More Than Skin Deep

A Polemic on the Importance of Beauty

By Niko Kitsakis, December 2025

I had a rather depressing encounter the other day. I was sitting with a group of businesspeople (as if that by itself wasn’t already depressing enough), and everybody was introducing them­selves and their jobs. I talked about my writing and about how I see myself as an advocate for more beauty in the world. We were sitting in an older part of Zurich and, to make my point, I pointed to two buildings in the vicinity: Both were Neoclassical buildings, but one had decorated window pedi­ments (little sculpted roofs above each window), and another, right next to it, had those pediments and other deco­ration removed – some­thing which probably happened around the 1960s when such crimes against old buildings were still being committed.

I told these people that, of course, today you don’t necessarily have to apply ornamentation – doing so could easily devolve into kitsch – but still, you shouldn’t just build things in a com­plete­ly pragmatic manner either. Namely without any consideration for aesthetics and beauty, a sense of organic quality, or the human condition. After having ex­plain­ed all that, I got blank stares. One of the people in the group asked me what exactly my point was. I was taken aback by this, but in the dis­cus­sion that followed, it became clear that this person, and many of the others, really didn’t understand why any sort of beauty would serve any kind of purpose in the world, or how it po­ten­tial­ly could.

When I came home that evening, I remembered what I had once read in a 1930 essay¹ by Bertrand Russel and looked it up:

The knowledge of good literature, which was universal among educated people fifty or a hundred years ago, is now confined to a few professors. All the quieter pleasures have been abandoned. Some American students took me walking in the spring through a wood on the borders of their campus; it was filled with exquisite wild flowers, but not one of my guides knew the name of even one of them. What use would such knowledge be? It could not add to anybody’s income.

In the minds of the people I have described, ap­ply­ing ornamentation to a building (or planning it in such a way that the result will be con­sid­ered beautiful) doesn’t add to anybody’s income either. And that is the essence of the problem we have today: If there isn’t a direct line from the work you do to money, it’s considered worthless.

This is hardly a new problem and monetary considerations are im­por­tant, of course, but the extent to which we have lost touch with what really matters in the last few decades concerns me. There is such a thing as balance after all, and when money becomes your sole con­cern, it will inevitably lead to a world that no one wants to live in.

Ugly Things

The problem can be seen across disciplines. Architecture takes a special place, because the resulting work will last a couple of decades at least and is always public. Forget what people say about public architecture. There are buildings that were paid for by the public and buildings that are open to the public but everything that gets built can also be seen by everyone. It is in that sense that everything is public architecture, and I strongly believe that this brings with it a rather large amount of responsibility: One should never put ugliness out into the world.

One cannot talk about ugliness in the context of architecture without mentioning Le Cor­bu­sier. This pretentious prick and political op­por­tunist, this condescending authoritarian, somehow managed to make a name for himself and is considered – by far too many people in my opinion – to be a good architect. Take a look at one of the buildings which is representative of his style, the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille from the early 1950s:

If you ever wanted to kill yourself by jumping off a building, the habitation units by Le Corbusier provide not only the necessary height but also a reason to do so. In those aspects, at least, they excel. The image is from Wikipedia.

Le Corbusier ruined many plots of perfectly good land with these monstrosities. At least the habitation units (which is what Unité d'Habitation means) are honest in their names: After all, habitation units are for carbon units² – not human beings.

If you think I’m overly polemic with my choice of words about Le Cor­bu­sier, believe me when I say that I’m holding back tremendously. Read a bit about his role in the Second World War or how he treated other people for ex­am­ple. And if you think I shouldn’t say anything be­cause I’m no architect and those people would, of course, know better, then let me tell you another thing: I have eyes with which I can see. Just like the kid who saw that the emperor was, in fact, naked.

What angers me personally about Le Corbusier is that he should have known better. He not only saw but studied the Parthenon and went to many other places to study and learn when he was young. I have to conclude, therefore, that he either didn’t understand what he saw or wilfully ignored the lessons he could have learned from his travels.

What’s really troublesome, however, is the in­flu­ence that Le Corbusier exerted and still does. If you have ever wondered where the non­de­script grey boxes that ruined your town or city came from, chances are high that the architect who built them was directly or indirectly in­flu­enced by Monsieur Jeanneret (and others like him).

