Beauty Matters

Beauty in architecture matters again. This issue of AD posits that after 80 years of aggressive suppression of engagement with aesthetics, the temporarily dormant preoccupation with beauty is back. This is evidenced by a current cultural shift from the supposedly objective to an emerging trust in the subjective – a renewed fascination for aesthetics supported by new knowledge emanating simultaneously from disparate disciplines.

Digital design continues to influence architectural discourse, not only due to changes in manufacturing but also through establishing meaning. The very term 'post-digital' was introduced by computational designers and artists, who accept that digital gains in architectural design are augmented by human judgement and cognitive intuition.

The issue takes an interdisciplinary approach to this re-emerging interest in beauty across neuroscience, neuroaesthetics, mathematics, philosophy and architecture, while discussing the work of the international architects, in both practice and academe, who are generating new aesthetics.

Contributors: Alisa Andrasek,Izaskun Chinchilla, Marjan Colletti, Peter Cook, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Winka Dubbeldam, David Garcia, Graham Harman, Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, Alan Powers, Gilles Retsin, Kristina Schinegger and Stefan Rutzinger, Fleur Watson and Martyn Hook and Semir Zeki.

Featured architects: Archi-Tectonics, ecoLogicStudio, NaJa & deOstos, Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA, soma architecture, Studio Gang, John Wardle Architects and Tom Wiscombe Architecture.

Introduction Architecture and Beauty: A Symbiotic Relationship

Chapter 2 Beauty in Architecture: Not a Luxury – Only a Necessity

Chapter 3 Truth and Beauty: The Role of Aesthetics in Mathematics and Physics

Chapter 4 The Return of Beauty: Driving a Wedge Between Objects and Qualities

Chapter 5 Abstraction and Informality Generate a New Aesthetic: An Interview with Kazuyo Sejima

Chapter 6 New Solids and Massive Forms

Chapter 7 Which Beauty Will Guide Us? Seeking a Reflective, Sustainable, Socially Engaged Visual Culture

Chapter 8 Chromatic Compositions: Design Dissonance and the Aesthetic of Fusion

Chapter 9 Beauty as Ecological Intelligence: Bio-digital Aesthetics as a Value System of Post-Anthropocene Architecture

Chapter 10 The Primacy of Relationships and the Reclamation of Beauty – Jeanne Gang: Observed and Interviewed

Chapter 11 The Geometry of Seduction: Considerations of Beauty from Noun to Verb

Chapter 12 A Specific Theory of Models: The Posthuman Beauty of Weird Scales, Snowglobes and Supercomponents

Chapter 13 Ambiguous, Bipolar Beauty: And Similarly Agile and Fragile Post-Digital Practices

Chapter 14 Deep Immediacy: Programming Beauty

Chapter 15 Beauty is in the Back Story: Diversity, Complexity and Collaborative Making in the Australian Condition – In Conversation with John Wardle

Chapter 16 In Search of the Unseen: Towards Superhuman Intuition

Chapter 17 In Part Whole: The Aesthetics of the Discrete

Chapter 18 Counterpoint – 'A Rose by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet': Finding Beauty in the Past Century

Yael Reisner is a practitioner, researcher, educator and writer. Born in Tel Aviv, she has lived in London since 1990 and is the director of Yael Reisner Studio. She trained at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London and is a registered architect in Israel. In 2009, she gained a PhD from RMIT University, Melbourne. Her doctoral thesis focused on the relationship between beauty and architecture. This research developed into a book: Architecture and Beauty: Conversations with Architects about A Troubled Relationship, written with Fleur Watson (John Wiley & Sons, 2010). Since 2005, Reisner has been teaching architecture internationally. In 2017, Reisner was appointed a guest professor at the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences.

Beauty in architecture matters again. This issue of AD posits that after 80 years of aggressive suppression of engagement with aesthetics, the temporarily dormant preoccupation with beauty is back. This is evidenced by a current cultural shift from the supposedly objective to an emerging trust in the subjective – a renewed fascination for aesthetics supported by new knowledge emanating simultaneously from disparate disciplines.

Digital design continues to influence architectural discourse, not only due to changes in manufacturing but also through establishing meaning. The very term ‘post-digital’ was introduced by computational designers and artists, who accept that digital gains in architectural design are augmented by human judgement and cognitive intuition.

The issue takes an interdisciplinary approach to this re-emerging interest in beauty across neuroscience, neuroaesthetics, mathematics, philosophy and architecture, while discussing the work of the international architects, in both practice and academe, who are generating new aesthetics.

Contributors: Alisa Andrasek,Izaskun Chinchilla, Marjan Colletti, Peter Cook, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Winka Dubbeldam, David Garcia, Graham Harman, Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, Alan Powers, Gilles Retsin, Kristina Schinegger and Stefan Rutzinger, Fleur Watson and Martyn Hook and Semir Zeki.

Featured architects: Archi-Tectonics, ecoLogicStudio, NaJa & deOstos, Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA, soma architecture, Studio Gang, John Wardle Architects and Tom Wiscombe Architecture.