What is beauty?
Beauty can be minimized into perfect mathematical proportions, specifically the golden ratio; 1.61803399. Beauty can be found in nature from the smallest plant to the largest animal. Man-made beauty is a reflection of the possible and the necessary to create a form that serves as the solution to a problem with an element of quality.
Firstly, beauty is subjective. Still, there is a consensus for what makes beauty in the natural and man-made world. Whether through utility, function, simplicity, complexity, or mathematical ratio, beauty abounds in the natural world. But since beauty does not define the intention of plants, animals or the built world, what does it take to bush beauty as an agenda against an age of technology, efficiency, and capitalists gains? Good design and beauty are not synonymous. My aim is to look at the past, present and future simultaneously to project beauty into the built environment. Natural beauty is the result of need and adaptation. Part of this study will be to analyze the function of plants and animals in their natural environment, focusing on their adaptations and uses of form. New understanding will then be related to architecture.
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I think this relationship that you are making towards beauty and architecture is strong. It seems that people tend to associate the two to good design which is not the case. The connection to mathematics and nature will definitely result in some interesting findings and relationships that might definitely inform how we perceive the built environment. I am curious to see how your findings turn into architecture or possible something else.
ReplyDeleteRaedun,
ReplyDeleteI think this idea is a very interesting one, but you're not the first one to think of it! I'm really attracted to the idea of studying the natural environment to inform the built one. Google "bioarchitecture" sometime and see what people have come up with. I can assure you if you go this route, you won't have a boring project. :)
Ja
Note: Also, not entirely related to architecture, but still something related is Theo Jansen. Take a look:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUsCQoDCXoY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b694exl_oZo
Enjoy!
Ah, beauty. This is one of the great questions of architecture. It is also is one of the few things that has the ability to tie architecture together across space and time, and elevates it above mere construction.
ReplyDeleteAnd Ja is right: you're not the first one to address this issue. Find out who else has. Start with Plato. Read Jorge Silvetti's essay "In the Beauty of Shadows" before you're finished.
Finally, bioarchitecture makes me very nervous as a methodology. Either it sits trapped in the realm of metaphor, and never becomes architecture, or it becomes mere mimicry, and bypasses architecture completely.
Don't get me wrong: nature has plenty to teach us and much to inspire us, but I think architecture has its own logic that is represented by the union of what is needed and what is wanted. It is fundamentally spatial, experiential and self-referential.
If this seems confused, let me give you a more concrete example: the drawings you've generated as part of your second graphic assignment are beautiful. They are intriguing, but they also speak to some concrete architectural ideas about scale, layering, and spatial relations. These sketches may have started as a reflection on nature, but they are valuable because they offer you an entree into your own architecture.