Building beauty?

Christopher Alexander showed us that beauty can be investigated in nature, in things that are made and built, and in our collective and individual selves, in a way that leads us to understand and enhance wholeness. All of this he pursued on the basis of objective physical evidence. Also, Alexander showed that the unfolding geometry of beauty can be sought with practical means that demonstrate its connections with all of life.A new Master program in “Building Beauty: Experience of Ecologic Design and Construction Process” is now assembling at the University Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples, Italy, with the mission of pursuing beauty through a new model of architectural education inspired by Alexander, with colleagues of the Center for Environmental Structure (CES), the organization Alexander established for his professional and educational work.In this paper we introduce the context of “radical” traditions of architectural education and culture from the 1960s and the current debate in the United Kingdom and the US; we then present the program’s general vision, that merges a truly holistic practice of building with nature and the community, with a research/evidence based approach to knowledge; finally we focus on pedagogic principles aimed to align with, and support, such vision; the proposed pedagogy covers both teaching and assessment, by introducing a constructionist approach implemented through an original Project-Based Learning model updated with latest fundamentals of Agile Project Management.

Exterior lighting of buildings and their appearance at night is an important issue in architectural design. While the effect of natural daylight on the appearance of a building during the day is not completely under the control of the designer, exterior lighting at night is a design choice that can strongly effects the beauty of a building. The current research Delft University of Technology examined the effect of exterior lighting on the appearance of buildings at night using a questionnaire-based research methodology accompanied by in-depth statistical analysis of the results. The aspects addressed are how exterior lighting and its elements, such as luminous intensity (low vs. high intensity), colour diversity (single vs. multiple colour), lighting type (accent vs. uniform), and lighting state (harmonized vs. diversified), can affect the perception of the beauty of a building facade at night. The results confirm that exterior lighting of buildings substantially increases the beauty of the facades at night. The beauty of buildings increases with the use of single-colour accent lights in harmony with the facade and as the light intensity increases. On the other hand, the use of multi-colour or uniform lights with low intensity or not in harmony with the facade negatively impacts the beauty of the buildings. The results also indicate that light intensity and lighting types affect the perception of beauty of building facades more than colour diversity and lighting conditions.

The beauty of buildings and places is not a luxury, it is a necessity if buildings are to be cared for over generations and therefore sustainable in the long term. Building Beauty is a new one-year postgraduate program teaching an integrated process of design and making. Its ultimate goal is learning to create wholeness, beauty, and life in the world. This program, based on Christopher Alexander’s theoretical and practical work, explores the new convergence of sciences and the arts in the direct practice of making. Its syllabus revolves around three major axes of learning experience: cultivation and construction, theoretical seminars, and the exploration of self. Gaining knowledge is continuously activated across the cognitive-intellectual, the affective, and the embodied—and occurs mostly on the building site. The program, now in its second year, is homed at the Sant’Anna Institute in Sorrento (IT). The curriculum offers direct working with the community, engaging in crafts, and construction on-site. It terminates with a “Summer School” set up every year in a different location in Italy, for 10 days of intensive direct practice of different building traditions. This paper describes the theoretical foundations of the course, combining Alexander’s theories with recent advances in systems thinking, network analysis, ecological awareness, and body-mind experience. It describes the curriculum, combining seminars, design, and physical making at various scales: from an ornament to small building projects. It concludes with assessing the achievements and challenges of the program, its relevance to a deeply sustainable building future for the twenty-first century, and our vision for creating a worldwide network of universities that will together develop its themes.

In early nineteenth century, Lima, Peru was heart of Spain's holdings in South America. The notion that Limenos wasted their time in festivities and less pious revelry and lacked good taste unified these critical accounts. This essay explores how this image or images of Lima or the City of Kings along with political and socio-economic changes framed local reactions to two major rebuildings of city, one that came after a catastrophic earthquake in 1746 and second an imposition of neo-classical architecture towards end of eighteenth century. European visitors frequently criticized creole Lima for its lack of civility. The architecture of city center did not extend very far and order and beauty of buildings and dress of inhabitants were just a screen for immoral behavior and obvious racial mixing that went on in capital. Keywords:City of Kings; civility; immoral behavior; late-colonial Lima; neo-classical architecture; racial mixing