I’m glad that I’m not the only person who isn’t all too impressed by that man and his work. The Swiss artist HR Giger also wrote about him (and part of the art movement of those days) in one of his books from the 1990s:

Le Corbusier, der berühmteste «fran­zösische» Architekt, mit seinem Proportionssystem «Modulor», das eine Mindestraumhöhe von 2,26 Metern vorschreibt, war Schweizer. Es konnte nur ein Schweizer sein, der so etwas Klein­kariertes wie den «Modulor» erfunden hatte. Ein System von einem Mindest­volumen, das ein normaler Mensch braucht. Die logische Anwendung seiner Ideen sind die Tier­fabriken, die uns mit Abscheu erfüllen. Wo in der ganzen Welt gibt es ein Museum für Quadrate und Recht­ecke? Natürlich in der Schweiz. In Zürich, wo die Banken­dichte die Menschen zu Gnomen erdrückt. Die soge­nannte konkrete Kunst scheint extra für die Schweizer Banken entwickelt worden zu sein. Sie hat vermutlich ihren Ursprung in den klein­karierten Stoff­mustern, die bäuer­liche Kissen, Bettdecken und Vorhänge zieren. Aber dem ist nicht so, der Russe Male­witsch malte sein schwarzes Quadrat zu Beginn des Jahrhunderts als letzte Konse­quenz seiner Malerei. Das zu Grabe getragene Quadrat bildete die Aufer­stehung der Konkreten, unter dem Dogma, dass, wenn sich etwas mathe­matisch beweisen liesse, es auch auto­matisch grosse Kunst sei. Grossmeister wie Bill und Lohse schmücken nun Museen und Banken. Diese Lang­weil­ereien, die mittels des Computers ins Endlose variiert werden kann, hat sich zur Staats­kunst gemausert und ist von den Gnomen als einzige Zierde ihrer Paläste zugelassen.

Le Corbusier, the most famous “French” archi­tect, with his proportional system “Modulor”, which prescribes a minimum ceiling height of 2.26 metres, was Swiss. It could only have been a Swiss who invented something as petty and small-minded as the “Modulor”. A system of minimum volume that a normal human being needs. The logical ap­pli­ca­tion of his ideas are the factory farms that fill us with disgust. Where in the entire world is there a museum for squares and rect­angles? Naturally, in Switzerland. In Zurich, where the density of banks crushes people into gnomes. The so-called concrete art seems to have been developed especially for Swiss banks. It probably has its origin in the small-chequered fabric patterns that adorn rustic pillows, duvets and curtains. But that is not the case: the Russian Malevich painted his black square at the beginning of the century as the final consequence of his painting. The square carried to the grave became the resurrection of the concrete, under the dogma that if something could be math­e­mat­i­cal­ly proven, it was automatically considered great art. Grandmasters such as Bill and Lohse now decorate museums and banks. This tediousness, which can be end­lessly varied by the computer, has become state art and has been declared by the gnomes as the only acceptable adornment of their palaces.

I believe Giger’s instinct was mostly correct here. I use the word mostly be­cause, personally, I like some of the things that Max Bill did. But that doesn’t keep me from understanding both per­spec­tives. Take a look at these two pictures that Bill made and which I have redrawn for this essay:

The state art as accepted by the gnomes of the Swiss banks (according to HR Giger).

If you saw the originals, you couldn’t tell them apart from my recre­ation. And that is an in­ter­est­ing point. There’s a joke that takes the form of a formula:

Modern art = I could do that + yeah, but you didn’t.

The fact that I was able to draw Bill’s squares in less than five minutes seems to prove that correct. And yet, he had a very good eye for colour and proportion. That doesn’t mean that you have to like his work, but there’s more to it than is immediately obvious. So no, you couldn’t easily have done that. Trace it like I did, yes, but not create it from scratch.

And that, I think, is really the heart of the matter. The people who don’t like Max Bill and other abstract art are most often complaining about the (sometimes per­ceived, sometimes genuine) lack of technical skill that is necessary to create those works. Whatever you may think of Bill, you can immediately recognise his work as his, and that is an im­por­tant quality in itself. But the ex­pec­ta­tion of the audience is usu­al­ly not only recognisability, but also to be able to admire in a famous artist a skill that they don’t have. Hence the joke above. How did that artist become so famous and rich? He draws only boxes! And I under­stand and agree with this notion in large part. It speaks directly to our sense of fairness.

