This article expands on the theme of this years AIA Baltimore lecture series
For millennia architects, artists and poets have tried to find beauty. Deep down they knew that beauty was more than an arbitrary judgment entirely dependent on the view of the observer. But time and again somebody comes up with that old chestnut about beauty being in the eye of the beholder. This can drive one crazy when one makes a living from wrestling beauty from things. The assumption that beauty is random and accidental belittles that effort of designers all over the world since the time of prehistoric cave paintings. Then there are the larger philosophical questions of the subject and object relations in principal (epistemology).
Finally, science comes to the rescue by proving that beauty is, at least in part, not random. That it is also not only cultural or social but universal. Experiments show that people across gender, race and cultural divides agree on certain visual preferences, spatial cognition and a few other things that look like plausible proxies for beauty, which otherwise remains an elusive concept.
The science which comes to the rescue is neuroscience, currently everybody's darling. This may have to do with the pendulum having swung heavily from nurture back to nature in recent decades. The implications are not without depressing aspects, one would think that a world where everything is determined by genes leaves little hope, after all.
But humanity yearns for eternal truth, for laws that are not .....for full article click below
Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects