Tidbits of Wisdom I've Heard: Beauty is Essential

I'll keep beating this dead horse until I can't beat it anymore

There’s nothing much more that I enjoy than when people outside the world of architecture and urban design talk about my issues. I find most commonly that people can boil down complex issues into very simple, but apt, reactions and thoughts. I may not agree, or I may want to weigh in with my knowledge that helps explain the matter, but I still enjoy “outside” perspectives on my world.

Today’s example is a discussion about beauty. I’ve written about the importance of beauty in cities many times, most recently here.

Here’s some excerpts from a speech I just watched. Watch the transition from the discussion of beauty in nature to beauty in architecture:

Beauty is essential. It’s as essential, I would say over time as air or water or food. We can’t really live fully as humans without it. We will be diminished without it. We punish our most dangerous citizens by putting them in concrete cells, alone, without beauty. If you wonder how important beauty is, anyone who hunts or fishes knows that a huge part of the experience is the stream itself. Regardless of the massive, fat square tail brook trout that reside there waiting for your fly, or the fields while hunting dall sheep at altitude. The mountains are a huge part of it. The solitude is a huge part of it. God’s creation.

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You have to be in a place where human beings in their folly haven’t made things uglier. You just have to, or you die inside. It’s that important. And, I think that’s the story of every person, whether we recognize it or not.

If there’s no effort at all to preserve beauty, if everything is done purely to maximize the return for the people who did it, leaving behind the detritus, this ugliness the rest of us have to live with for generations – then that’s a crime. And we should say so.

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And some massive, ugly housing development, how about you build a massive, beautiful housing development? And it costs you 20% more, but that’s kind of the price of not destroying things. And we’re going to demand you do that. But we don’t. We just sort of sit back and go, that’s the free market.

I would say two things – one, I’m strongly for the free market. I wish we had one – we don’t. We have an economy based on monopolies that exist because they have favor from the government. Period. That is our economy. And second, how far do we want to take the ideology here?

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There are parts of this country that look nothing like they did twenty years ago. I drive through them and I say, who built that? Who is the architect, and why is he not in prison? People didn’t build buildings like that 80 years ago. There wasn’t one building in America like that. Why are we doing that now? Why are we letting them do that now?

If I have one, major beef with they YIMBY movement and its loudest voices, it’s this complete lack of recognition of the importance of beauty in the built environment. Just building stuff isn’t enough. If what we build doesn’t please us at our human core, then it won’t last. As architect Steve Mouzon puts it, it won’t be “lovable.” And anything not lovable ultimately gets cast aside or torn down.

Former long-time Mayor of Charleston, SC, Joe Riley understood this deeply. It’s one reason he was so popular, and the city kept him around for about 100 years as Mayor. Here’s an example of how he used to talk about the importance of beauty to actual human beings:

Riley recalled building a park on the waterfront—one that was designed without a railing so that a person could dangle their feet over the retaining wall and look out across the sea. Clarence Hopkins, an epileptic who rode a bicycle to his job sweeping floors, was one such person. One morning, not long after the wall was built, Riley noticed Clarence sitting just so. “Why do you come here?” Riley asked. “Because it is so beautiful,” Hopkins told the mayor. “I love it when the sun is coming up and you can see the ships coming in.”

“Clarence had never seen the Great Lakes, or the purple mountains’ majesty. All he had was the city. Not long after, he had a stroke from which he never recovered. When we dedicated the park, I insisted on bringing him to the ceremony in a wheelchair with his family. They thought it odd that we made such a fuss and insisted that Clarence be there. I didn’t single him out and embarrass him. But I wanted Clarence to be in the front row to remind us about why we built the park—so someone like him can begin his day in a public place and clothe himself in peace and beauty.”

I often end my presentations, or have something near the end, to the effect of “Human Pleasure is Not a Frill.” This is not a plea for fifty more pages of design regulations. It’s a plea for all of us that touch the built environment to remember why we do this to begin with. It’s a plea for us all to return to basics, and make places that are enduring and worth caring about.