerable. Maggie Keswick Jencks, a designer, wife, mother, and vivacious lover of life, was diagnosed as having breast cancer in 1988 when she was forty-seven years old. She had a mastectomy, more or less forgot about it and got on with her life.

Five years later, in May of 1993, it returned. She was hurled into a maelstrom. Tests showed that she now had cancer in her bone, bone marrow, and liver. She was told, kindly but baldly, that there was nothing to be done, and that she only had a few months to live. The weakness of her own body seemed to confirm this. She had reached a degree of serenity in which her mind had released its passionate attachment to life and was accepting the ebbing away of her body. Maggie and her family fought her illness with experimental drugs, therapies, even yoga and prayer. She joined an advanced chemotherapy trial and lived for another 18 months. During that time, she and her husband Charles Jencks worked closely with her medical team to develop a new approach to cancer care.

In order to live more positively with cancer, Maggie and Charles believed you needed information that would allow you to be an informed participant in your medical treatment, stress-reducing strategies, psychological support and the opportunity to meet other people in similar circumstances in a relaxed domestic atmosphere. She used her knowledge and experience to create a blueprint for a new type of care. And so Maggie’s Centre was born. Maggie’s Centres provide free practical, emotional and social support to people with cancer and their family and friends. The Centres are places to find practical advice about benefits and eating well; places where qualified experts provide emotional support; places to meet other people; places where you can simply sit quietly with a cup of tea.

Maggie passed away in June of 1995, and the first Maggie’s Centre opened in Edinburgh in 1996. Since then Maggie’s has continued to grow, with 19 Centres at major NHS cancer hospitals in the UK, online and abroad. Maggie’s program of support has been shown to strengthen the physical and emotional wellbeing of people with cancer and their families and friends.

Above all what mattered to Maggie most was to not lose the joy of living in the fear of dying. Struggle and tension is what makes a person know they are alive. The day before she died she sat outside in her garden, on a rare warm June afternoon. Face tilted up to the sun, she smiled and said, “aren’t we lucky?”

Beauty and the Beholder

Beauty is a quality. The world was a beautiful place before we started altering it to fit our needs. A completely untouched canvas that still contained a masterpiece. Nothing is telling us not to continue destroying it for our own benefit. But one day, if we continue on how we are now, it will be gone. Trees will be gone, water will be gone, fresh air will be gone, and therefore we will be gone. We quite literally have the world in our hands, and we have the freedom to do what we want with it. It is humanity’s decision if we will treat it as a treasure or something to exploit. Life is beauty, and we are the beholders.

ARCH 643 Beauty

What is Beauty?

How can one define beauty? Webster’s Dictionary defines beauty as the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit. French writer Stendhal refers to beauty as the promise of happiness. Synonyms for beauty include aesthetics, allure, radiance, delicacy, and desirability. But beauty can be defined an infinite number of ways depending on who you ask and what they are referring to. The beauty of watching a sunset - waves washing against your feet, breeze rustling your hair, almost making you chilly enough for a jacket, but knowing you don’t need one because the touch of the wind against your skin is too good to let go of - is different than the beauty of a soldier arriving home from war – deployed for almost a year, the embrace of his mother’s love despite all that he had been through, the loss of numerous friends in battle, an amputated limb to save his life, discharged because of PTSD, yet still a beautiful survivor. Beauty does not have a formula. Beauty looks different to every person.

Beauty gets a bad rap, for people often consider it luxurious at best, superficial at least, and harmful at worst. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept of beauty was a quality of association. “The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms – the totality of nature. Nothing is quite beautiful alone. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace.” Today we judge things – buildings, objects, people – in isolation. However, the entire makeup of our world is where this association comes from, whether we realize it or not. The idea that the parts should be integral to the whole actually comes from the origin of Western aesthetic theory, Aristotle’s Poetics, in which he demanded that the plot of a good play and the composition of any good work of art must have a distinct beginning, middle, and end: “For if any part can be inserted or omitted without manifest alteration; it is not a true part of the whole.” In other words, the work must be complete in itself – take away any piece, and the whole thing unravels. A flower is beautiful because it reminds us of the colors of the sky; the smell of a forest is beautiful because it reminds us of the scent of our grandmother’s favorite candle; the sound of crunching leaves under our feet is beautiful because it takes us back to our childhood in the woods. Louis Kahn once described his view on beauty.

