Let us be clear: beauty in architecture is not as subjective as much of contemporary criticism would like to simplify the subject. There are specific reasons why we perceive certain streets as attractive walking routes - and, at the same time, why the general judgement of taste leans towards traditional buildings.
In 2020, the Norwegian University of Life Sciences used VR technology to study the reactions of a group of people to various locations in Oslo. The experiment confirmed the findings of every major survey that has been done on the topic in the past 20 years: neighbourhoods defined by modernist buildings were described by participants as unpleasant, tedious, and stressful, while places with a preponderance of historical architecture evoked overwhelmingly positive feelings.
Explaining the phenomenon by nostalgia for the “good old days” is not seriously supported by the facts. According to science, certain compositional solutions - arbitrarily deleted from the prevailing theory of architecture in the 20th century - determine the brain’s particular inclination towards old townhouses and palaces.
On “beauty” most simply
“Beauty” is one of the concepts that resists precise definitions with exceptional success. One of the reasons for this difficulty is the tradition of a too “abstract” approach to the issue - for centuries, the mainstream of considerations about beauty flowed from vague divagations around the order of the universe, the absolute, the soul, and so on. Meanwhile, it is a futile act to define any concept with terms even more complex and abstruse than it. So, for our brief considerations, let us adopt optics that are as simple as possible, inductive, and created from clearly defined blocks of information:
Only organisms that move have developed a brain. The ability to move naturally implies the need to make decisions that increase the chance of survival in a given location. In a sense, the key to survival is an effective diagnosis of reality: some circumstances are conducive to survival and reproduction, and others involve deadly risks.
From a scientific point of view, the act of rapid, accurate, and precise observation is therefore associated with a kind of serotonin “reward” that the brain gives itself for recognising potential benefits and risks. Aesthetic satisfaction lies at the heart of this highly elaborate perceptual mechanism. To oversimplify the subject, we could say that “beauty” is a feature of a thing’s character that makes it at least partly easy to define and understand.
The theory outlined in this general framework applies to virtually every branch of art; however, in the case of architecture, it should be broken down into two levels: compositional and typological. The first relates to the mechanical process of seeing; the second to interpretation, which we will consider in turn.
The so-called human scale
The sense of sight did not originate and develop randomly but as a tool dedicated to analysing the natural environment. Therefore, the way it works is a response to the structure of the environment in which our ancestors lived and moved for the absolute majority of history. If the structure of a given form makes it difficult for the optical apparatus to assimilate it - or if the stimulus deviates too far from the standard to which the eye and visual cortex are “tuned” - perception remains incomplete. In other words: the brain ascertains the presence of an object but does not receive information in sufficient quantity to make a satisfactory diagnosis.
As N. Salingaros noted, an essential and common feature of the structure of the natural environment is its hierarchical fractality. Therefore, the visual characterisation of animals, plants and rock formations does not end with a contour filled in with a uniform patch but is subject to further refinement in a chain of ever-decreasing scales. For example, a tree has a general outline, where we then distinguish the trunk and crown. A longer view makes it possible to extract individual branches and blocks of greenery from the form, and finally, the texture of the bark and the foliation of individual leaves. What is extremely important, each of these optical “levels” is clearly defined.
The architecture, corresponding to the outlined principle, cooperates with our way of seeing and is naturally satisfying for the viewers. A study once carried out showed that a walk around London’s St Paul’s Cathedral could provide levels of relaxation comparable to a walk in the woods - this should come as no surprise because one of the chief features of the ancient building was precisely an elaborate, strictly rigorous hierarchy of size.
Imagine a typical 19th-century tenement house: the building resembles a cuboid at its largest scale. “Subsequent scale” amounts to visually breaking up the building into a ground floor, intermediate floors, and a kind of crowning level. When further elaborated, the composition makes it possible to distinguish the openings, then the framing around the doors and windows - and finally, the fine profiles that make up the individual elements. The smallest part of a classical building can usually be grasped with fingers, making it extremely easy to realise the object’s size.
Interestingly, it appears that the brain - in a kind of quest for “synaptic training” - is particularly satisfied with forms of a certain degree of complexity. Arrangements that are richly decorated but organised in a way that allows them to be assimilated smoothly, can provide the viewer with a satisfaction akin to solving a puzzle in no time. “Everyone content with his conjecture”, quipped an 1849 architecture textbook on the subject.
The traditional theory of composition aimed to develop forms in such a way that, on the one hand, they satisfied our need for scalar hierarchy and, on the other hand, presented the cognitive apparatus with an apparent challenge. This was particularly important in the case of objects of considerable size, resisting instantaneous “diagnosis” and often associated with a degree of danger.
