Imagine that you wanted to solve world hunger, and in your quest to do so, declared that we can’t afford to have food with condiments, because that would be wasteful of resources that would be better employed in paying for more food.
Does that sound absurd to you?
Well, that’s precisely what we’ve been doing when it comes to architecture.
We, as a society, have declared that beauty is a luxury and that we just can’t afford to spend money on that when there are so many people that need a home.
It’s the justification used by Modernists (with capital M) going all back to Adolf Loos, and Le Corbusier, for stripping buildings down to their bare elements.
It’s the philosophy behind the brutalist housing estates that dominated the outskirts of European cities.
But is it really true? Is beauty a “nice to have but too expensive”? Is it a luxury?
Think of the buildings that you find beautiful, those that fill you with joy.
What are the elements that make them beautiful?
For example, this building fills me with joy:
Why is this building pleasant to look at? The answer is in the details.
It’s the painting around the door frames, it’s the cornice on the roof, it’s the planters, the little stone cross, the ironwork near the windows, etc.
None of these details are particularly expensive. Yet modern architects, influenced by 100 year old Modernist fallacies, have fallen for it.
The road towards a more beautiful, more humane, world starts by deprogramming ourselves from mistaken century-old ideas.
Remember that beauty is a choice, and it’s a choice worth making.