“When sight came, the first moment of sight was the realization of beauty. I don’t mean beautiful, or very beautiful, or extremely beautiful.  Just simply beauty itself, which is stronger than any adjectives that you might find to add to it. It is total harmony without knowing, without reservation, without criticism, without choice. It is a feeling of total harmony as though you were meeting your maker, the maker being that of nature, because nature is the maker of all that is made.  You cannot design anything without nature helping you.”

Beauty in Nature

In nature, imagery and ecology are interwoven, and the aesthetic of a living thing emerges from and often echoes its surrounds. The spotted leopard with the dappled shade of the jungle.; fish are bright in the belly – seen from below, they blend with the sky beyond – but they’re dark on top, to disappear in the deep; alone in a field, an oak forms a thick, round canopy, but in dense woods, it stretches straight. Creatures adapt to what’s around them. Life is a shape-shifter. Yet nature expects nothing from us. We can be alone with our thoughts and hopefully find comfort in the presence of beauty around us. Helen Keller felt it wasn’t she but the sighted who are blind, “for they have no idea how fair the flower is to the touch, nor do they appreciate its fragrance, which is the soul of the flower.” How often are we unaware, or perhaps completely blinded, by the beauty that surrounds us every day, even if we have to change our perspective to see it more clearly?

Beauty in Design

“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” Architect Buckminster Fuller understood that aesthetic attraction is not a superficial concern, yet perhaps an environmental imperative. If we only hold on to things that we love or find beautiful, why not apply this thinking to our built environment? Forestry engineer Baba Dioum explains that “in the end, we only conserve what we love.” Perhaps we can replace the old mantra of ‘love it or lose it’ with ‘if it’s not beautiful, it’s not going to last.’ Beauty could save the planet if we start creating things that we find beautiful, because we won’t want to get rid of them so quickly. Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey sees nature not only as an inspiration for design, but as base for all that man creates.

“Go out to nature and learn from experience what natural structures men find beautiful, because it is among such structures that men’s aesthetic sensitivity evolved. Then return to the drawing board and emulate these structures in the design of your city streets and buildings.”

If design is to act like nature, it should take our breath away. In the view of Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, “the task of architecture is to make visible how the world touches us.” Our built environment can return to a balance that respects the earth for its own sake, rather than viewing it as a resource to be exploited, if we see the beauty it contains.

Beauty in Living

Apollo 11 was the first manned lunar landing mission with a crew, placing the first humans on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969 and returning them back to Earth on July 24. However after the Apollo program ended, the writer Norman Cousins told Congress that the most dramatic event of the lunar voyages “was not that men set foot on the Moon, but that they set eye on the Earth.” Up until this point, no human eye had seen the Earth first hand. Photos had been taken of the earth by unmanned space crafts some twenty years before, but the crews of the Apollo missions were the first humans to ever lay eyes on the entire planet. “We came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home planet,” said Bill Anders, a member of an Apollo crew. When we begin to realize the magnificence of this planet we have been given, we begin to understand our place in the world and its place inside of us. Sustaining life is not just maintaining a pulse, but rather embracing all the things that make life worth living.

“The truly rampant diseases in our materialistic culture are not of the body, but diseases of the spirit. They arise from lack of self-esteem and mutual respect, being of value to our community, or finding meaning in our lives. These diseases have manifested in rape, substance abuse, addictions, violence, crime, obesity, isolation, depression, and despair – things possible in any culture, but overpowering in ours. They arise from the root violence of our deepest cultural values – our separation from the love of others caused by denying existence of the spirit world. Healing those diseases of the spirit requires that we give primacy to the emotional, energetic, and spiritual well-being of all.”

Beauty in Struggle

People are amazing, and never so much as when they are facing an enormous challenge and feeling at their most vulnerable. Maggie Keswick Jencks, a designer, wife, mother, and vivacious lover of life, was diagnosed as having breast cancer in 1988 when she was forty-seven years old. She had a mastectomy, more or less forgot about it and got on with her life.