The twentieth century replaced the described system with an absurd - from the point of view of neuro-aesthetics - the paradigm of minimalism and frenetic pursuit of simplicity. Research suggests that forms that are too flat, homogeneous, and deprived of areas of high contrast by their unnaturalness and “informational poverty” confuse the brain, opposing its innate processes of order. Particularly alien to the visual apparatus are the austere Platonic solids so beloved by the modernists, as well as the vast planes of glass and the now fashionable façades based on monotonous, orthogonal “grids”. The latter have even been the subject of studies suggesting their effect on migraine complaints.
In search of constancy
In the accepted context of survival, the sense of recognition boils down to the ability to identify those stimuli we experience for the first time. Memory alone can only be sufficient under conditions of re-encountering precisely the same copy of a given object. Meanwhile, diagnosis of the new and unfamiliar requires the involvement of more complex cognitive processes.
An American farmer remarked that “no two snowflakes are alike”. How, then, does a never-seen-before tree, cloud or lake not lead us into profound surprise?
The answer to this question is provided by a phenomenon that one scholar called the cognitive economy of the brain. In a constantly changing reality, the cognitive apparatus is forced to be interested only in the fixed, essential, and fundamental properties of things, “sifting out” the features associated with their individual occurrence. Our neural circuits, striving to identify a given stimulus as precisely as possible with as little effort as possible, make use of a kind of reservoir of patterns - created based on averaged experience. Each sensory stimulus encountered is confronted and compared with this catalogue. As one can easily guess, finding a consistent precedent in the described set provides satisfaction - while the occurrence of a disorder puts the brain in a position of helplessness and self-doubt.
Plato wrote about the “ideal form” of the apple, i.e. the theoretical, pure form of this fruit, which - although it does not occur in reality - serves as a kind of basis for recognising all the apples of the world. Such “ideal forms” are what traditional architectural theory calls “types”.
In an experiment once conducted by Leon Krier, the children - when asked to draw a house - unanimously returned cards with a rectangle covered by a sloping roof. Interestingly, many of them grew up in neighbourhoods where this type of architecture was practically absent: the “type” mentioned is, however, so emphatic, logical, and comprehensible that it has displaced the modernist forms available to their personal experience from the young people’s imagination.
One of the chief reasons why traditional architecture enjoys such a positive reception is precisely because of its clear, elaborate typology, which corresponds to a profound logic. From the point of view of the brain, most classical buildings are easy to “read” in the search for visual meanings; this has a soothing effect on the cognitive apparatus in the case of the simpler designs and arouses aesthetic delight in the case of the more complex ones. Viewing a traditional building from some distance, we usually have no doubt not only that we indeed see a piece of architecture, but we are also able to read the likely purpose of the object. An ordinary dwelling house is of a different type, as is a church accentuated with a soaring belfry and large windows; a town hall or tenement house represents yet another type.
Similarly, the abandonment or even blatant contestation of a typology established in the collective consciousness mostly leads to the unpopularity of modernist architecture; where experience, memory and comprehensibility are crucial, the builders of the twentieth century introduced a paradigm of shocking novelty at all costs. Countless contemporary theatres began to resemble steel mills, temples became similar to oil refineries, and single-family homes took the form of microwaves, radiators, and refrigerators. Such a confusion of conventions on a larger scale forces the cognitive apparatus to scan the environment constantly and actively in search of things that are understandable and safe; thus, it introduces a state of constant alertness that is chronic torture for the brain.
The act of perceiving - seemingly instantaneous - is, in fact, more like a multi-level process. First, the brain makes a quick “hypothesis” about the nature of the thing seen and assigns it to a highly generalised category. Then, with the involvement of more complex cortical areas, it begins to collect premises that confirm the initial assumption and allow the stimulus to be refined. As already mentioned, the coherence of the process described determines aesthetic satisfaction, while the occurrence of contradictions - undermines the effectiveness of the first insight and arouses frustration. As Arnheim tried to define the problem, ugliness is “a relation suggested but not realised”.
The large scale of the object, its relative regularity and the sight of people penetrating inside through openings placed near the ground lead to an early conclusion that we are dealing with a type of building. If further examination reveals the presence of, for example, a sloping roof, vertical windows, and thick walls - the perception will be “completed”. However, if the overall form of the building resembles, for example, a crystal, the partitions appear to be monolithic planes of glass and the façade is covered with abstract patterns - the cognitive apparatus will experience dissonance.
Roger Scruton remarked that the qualities that determine the beauty of a horse, for example, would be repulsive in the human form. The case is no different with architecture. This art has a language of its own, developed over thousands of years - and littering it with “foreign words” is bound to arouse protests in most viewers, who are naturally inclined to feel in control.
