The other side of the mountain

Its nearly a year since our epic expedition in Tanzania but it's still fresh in my memory, reinforced every time I 'don some kili kit: boots, rucksack, buff (yes, it's brilliant for cold weather on a bike). But time to think of other things and hopefully, take you along with me. This may be stretching your loyalties to this blog a bit far but I'm proposing that it metamorphoses into a debate on 'Beauty in architecture'. This transition is not a revelation incubated in the thin air of Kilimanjaro but more of a growing awareness that we present many of our new buildings in much the same way that the two swindlers 'presented' the concept of the King's new clothes; 'if you can't see it then you must be stupid'. Am I being an old fogey or do I have a point? I recently started one of our office Au (Architect's united but also, cunningly, the chemical symbol for gold!) meetings with an image of a building taken form a recent Building Design magazine (and I should point out that being published in BD is not the ultimate accolade in architecture). This was a new retail and commercial building in a provincial high street where the response by the architect to a very straightforward brief was to be well mannered at ground and first floor levels but to introduced curious splays in the plan at successive floor levels. This has nothing to do with rights of light or the 'planning envelope' and everything to do with giving some excitement and 'interest' into a design that clearly the architect feels embarrassed about. Thankfully my peers concurred and concluded that there may be point here. And I got to thinking, where does beauty come into the argument? Should architecture be mere utility and we should be grateful if the result looks half decent or should we insist in a level of design quality, indeed even beauty? In the several thousand years that we have been building I'm not the first to consider beauty but it does seem time for reappraisal. Is there anything intrinsic in design that might confer beauty or is it entirely subjective? How does proportion, scale, rhythm, symmetry affect beauty? Please let me know your views. Perhaps you can point to a beauty or a horror. You may identify a period that is more likely to have created beautiful buildings but I hope not. Contemporary architecture can deliver both utility and be beautiful but then should we really care? Yours, with my feet firmly on the ground but maybe my head still in the clouds, PaulNick.