Five years later, in May of 1993, it returned. She was hurled into a maelstrom. Tests showed that she now had cancer in her bone, bone marrow, and liver. She was told, kindly but baldly, that there was nothing to be done, and that she only had a few months to live. The weakness of her own body seemed to confirm this. She had reached a degree of serenity in which her mind had released its passionate attachment to life and was accepting the ebbing away of her body. Maggie and her family fought her illness with experimental drugs, therapies, even yoga and prayer. She joined an advanced chemotherapy trial and lived for another 18 months. During that time, she and her husband Charles Jencks worked closely with her medical team to develop a new approach to cancer care.

In order to live more positively with cancer, Maggie and Charles believed you needed information that would allow you to be an informed participant in your medical treatment, stress-reducing strategies, psychological support and the opportunity to meet other people in similar circumstances in a relaxed domestic atmosphere. She used her knowledge and experience to create a blueprint for a new type of care. And so Maggie’s Centre was born. Maggie’s Centres provide free practical, emotional and social support to people with cancer and their family and friends. The Centres are places to find practical advice about benefits and eating well; places where qualified experts provide emotional support; places to meet other people; places where you can simply sit quietly with a cup of tea.

Maggie passed away in June of 1995, and the first Maggie’s Centre opened in Edinburgh in 1996. Since then Maggie’s has continued to grow, with 19 Centres at major NHS cancer hospitals in the UK, online and abroad. Maggie’s program of support has been shown to strengthen the physical and emotional wellbeing of people with cancer and their families and friends.

Above all what mattered to Maggie most was to not lose the joy of living in the fear of dying. The day before she died she sat outside in her garden, on a rare warm June afternoon. Face tilted up to the sun, she smiled and said, “aren’t we lucky?”

Beauty and the Beholder

The world was a beautiful place before we started altering it to fit our needs. A completely untouched canvas that still contained a masterpiece. Nothing is telling us not to continue destroying it for our own benefit. But one day, if we continue on how we are now, it will be gone. Trees will be gone, water will be gone, fresh air will be gone, and therefore we will be gone. We quite literally have the world in our hands, and we have the freedom to do what we want with it. It is humanity’s decision if we will treat it as a treasure or something to exploit. Life is beauty, and we are the beholders.

ARCH 642 Reflections on Koyaanisqatsi

1. Formulate at least three points of analysis in relationship to your [architectural] interpretation of the film “Koyaanisqatsi” that touch your individual way of understanding spaces. Were you aware of those topics? Explain how.

The movie Koyaanisqatsi started out showing natural features of the world. Which at that point I found interesting because there was no way of knowing when the movie was actually filmed and produced. While our man-made world is constantly changing, the natural world withstands the test of time unchanged. So when people started showing up, and specifically man-made things, it was quite obvious what time period was being filmed, The natural elements were relaxing to watch, while the man-made movement was taxing to watch, yet I still couldn't look away. I think that's a metaphor for how we live nowadays. While we know that giving into the demands of the world can be a bad thing, we can't help but do it anyways.

2. Are those interpretations, those inquiries related to your individual architecture searches? How? Why?

I have always found nature fascinating and necessary, and have always wondered why we don't focus more on incorporating it into the built environment. This movie made it quite apparent that we don't focus on nature, and we haven't been for some time.

 3. Are those interpretations influencing your individual architecture thesis question[s]? How should they be considered in the current architecture discussions? Bring to the discussion examples of that influence.

My thoughts about the movie are strongly reflected in my thesis. My thesis is about incorporating the nature world into the built world, and the movie made it very obvious to me how much that isn't happening and how necessary it is.

4. As a reference search for an article, a piece of architecture, a design position that take into account the topics you are listing/observing.

I recently read an article/journal written by Maggie Jencks, an architect who died in 1995 from breast cancer. She described hospitals as places that people dread going to. While the buildings 'serve their purpose' of providing medical care to patients, they are not conducive to helping people (family, friends or patients) deal with the harsh reality of their illnesses and overcoming them. Maggie came up with the idea of the Maggies Centre, a place for patients and their families to go to deal with their illnesses, get help and comfort, and realize they have a community who supports them, so they know they aren't alone. It's all about designing and providing an appropriate space where these types of interactions and relationships can happen, and people feel comfortable in them.