Personally, I think that in the case of abstract art movements, the problem lies not so much with what the people who started them did them­selves – at least they tried something which (at that time) was new – but rather with the people who followed in their footsteps. It seems that they saw in those art forms an opportunity for not having to put in any effort. The downstream result of that is the thing we now call con­tem­po­rary art, which is – and I hope you will agree – mostly junk.

A whole industry has sprung up around this junk art and it is largely feeding itself. I come back to my metaphor from The Emperor’s New Clothes: The con artists in the story say that they can weave clothes out of a very special fabric. This fabric has the property of being invisible to people who are either not fit for their duties or criminally stupid. Since no one wants to admit to their own incompetence or stupidity, everyone who looks at the empty looms pretends to see this magic fabric and is fascinated by its mag­nif­i­cent texture and colours. If this reminds you of the last vernissage you went to, you’re on the right track. What you saw didn’t only seem like garbage, it most likely was garbage.

I call the people who produce this garbage cultural terrorists because – like the con artists in Andersen’s story – they know exactly what they are doing. They are grifters who have overrun art schools, ar­chi­tec­tural departments, and other such institutions and show off their work only to their peers. Almost no one in the real world is interested in fine art anymore because of these people. The individuals who have real creative talent do other jobs (in commercial design, for example) because this clique of navel-gazing posers in the art world would never let them into their circles.

Whoever was the janitor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1986 must have thought similarly. The janitor removed five kilograms of butter from the corner of one of the rooms there when it was time to clean. It turned out that this was “art” by the insufferable hack³ Joseph Beuys. Now, I’m as much a fan of making fun of the bourgeoisie as any thinking person, but stuff like that corner of fat is neither provocative nor inspiring – espe­cial­ly when everybody does the same thing. It’s rather dull, really. The real artist was the janitor, and the act of clean­ing up would have been an art performance worth watching.

Beauty and Life

When I sat with the businesspeople, I talked about aesthetics and beauty, a sense of organic quality, and the human condition. That is, of course, rather vague. And it is vague because to describe these deeply human affairs isn’t exactly a hard science. The architect Christopher Alexander talked about what is essentially the same thing and called it life⁴ in his books. He has an anecdote where he showed 110 ar­chi­tec­ture students two pictures, one of a Bangkok slum house and another of an octagonal postmodern house (which resembled a tower), and asked them which one had “more life”. Some of the students protested and wanted a definition of life. That is understandable – commendable even. After all, it speaks to a scientific spirit, and I would be the first one to support that. And yet, it misses the point. Alexander then made it a bit easier on the students by telling them that they could vote for one of three answers:

• The Bangkok slum house had more life
• The octagonal postmodern house had more life
• The question didn’t make sense to them or they didn’t want to answer

Before I show you the results, take a look at the following pictures. They were all taken by me in and around Zurich and consist of three pairs of two pictures each. The first pair shows housing, the second house numbers and the third streets. Let your intuition guide you and ask yourself the same question: Which picture in a pair has more life?

Two sets of houses, two sets of house numbers and two different streets.

Christopher Alexander had 89 out of his 110 stu­dents saying that the Bangkok slum house has more life. The remaining 21 said that the question didn’t make sense to them or that they didn’t want to answer. No one said that the postmodern house has more life. Alexander writes:

To repeat, out of those 110 people, not a single one of them wanted to say (or was willing to say) that the postmodern building had more life than the Bangkok house. This shows an extraordinarily high level of agreement.

Several of the architecture students among the twenty-one who said they could not judge the issue later came to me and told me that they had felt that the slum has more life, but did not feel comfortable saying so. Why not, if the question was indeed so trivial?

I believe it was not trivial, and did not seem trivial to them. I believe that these students were embarrassed by a conflict between the values they were being taught in architecture school, and a truth they perceived and could not deny. In spite of themselves, they saw some quality of ordinary life, with all the feelings that entails, present in the slum, regardless of its poverty, hunger, and disease.

