Since I was a teen, I have observed one thing about myself: I am attracted to beauty (a subset of aesthetics, perhaps). I noticed the beauty of a woman’s face with excellent symmetry. In the Marines, I experienced the beauty of a plume of water shot up from the engine of a rigid-hull boat as we tore through calm waters and the ceiling of fog hovered a mere twelve feet above us. As a student in Jerusalem, I walked most Saturdays to the Old City and just sat for hours inside and watched humans gather and pray in front of the massive blocks of limestone stacked up to form the Western Wall.
Over the last few years I’ve been thinking about beauty more and how much I crave it. I now believe beauty is both a human need and something critical to our experience as humans. Why? Beauty (along with awe and wonder) provides us with a glimpse into the transcendent, the divine or the higher order. It creates an opportunity for us to break away from the gross, the dense, the difficult, and the ugliness all around us created or built by other humans.
I recently found out about Roger Scruton, a British writer and philosopher who specialized in aesthetics and political philosophy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Scruton) and a documentary he produced titled “Why Beauty Matters” (https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/why-beauty-matters/). It’s not a high-quality production and nor is it entertaining, but it is a very, very important documentary to watch for anyone who designs and builds things in our world.
So much ugliness is built all around us. I’m Furious with the thoughtlessness of designers, planners and builders in America who mindlessly heed the “form follows function” maxim introduced into the architecture world by Louis Sullivan. What they’ve produced are strip malls, box-shaped office buildings, grid patterns of all kinds, cookie-cutter housing developments with no natural spaces, and more that completely lack beauty let alone wonder or awe. They are all mean acts and not kind acts perpetuated upon other humans who have no say about what’s built in public spaces that we are all then forced to interact with.
I encourage you to watch this very important documentary.
Meanwhile, I plan to continue on my quest to create more beauty in this world no matter what.