ARCH 642 Koyaanisqatsi

My word to describe the movie Koyaanisqatsi was MESMERIZING.

dictionary definition of mesmerize:
[mez-muh-rahyz]
1. to hypnotize.
2. to spellbind; fascinate.
3. to compel by fascination.

Others words:
enthrall
fascinate
hypnotize
stupefy

Typically when someone is fascinated by something, you assume it is something good. But this movie I think was the exact opposite. It was a series of videos basically showing the metaphorical bad of what was happening in the world at that time. Yet I still couldn't look away. I don't know if it was because I was amazed by what was happening, or anxious for what would show up on the screen next, but I was mesmerized by it none-the-less. I t brought to my attention the issues of our reality at that time, and made me realize what we had done to 'fix' some of the issues, and what we hadn't done to make some of the issues even worse today. I imagine the other movies related to this one show even more relateable things to my lifetime and experience thus far. Regardless, I was still fascinated with what was happening. Kind of like when you watch Criminal Minds or visit a memorial, it is still interesting to learn more about what has happened, even if it is bad.

ARCH 642 Challenge vs. Comfort

Rem Koolhaas explains to us that designers used to come up with really unique and groundbreaking ideas that were unpredictable and maybe even controversial. But now, designers have gotten into this rhythm of predictable and safe designs that don't challenge the designers or the users of the space to have to think about it. We design spaces for specific people and only those specific people tend to congregate there. It used to be that designers could create a space that would apply to multiple types of people and therefore would allow for a variety of humans to come to the space, spurring social interaction with new types of people. Many designers now are afraid to take a chance and try something new and crazy because they fear being ridiculed and rejected.

This is an example of a "comfort" plaza. It is safe, symmetrical, flat, and predictable.

This is a "challenge" plaza. It has a sense of danger, has a giant curve that people can climb on if they desire to, and has multiple levels of space.

While both spaces are intended for people to spend time on and congregate in, they are completely different in design. There is nothing in you that desires to walk to the other side of the safe plaza because you know that it will be the same on one side that it is on the other. But there is a part of you that wants to climb the curve on the challenge plaza, a part of you that wants to run down it or sled or just see what the view is from up higher. The challenge plaza creates different types of spaces for all types of people, not just one massive space for a few types of people.

ARCH 642 Invisible Cities

When reading about the city and the sky, I started imagining how you could bring the city level up closer to the sky. I envisioned terraces towering over a city that create a long but meaningful journey up, with connections along the way and multiple paths to choose from. 

One of the city and the sky chapters discussed a city that had a very complex and confusing road system, but if you stood in one specific spot in the city, the paths would all make sense, This model is a conceptual idea representing finding order in chaos. Bright colors, multiple shapes and scales, and blocked views make this environment difficult to travel through, but if you recognize that the patterns on the vertical surfaces are the same as the pattern on the horizontal surface, you can begin to understand the repetition. 

ARCH 642 Theory Less More

LESS seriousness MORE humor
less blah blah blah more ha ha ha

In a society where we are told to be professional, look our best, and behave, it doesn't hurt to break from the norm every once in a while and have a good laugh. Laughter is the best medicine. It is scientifically proven that children laugh significantly more than adults do, but as we grow older we lose our laughter. And that is not okay. If not for pure enjoyment and bliss, laughter can at least help manage stress, decrease blood pressure, and help with anxiety. I think we all get caught up in life and our jobs and forget to have fun with it. I am not immune to it, but I am aware of it. If you aren't surrounding yourself with people who make you laugh or with an environment that you can have fun with, then I think it's time to make a couple of adjustments.

LESS talk MORE action

This is something I have to remind myself of. I am notorious for having big ideas and big dreams for things, but never fully executing them the way I had imagined. That is not to say I am not a highly motivated and goal oriented person, because I am. I think I just am very optimistic when starting something new, and by the end of it the realism sets in and I finally see what I can realistically get done in the amount of time I have and with the resources I have access to. I'm hoping this doesn't happen with my thesis. I have already started doing readings and research for it, so I am trying to get ahead of the game as much as I can while I have the time to do it now. I am very excited about my thesis topic and about the work I have ahead of me to get it accomplished, so I just keep telling myself to 'shut up and do it!'