Thus, in my view, the sense one has in making this judgment is that it is about something real. And because of this, people tend to agree. Indeed it is about something real.

The power of the effect is remarkable – especially when one remembers that most of the hundred-odd people in the audience were architecture students. Given the cultural milieu and ethos of the late 20th century, many of them had come to school to learn how to build things like the postmodern tower. If a hundred of these students were asked to say which of these two things had more life, and not one of them could bring himself or herself to say that the obviously more architectural one (the one which is more similar to buildings that have been held up to them as models of architecture in other classes) had more life, it is clear that something remarkable was going on under the surface.

Indeed, I think there is no doubt that the students – many of them any­way – found the question disturbing, almost as if a secret, a hidden truth, were being dragged from them in spite of themselves. After having said that the Bangkok house has more life, could that same student then honestly say to himself: “Anyway, the octagonal tower is better,” or even, “Postmodern architecture is good”?

I cannot add much more to that. Except that I ran the test myself in an online poll using the pictures that you saw above and got basically the same results that Alexander got with his⁵. I’m going to assume that you reached a similar verdict and chose 1b, 2a and 3b when you looked at the pictures.

Old Is Good, New Is Bad

You will have noticed that there was a pattern to my pictures. The ones with more of a human touch also show things that are older than their counterparts. Can we conclude from this that old things are better? The answer is no, not nec­es­sar­i­ly. But if you look around online, you might come to that conclusion. There is a movement for promoting more beauty, especially in ar­chi­tec­ture, that has been gaining a lot of traction in recent years. You will find accounts on social media that call them­selves “Architectural Revi­val”, “Traditional Building”, “The War on Beauty” etc. Their verdict is clear. “Modernism” is bad, tradition is good.

Unfortunately – but not surprisingly – most of these people are rather un­so­phis­ti­cat­ed in their critique. Philistines even. And that is a shame, because I generally agree with much of their criticism. However, if you look just a little closer, you will find that many of them are really just Christian con­ser­va­tives who (think they) found a new method of con­vinc­ing people of their faith through criticising modernity itself. Their under­standing of architecture (and art and design) is, for the most part, predictably shallow. For them, old equals tradition and is there­fore good, and new equals bad because it doesn’t look old and hence isn’t “godly”.

One of the more ironic aspects of these people’s worldview is that many of them posted this quote from Gustav Mahler, seemingly without even under­standing it:

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.

This is a notion that I wholeheartedly agree with. I also agree on the importance of tradition. Yet, many of the people of this movement seem to me to exclusively worship ashes because of their silly insistence that everything (or almost every­thing) modern is bad.

They betray their ignorance by using the word “Modernism” when what they actually mean is “contemporary”. Modernism was a movement which had a start and also an end – and it ended quite some time ago. Another thing is that if something looks old, it’s considered good by these people. That inclu­des the most ridiculous looking new buildings, as soon as those resemble things like castles.

One such example – an architectural abscess really – is the John Cunningham Student Centre of Scots College in Sydney. A wan­nabe Scottish castle finished in 2024, it has been passed around en­thu­si­as­ti­cal­ly by the neo-tradi­tionalists as something to celebrate – to emulate even. Yet, almost every element of that building is so comically out of proportion that it looks like Hogwarts had a nightmare and threw up in bed. Then again, that might be quite fitting: The building is part of an elite school for boys – kitsch for the nouveau riche. You can download a PDF where the school shows off that project and see it for yourself. Notice that the building it replaced was itself an ugly monstrosity of the brutalist type, but the new one isn’t much better. It’s just ugliness with a different veneer.

Fortunately, there are also many competent people and organisations that made it their mission to create better architecture, towns, and cities. Create Streets and Strong Towns are two such entities, and you should check out their websites and social media channels.

Another example that I found quite amusing comes from art. One of the neo-traditionalists recently posted a comparison between a paint­ing by George Romney and one by Amedeo Modi­gliani, both of which were portraits of women. There was no comment, only the years in which both pic­tures had been painted, written in text bubbles above them. For Rom­ney’s painting, 1782, and 1918 for Modigliani. That was sup­pos­ed­ly enough information for the audience. The implied critique? Romney’s painting looks more photorealistic than Modigliani’s and is therefore better. The social media channel in question is very single-minded when it comes to those things, so it’s not really hard to guess at the unstated premise. It’s always “old, looks realistic, good” vs. “modern, doesn’t look realistic, bad”.

