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.