We don't go on stage with one person trying to put a will on the music. We prime ourselves to follow the will of the music. See, when you play a music, all you do is to prepare yourselves to accept the spirit. Like, when you practiced your instrument you don't go on the stage to play what you practiced. You just prepare yourselves to be overwhelmed by the music, to let it put you in a spiritual state. And then you express yourself without regard to where it's coming from. You just do it! (Lester Bowie, qtd. in Solothummann 52) Miles away, on Bald Mountain, in the midst of Surrogate Acres, beneath an uninsulated roof which creaked slightly now and then under the growing snow load of a winter storm, Mr. Blandings smiled uneasily in his sleep. He was dreaming that his house was on fire. (Hodgins 237) I know what you're going to say. The title of this sounds as pretentious as it could. We have some of the biggest words around collected here - aesthetics, beauty, religion - and two that are comparatively small (yet big enough to fill libraries): jazz and building. I'd like, however, mainly to concentrate here on a theme with little pretension - the blues in B flat - and on one of the best known of jazz standards, Thelonious Monk's Blue Monk. Let me say first that I derived the idea of using the word building to describe some of the aesthetic problems and, as I will argue, strengths of jazz from a famous essay by Martin Heidegger (to add some more pretentiousness) called Bauen Wohnen Denken. There he explains that the core of the German word bauen (and hence also the English to build) is a word that means 'to dwell' (140). This relation is almost all I want to take from Heidegger: To build is to dwell. The way in which we create our buildings, the way we think them beautiful, is our view on the aesthetics of our lives, is the philosophy of beauty that permeates our lives. This is Heidegger's conclusion: that what we build, how we dwell, is how we think and form a paradigm of our aesthetic views. Most of us will generally like to assume that what we build should be a house. It will be a home to someone; we name them Jack and Jill (if I remember Jerome Kern's and Oscar Hammerstein's version of John Winthrop correctly); we place them on a hill; we give them two kids and a dog and let them live happily ever after.(2) And you know, as Hal David says, that a house is not a home when the one you love is not around.(3) This is the Euro-American aesthetic ideal. Happily ever after, to be sure, means beauty has been achieved and ideally has to remain unchanged. Beauty is that rare thing not to be touched after it has been accomplished. We leave it on the hill and visit it from time to time, carefully watchdogged, so that nobody will hurt it. Happily ever after also means that someone's got to build your dreamhouse, and it's certainly not Mr. Blandings(4) himself: Someone's got to be your architect; someone's got to make the blueprint, the master plan to direct us on the road to the rainbow. If we take all our happiness to a building, we better be sure that the building will hold us to eternity. We better trust the architect. And, as Mr. Blandings could tell you, if you want to build a house, you have to pay a price. This finally brings us to the music. For Western music criticism, music has long needed an architect, someone who creates the master plan to make a musical work do what it has to do - make us happy till death do us part. That is the death of the listener to be sure; a work is meant to live eternally, filled with divine grace. Hence, a central relation in Western music is that among the creator of a work, the composer, maybe the conductor, and the work itself. This work we tend to regard as a closed work, a house on a hillside that we can be happy in. The central issues of Western music criticism are this blueprint and the way it has been realized. We forever seek ways to fulfill the creator's blueprint in the most beautiful fashion. …

In the aftermath of a normalized Foucaultian world with an all encompassing web of biopower, one remaining hope is to cultivate nimbleness. Nimbleness is an embodied aesthetic sensitivity to the material presence. Cultivating nimbleness is a particular style of cultivation; it is to willfully gather together one’s self in the wake of a formative force far richer than the derivative web of living power relationships of human embeddness within a horizon of social, economical, political and historical subjectivating power relations; which are chronicled and labeled by Michel Foucault as the normalizing practices of biopower. In other words to have freedom, one must start by rejecting the categories and labels normally internalized in order to relearn to learn from the material presence. Such a style of cultivation is a means of resisting normalizing power relations which co-opt cultivating practices to engross their own dominance which has had the by-product of an impotence to negate the gross material injustices present. This normalizing style of cultivation is a prevalent, corrupted, semblance which denies the importance of beauty for that of efficiency, rejects non-human purposiveness, and limits its measure of ethics to short term economical pragmatism. The thesis acknowledges that something is awry with the world and that giving care to beauty might help. The aim is to examine the event of Beauty as depicted by the philosopher Immanuel Kant and to apply this characterization to elective architectural spaces such that it may motivate individuals to cultivate their own nimbleness in relation to a formative force of nature. However given the revealed need for sensitivity to the particular material presence, the thesis can not be a rule book or catalog for beautiful design. Rather it is a rehabilitation for architects who are already heterospatially curious, with the desired outcome of architects cultivating their own nimbleness to reflectively judge as a ground up, multi-node, rhizomatic means of resistance to normalizing power practices as manifest in bad architecture.