In the first comparison, to the left, you see a painting by George Romney called “Lady Hamil­ton as Nature” from 1782. To the right is Amedeo Modigliani’s “Portrait of a Young Woman” from 1918. In the second comparison, the picture of Lady Hamilton is replaced by a photograph of a Cycladic figurine from ca. 2500–2400 BC.

Whoever you prefer, both Romney and Modi­gliani were gifted artists and whatever the in­ten­tion of an artist might be, it has, most of the time, little to do with technique. As for Modi­gliani, he was certainly com­pe­tent enough to have painted in the Romney style if that had interested him. He did, however, live in a very different time and was fascinated by other things. Among those were the Cycladic figurines that he saw in the Louvre and other museums in Paris. You can see the influence they had on Modigliani clearly in the second comparison above. And he wasn’t alone: The Romanian sculptor Con­stan­tin Brân­cuși, for example, was equally impressed by these early Bronze Age sculptures.

What makes this all so amusing to me is the question of which of these two paintings should be considered old in the first place: The painting by Romney from 1782 or the Modigliani from 1918 – which was inspired by something from 2500 BC…

Concerning the question of beauty, I hope that my readers will agree with me when I say that, aesthetically, both paintings have their own distinct beauty, and that the Modigliani is a far cry from putting fat in a corner or duct taping a banana to a wall. Whoever does something like the latter only wants to express his deep-seated contempt for humanity and, at the same time, test whether he can get away with weaving in­vis­i­ble clothing. The rationale of the de­fend­ers of this conceptual art non­sense is, of course, that it doesn’t have to be aesthetic because the idea is the art. I swore to myself that I will slap hard across the face any person who wants to tell me that in person. I will then declare that action conceptual art (a micro-performance), call it “pushback”, and it will cost $8 million.

Good Is Good, Bad Is Bad

It should be clear now that the idea that old is good and new is bad doesn’t hold water as a general statement even though it might often be the case.

Below is an example of what I consider to be good contemporary architecture. The Church of San Giovanni Battista in Mogno, Switzer­land, designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta. The Church was fin­ished in 1996 and replaced an older one which was levelled by an avalanche ten years before. The marble and granite that was used was quarried from the valleys of the area, and they repurposed two bells from the old church which had survived⁶.

You can tell by the extreme wide-angle of the first picture below (note the distortion of the cross) how small the building really is. This scale works well for a building with such a distinct character. And the fact that it is a very radical approach in the context of a rural village in the mountains makes for a good contrast.

The Church of San Giovanni Battista in Mogno, Switzerland. The pictures are from Shutterstock.

The neo-traditionalists whom I criticised above – and who would hate this, especially since it’s a church – seem to forget that the medieval chur­ch­es they love so much looked just as radical when they were new. But the point I want to make is actually an entirely different one. I think that many people get confused by focusing whether something is old or new, when what they should actually be concentrating on is the bal­ance between intuitive and intellectual beauty.

Heart and Mind

Some people make the argument that beauty is self-evident. I believe this statement to be neither completely true nor false. In my opinion, the appreciation of beauty has to be taught. And yet, at the same time, beauty can and should indeed be self-evident. This seem­ing con­tra­diction comes from the fact that we are humans and not robots. To live with contradictions is indeed one of the things that makes us human. What I mean is that there are two ways of ex­pe­ri­enc­ing beauty which actually complement each other: An intuitive one and an intellec­tual one. Beauty for the heart and beauty for the mind.

When we speak of kitsch, we refer to something that is perceived on a purely emotional level but offers nothing for the mind. Whereas (good) con­tem­po­rary art or architecture, for example, is the opposite by being largely intellectual. One can only be grasped through a gut feeling, the other only through the mind. I think both approaches, if pursued as a sin­gu­lar goal, are wrong because they deny the complexity of our existence.

