Everywhere, in every nook and neighbourhood of our cities, the uglifiers are hard at work – hordes of them, beavering away day and night to replace the particular, the organic and the intricate with the shiny, the soulless and the wrist-slittingly dull. We should be inured to this by now. Yet every 10-lane swathe of overbaked tarmac, every square-jawed overbridge, clear-felled urban forest and soul-shrivelling curtain wall manages to shock me anew. I’m astonished not that it happens, but that we still – with all our money and smarts – cannot make shared habitat that we actually like. In fact, we’re getting worse. Why? Who are these uglifiers and how did they get such power?
The reasons are threefold: modernism, postmodernism and totalitarian instrumentalism. Modernism’s insistence that form had but one task – to follow function – reduced beauty to an effete embellishment. Postmodernism, undermining both truth and judgement with its relentless epistemological relativism, rendered everything personal and subjective; nothing could be considered truly beautiful or truly ugly. And, while recognizing beauty as power, the imperative of totalitarian instrumentalism saw also that, in order to oppress people, their source of beauty had to be destroyed.
Each of these forces has shaped our cities in ways that are no less real for being largely unseen. Let’s consider them one at a time.
Modernism had countless plausible origins, but say we accept that it was kickstarted by the horrors of World War I, which universalized a desperation to shed all things historical, including canons of beauty. By 1917, Duchamp could revolutionize the art world with his pseudonymous submission of a deliberately commonplace urinal, Fountain, to the Society of Independent Artists’ Salon in New York. And by 1918, Tristan Tzara could declare, in his Dada Manifesto, that “beauty is dead.” Suddenly, art was no longer about beauty. It was about ideas, including the shocking idea of ugliness.
Of course, this rejection of beauty lived more in the word than the deed. Gropius might affect to despise aesthetics, dismissing all things visual as mere “style,” but a glance at his work (such as the famous Fagus shoe factory constructed between 1911 and 1913) shows that composition was always front-of-mind. Similarly, Harry Seidler, a former Bauhaus student who brought Gropius to Sydney to mount similar arguments in 1956, spent his life rejecting “style” but was nevertheless profoundly aesthetically engaged
As it turns out, modernism did not kill beauty, but instead – perhaps worse – trivialized it. In severing the age-old links between beauty and morality, modern functionalism shrank the entire aesthetic enterprise from being a subject worthy of serious scholarship to mere superficiality – hence “style.”
It sounds small but the effect was huge. For eons, from Plato through Aristotle, Aquinas, Alberti and Kant, physical beauty had been considered to have moral and spiritual import. As Kant insisted in 1790, “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good.”1 Beauty worked both ways: it evidenced the noble and was itself ennobling.
This idea reappears in poet John Keats’s famous 1819 injunction, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”2 Indeed, as contemporary American philosopher Crispin Sartwell notes, “beauty is fundamentally connected to the spirit in every culture.”3
In a sad, traduced way, this intuition is still current. It’s why the heroes and heroines in blockbuster movies are always physically attractive. But within the creative professions lurks the more damaging idea that beauty is merely skin-deep.
Manet’s 1865 nude, Olympia, so shocked Parisians that armed guards had to be stationed outside the exhibition. Why? Not because she was nude (Parisians were, after all, artistically sophisticated and well accustomed to nudes) but because she was physically beautiful, despite being morally corrupt (a courtesan). Because, for the first time, beauty was no more than a look.
More than a century on, this decoupling of beauty from goodness still blights our cities. By making beauty a luxury – a nice-to-have but only if the budget happens to stretch to it – we make it the preserve of the rich. So, the beautiful parts of our cities – which are, broadly speaking, the old parts, with their mature trees, textured streets and lively walkability – are now small, few and exclusive. Contemporary city-making, driven as it is by the headlong pursuit of “supply,” tends to dispense with aesthetic amenity as a mere superfluity.
The second force for uglification, postmodern relativism, intensifies this city-making carelessness. The idea that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is an old one, long predating the late-twentieth century. But most thinkers, including Alberti and Kant, have held that beauty is part-subjective and part-real or inherent. Postmodernism, as popularized, makes beauty so subjective, so personal, that it can barely be discussed, much less formulated, analysed, taught, critiqued or applied to the public realm.
The effect is to shut down virtually all aesthetic discussion. This impoverishes everything, especially architecture. Traditionally, the profession espoused and taught beauty as its explicit and defining purpose. Even now, and alone among the arts, architecture holds aesthetics close to its secret heart. Yet the reluctance to declare this leaves the most public of all the arts – urban architecture – the least publicly discussed. It also opens the door to the third uglifying force, which we might call numerogarchy or rule-by-men-armed-with-numbers.
Perhaps you think the word “totalitarian” is too strong. We know that the deliberate destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Islamic Emirate in 2001, and of the winged bull (lamassu) of Nineveh by Islamic State members in 2015, had the desired effect of demoralizing the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively. Our contemporary urban uglification is less deliberate, and perhaps therefore less heinous. But the effect of forcing those who yearn for softer, more lovable city fabric to acquiesce in stoical self-censorship is not dissimilar.
It works like this. Numbers, being measurable, are considered “real,” while qualitative traits like beauty, heritage and amenity are considered soft, feminine, dispensable. The numbers involved include traffic flows, dollars and votes. Their wielders – the numerogarchs – include engineers, traffic planners, developers, politicians and financiers to whom we have inexplicably delegated our city-making. The net effect is urban habitats that, increasingly, impose all the disbenefits of hyperdensity – urban heat, hostile streets, the interiorization of the urban realm – while offering none of the increased amenity, walkability and delight that should compensate.
What is the answer?
Architecture must become brave. It must be prepared to give (and take) public critique that is neither petty nor personal. It must understand that, through criticism, taste can be cultivated and the eye can be educated. The idea is not to impose a particular concept of beauty but, rather, to build an understanding of how beauty works, what we respond to and why it matters. We should teach the entire lineage of aesthetic theory, starting with Plato, and instruct students not in what shapes or colours or principles to apply, but how to think about these things. We need to understand the dynamic of beauty – and of ugliness.
What makes something beautiful is, as much as anything, the sense of invested human care. The subconscious understanding that someone, somewhere, has invested thought and time and skill in creating a place we inhabit induces a sense of being nurtured. Conversely, the uglifiers’ evident lack of care, manifest now in almost all our public realm design, signifies to the hapless pedestrian that they could not matter less.
Beauty, argues Platonist philosopher Iris Murdoch, is a love thing. Beauty empowers us not via possession but because, in loving it and in feeling loved by it – by delighting in the shaded avenue, the curved and burnished shopfront, the picturesque mossy wall – we take a tiny, collective step towards our better selves.
To accept that only the rich deserve this delight is to validate a lie. If anything, the godforsaken peripheries of our cities need and deserve such delight more than our venerable urban heartlands. Only by recognizing this truth and acting on it can we disempower the uglifiers. That would enrich us all.
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, 1790, transl. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; original publication date 1952).
- John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in John Keats, John Barnard, John Keats: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1977).
- Crispin Sartwell, Six Names of Beauty (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006), 57.