This chapter spotlights the cyclical interest, at a governmental level in England, in design governance, characterised by discrete periods of strong public oversight and relative market freedom. The chapter analyses the failure to deliver a consistent approach to place and housing quality over the last decade – a period in which the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment’s role in design scrutiny was ended while greater ‘market freedoms’ arrived in the form of an extension of permitted development rights. It notes that while permitted development rights are producing the ‘slums of the future’, a conservative ‘beauty’ ethic that will affect future planned development has been re-rooted in the Office for Place, marking the standard cyclical return to design oversight, though one that leans heavily on traditional urbanism. The chapter argues that the return of oversight, albeit in a very different form, might be cautiously welcomed if it can be evolved to correct at least some of the failings of design governance that have become apparent in the last decade.

The first part of the thesis is the autobiographical novel, Who Do You Love? It is narrated in the first person by Francis, a fictionalised representation of the author. The novel tells the story of how Francis is sacked as a journalist and then a little later learns that his former-lover, Ellida, has died. These traumatic events prompt Francis to remember his past life with Ellida and induce, in the present day, a crisis in his marriage to Hadley, a school teacher. His failure to get a new job and his grief at Ellida’s death result in a crisis of confidence which is exacerbated when Hadley becomes interested in another man. As he discovers more about Ellida’s family, his situation grows even more complex and conflicted. Throughout the novel, all the main characters have to address the question posed in its title. The novel is accompanied by an educational commentary which reflects deeply upon the author’s writing processes and the possible application of the lessons learnt in the author’s teaching and writing careers. The commentary shows how the author has found it helpful to think of himself primarily as an “aesthetic learner” rather than a writer or teacher. The commentary discusses various issues connected with aesthetic education and then shows what happened when the author put the principles of aesthetic education into practice in his own classroom teaching. Four case studies – the author’s own pupils -- are analysed in detail: two eleven-year-olds and two fifteen-year-olds. They were asked to write their own “aesthetic autobiographies” – autobiographical accounts which deploy the devices of fiction – and then were interviewed regarding their thoughts and feelings about this project. The commentary suggests that the case studies reveal some important things about their lives and situations, and shows that there are possible educational and therapeutic benefits in projects such as these.

Building beauty: physiognomy on the gas-lit stage

The starting point, and also the end point, for this chapter is that government in England has established the Office for Place and signalled its confidence in the use of design codes as a foundation for building more 'beautiful' places. There is nothing new in having a dedicated body to oversee development and place quality, and this is not the first time that design strictures have been codified. Reform is often about returning to the past and applying old ideas to today's challenges. Institutional and political memory is short, while the processes that underpin development outcomes have greater longevity. Governments, of different stripes and ideologies, are inclined to return to the same problems time and again, and the odds are that their prescriptions, drawn from a limited repertoire, will be strangely similar. They are also compelled to offer fresh solutions to the challenges of the day – a prerequisite of electoral success in a parliamentary democracy.

Building beauty

Building beauty? Place and housing quality in the planning agenda

Science NewsVolume 175, Issue 8 p. 23-25 Feature Building beauty: Deconstructing flowers yields the secrets of petals, scents and hue Rachel Ehrenberg, Rachel EhrenbergSearch for more papers by this author Rachel Ehrenberg, Rachel EhrenbergSearch for more papers by this author First published: 30 September 2009 https://doi.org/10.1002/scin.2009.5591750818AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume175, Issue811 April 2009Pages 23-25 RelatedInformation

Architect, builder, and professor Christopher Alexander focused his life’s work on trying to understand what makes the physical environment beautiful, and how beautiful environments can be created today. Through careful research, innovative teaching, and unorthodox professional practice, Alexander formulated a unified vision of the physical environment based on a theory of “wholeness.” He observed that achieving beauty and wholeness in the built environment – as well as teaching it – requires the integration of processes and considerations that are usually kept separate: integrating form and function, integrating teaching and practice, integrating design and construction, integrating projects of various scales, and integrating all of these within the ongoing search for how beauty and wholeness might be reached, taught, and proliferated. Alexander explored and developed ways of implementing these observations throughout his decades of teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, culminating in the Building Process Area of Emphasis, which he founded with his colleagues in 1990. His former students from this period, together with new partners, established “Building Beauty” in 2017, a post-graduate program in architecture that continues to teach and expand upon Alexander’s theories and methods of generating beauty and wholeness in the physical environment.

Building beauty? Place and housing quality in the planning agenda