The best architecture – be it the finest con­tem­po­rary buildings or the ancient Greek temples – succeeds on both levels. Work of this kind is immediately and unmistakably beautiful, while also becoming richer and more rewarding the more one learns about it on an intellectual level. I myself didn’t know about the intricate details of the Parthenon until a few years ago, and when I finally read about them, it just deep­ened my appreciation for the temple’s obvious beauty and even gave it a sense of the numinous.

Botta’s church – for me at least – works on these two levels. It’s play­ful and goofy enough to speak to the heart, while its geometry and materials invite contemplation and the desire to find out more about it.

The Mainstream

Unfortunately (or maybe not), not every con­tem­po­rary architect is Mario Botta. And even he didn’t produce excellent work all of the time. In any case, I’m not so concerned with the very small group of people that some would call “star architects”. They plan maybe one out of every 5000 buildings or so in a major city. My problem is with the 4999 other buildings that get com­mis­sioned by bureaucrats or other uninspired people and look accordingly.

Which brings me back to the beginning of this essay. People like the businesspeople I sat with will never appreciate or pro­duce anything beautiful. I know it sounds rather harsh, but just like I got blank stares from these people, you will be laughed out of the room if you even utter the word “beauty” in what some people would call a “serious environment” or a “business meeting”. The Microsoft Excel mindset has infested and destroyed almost everything. It has infested the brains of the already soulless middle managers to an extent that they don’t even see the hypo­crisy of their own actions. Indeed, if you ask them where they went on holiday, they will tell you about their trip to Santorini or some little Italian town that was “full of life”, as they will put it. Un­wit­ting­ly, they mean life in the Christopher Alexander sense!

You see, these people will sit at their desks in the morning and plan the next grey suicide-box (apart­ment building they call it), and at lunch­time book a flight to “some place beautiful”. Meaning, some place that doesn’t look like the crime they have just com­mit­ted. And all that with­out ever realising the contradiction.

And they are very good at making a stern face. They mean business and they let you know it. No time for fanciful notions of beauty. They are in fact proud that they won’t be distracted by such romantic non­sense. Saving money by using standard industrial components, so that Le Corbusier’s standard industrial humans can be put there, is their only aim. They will indeed call a solution that was well executed in a purely economical sense “beautiful”. The results will ultimately look very much like this street in Athens:

O shining and violet-crowned and celebrated in song, bulwark of Hellas, glorious Athens, divine citadel – Pindar

The photo above could have been taken in almost any major city. It hurts me especially, though, because Athens is the cradle of our civil­i­sa­tion. It should look like that too, and not as if someone emptied a large trash bin over the landscape.

Many people will even defend this sort of crime against humanity. They will say, for example, that we needed to rebuild quickly after the Second World War. That is true, of course, but also eighty years ago now. Depressing concrete blocks like these, however, still get built wher­ev­er you go. And then, of course, there are the usual suspects, the cultural terrorists that are actively working against anything that could be beautiful. They will argue that the bleak nature of these buildings reflects the struggle of the working class or some non­sen­si­cal rubbish like that. Of course, the people who make that argument have never seen anybody from the working class in real life. George Orwell saw right through them in 1937 already:

Sometimes I look at a Socialist – the in­tel­lec­tu­al, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation – and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed.

A Question of Culture

Culture is what remains once the money has run out. That is what I have been taught by my parents. It was their answer to my question what culture is. I have also been taught that people mis­take wealth for education. An important lesson when you grow up in a place like Switzer­land. So play this game if you will: Look deep inside you and ask yourself what will remain if your society runs out of mon­ey. Are you sure there would be much left to be proud of? A fire to preserve?

This needs to be addressed. Architects, de­sign­ers, artists, but also engineers – everyone who puts things into the world has a re­spon­sibility. And I don’t want to hear about how better things are more ex­pen­sive. First of all, they don’t need to be. We have more than enough technology today with which we can easily automate many things that would have been manual labour just a couple of decades ago. There is now even a startup called Monumental Labs that aims to build stone-carving robots to reduce the cost of producing building or­na­men­ta­tion and sculp­tures⁷. And secondly, let me remind you of what designer Raymond Loewy said:

Between two products equal in price, function and quality, the better looking will outsell the other.

So it is not only a question of doing something out of self-respect or for the good of society and our culture – all of which, I claim, would be more than reason enough to insist on beauty – it also makes good business sense.

