Abstract
According to Vitruvius, successful works of architecture are supposed to possess three virtues: durability, convenience, and beauty.1 Of these, one might expect the last, beauty, to be the most difficult to apply and so to be the focus of disputes architectural criticism. Beauty, after all, is widely believed to be in the eye of the beholder, and people frequently insist that whether something is beautiful cannot be settled through empirical study or rational debate. Whether something is durable, contrast, seems to be clearly a matter of fact, something that can be assessed empirically, for example, by measuring the ability of a structure to withstand stress or exposure to the elements. Conveniencewhich today we might call utilityis more complex, but seems similarly based fact. For example, to assess the utility of a hospital, we could measure the speed with which personnel and supplies may be moved through it. For these reasons, we might well expect beauty to be the real sticking point of disputes within architectural criticism.
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