You should indeed know this from your own city (if you live in one and it is interesting enough to attract tourists): The tourists will go to the old town “where it’s beautiful” and not to the out­skirts where the Cor­bu­sian depression factories⁸ were built.

There are other arguments too. A rather famous study from 1984 found, for example, that:

Twenty-three surgical patients assigned to rooms with windows looking out on a natural scene had shorter post­operative hospital stays, re­ceived fewer negative evaluative comments in nurses’ notes, and took fewer potent analgesics than 23 matched patients in similar rooms with windows facing a brick building wall.

There’s a whole Wikipedia article on healing environments that has more information if you’re interested.

So the benefits of beauty are, as we have seen, not only cultural and philosophical but also tangible. There is, in other words, no excuse not to insist on beauty.

I believe that everyone who creates has to make the case for beauty again and again, especially to the decision makers. In a certain way, the businesspeople I talked about cannot be blamed. They just don’t know any better because they have grown up surrounded by medi­ocrity. That makes it all the more important to explain to them why beauty is important, and that it is more than skin deep – much more indeed.

1. The Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 3, Competition ↑
2. Carbon units is what the alien that threatens Earth in Star Trek: The Motion Picture calls the humans. The alien turns out to be a machine and is under the im­pres­sion that the carbon units are infesting the Enter­prise. I cannot help but think that Le Corbusier must have had similar feelings towards human beings: An infestation of his otherwise perfectly sterile grey boxes. ↑
3. Beuys wasn’t only a hack but also a Nazi Mitläufer. He joined the Hitler Youth before it became mandatory, volunteered for a twelve-year term of military service and, after the war, “…surrounded himself with former and long-time Nazis, who were his artistic patrons and his political comrades-in-arms.” What a charming fellow. And later in life a founding member of the German Green party – of course. There is more: “The author of a new Beuys biography, Hans Peter Riegel, has set out to uncover the man behind the myth. In Riegel’s view, Beuys was neither a deranged artist nor an innocent genius, but rather a fairly reactionary and dan­ger­ous figure. There is no doubt that Beuys was a devotee of the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, who died in 1925 and was the founder of anthroposophy, which forms the basis for Waldorf education. According to Riegel, Beuys even saw himself as the new Steiner, as a chosen one, and he was obsessed with Steiner’s occultism and his racial theories – and with the abstruse ideas of a Germanic soul, a German spirit and a special mission for the German people.” Read the rest at Spiegel. ↑
4. I’m oversimplifying in this essay what Alexander meant by life but for this context, it is good enough. If you want a deeper understanding, look at his four-volume The Nature of Order. ↑
5. The exceptions I got were one person who thought it was a trick question, another who said that he didn’t have his glasses on for the first pair of pictures, and another who tapped the wrong thing by accident. ↑
6. If you search online for Botta’s plans and sketches of that church, you will find one where he used Le Corbusier’s Modulor to visualise the dimensions of the structure. Do with that information whatever you like… ↑
7. The relentless usage of “AI” on their website irritates me. That being said, their mission statement is re­veal­ing: “With technology and craft, we can unleash a gold­en age of art and architecture. After decades of industrial efficiency overtaking aesthetic ambition, we believe robots and AI will empower artists and ar­chi­tects to bring radical and beautiful new visions to life quickly and affordably.” Whether or not that is a good idea remains to be seen. The technology itself is certainly in­ter­est­ing for window pediments, column capitals and so on. What I see in terms of sculpture on their website, however, didn’t exactly strike me as very so­phis­ti­cat­ed in its artistic value. And that’s not even touching upon the point that sculpture lives because it had a sculptor, not a machine that made it… ↑
8. Le Corbusier uniron­i­cal­ly called his housing “machines for living in”. ↑

Concerning the tone of this essay: There has been, in my opinion, too much room-temperature rhetoric around the topics of beauty and culture already. I’m afraid that par­tic­ular­ly in the design profession, arts, and architecture, people usually don’t have much of a backbone and thus don’t say out loud what they really think. So if you dis­approve of my style as being too polemic or ag­gres­sive, I can’t help you.

Thanks to Professor Evaggelos Vallianatos and Yannis Fotiadis for reading drafts of this essay.