The sense in perception
John Locke once wondered whether a person blind from birth - having miraculously possessed the sense of sight - would be able to recognise objects being viewed. If he had lived a few decades longer, he might have heard of an extraordinary case that settled this doubt unequivocally. A blind girl, unexpectedly having begun to see at an early age, was unable to make the slightest use of her newly acquired ability. Objects, people, and animals appeared to her as meaningless blobs; the flood of incomprehensible stimuli stressed her to such an extent that she recalled with longing the times of her disability. The story cited above is one piece of evidence that stimulus recognition is a skill that requires a deep grounding in experience. From the point of view of the cognitive apparatus, the absence of this experience is tantamount to a lack of meaning. Since the girl had never explored reality with her eyes, the impulses aroused in the visual cortex did not provide her with any meaningful information.
The brain constructs a typological system based on countless precedents; throughout a lifetime subjected to analysis, evaluation, and retrospection. The components of our visual reality do not have inherent “signatures” or “labels” but receive them as a result of multisensory experiences. For this reason, the intensity of a given visual type is related to the frequency of exposure to the stimulus, the usefulness of the type for survival and the multilateral grounding in experiences of another type.
Finding safe shelter is among the most ancient and core human needs. Early attempts by humans to protect themselves from rain, cold and wild animals gave rise to the primitive shelter type - found in probably all cultures and latitudes. The universal validity of the laws of physics, such as gravity and friction, and their practical observation reassured our ancestors of the structural superiority of one shape of building over another. Experience, available even to young children, showed that forms wide at the base are more stable than those tapering downwards, that the ratio of length to thickness of a stick has a direct bearing on its breakability, and that an inclined plane is more conducive to drainage than a flat one. The emphatic pronunciation of the triangle, composed of branches leaning against each other and covered by leaves, thus gave rise to a complex system of architectural types.
As human ingenuity developed, buildings were erected using increasingly complex techniques and more varied materials. In each case, however, the “working principle” of the structure remained clear to the eye and made it possible, by reference to a typology supported by experience, to estimate the suitability of the building in question as a place of refuge. The natural requirement that perception places on a form diagnosed as a “building” is stability and security - thus, the application to the architecture of shapes commonly associated with failure disturbed the consistency of perception and did not enter the aesthetic canon.
One of the chief concerns of traditional architectural composition is to develop the external shape of a building in such a way that - regardless of the detailed structural solutions - the visual apparatus experiences the impression of a building that is logical, safe and cooperates with the commonly associated forces of physics. A peak of unparalleled harmony was reached in this respect by the artists of ancient Greece: it should therefore come as no surprise that all later European architecture continually referred to Hellenistic typology.
Every, even the smallest, element of a classical building is either an expression of the forces of physics acting on a given construction place or such a plastic elaboration of this place that satisfies the optical demand for stability. Buildings were obliged to begin with a massive plinth or base, which closed the composition from below and prevented it from helplessly “sinking” into the ground. The ground floor was often motivated by massive arcades and sometimes by crude stone blocks, on which successively lighter storeys were erected. Elements were clearly differentiated into carrying, carried, and constituting merely a passive “screen” between structural threads. The remarkably fine line of the antique column - slightly thickened at a third of its height - corresponds to the truth of the way a taut muscle struggles against weight; or the manner with which a material slightly distorts under pressure. Profiles and cornices, richly distributed over the classic façade, have nothing of randomness - but represent a deeply thought-out emphasis of deflections, wrinkling and stresses, which on a scale invisible to the eye actually occur in the structure. The various brackets, so eagerly stylised as unfurling leaves and stems, understandably reproduce the sense associated with lifting and carrying. The subject is so vast that a full elaboration would require a separate major work.
It does not matter at all that most of the measures mentioned merely amounted to decoration, enriching an essentially flat wall. From an Aristotelian point of view, the classical building did not reproduce reality as it is - but brought out the intuitively demanded truth of the aesthetic essence of architecture. Thus, as such, it satisfied the natural need of the cognitive apparatus to “absorb” the world in an easy way, to categorise and understand it.
Avant-garde architecture - with its programmatic rejection of traditional aesthetics - dissociated itself from the thousand-year-old science of the optical static of composition. Since the 1920s, it has marked its march with gigantic masses balancing on flaccid supports, beams with caricatured stretched, “breakable” proportions, and walls artistically developed as so thin that they seem unable to withstand the pressure of the spaces they enclose. Stripped of any stylisation, the partitions cannot be defined as load-bearing elements or as primary “fabrics” stretched between the pillars. The modernist column has completely lost the original, classical sense of an element: stripped of its base and capitellum, it seems passively lost somewhere in the ground, at the same time “drilling” through the ceiling it carries - like a pipe, devoid of structural significance.
For the most part, a traditional building is a metaphorical story of its own fundamental significance, a synthesis of threads that is legible to the human diagnostic apparatus, ensuring that the content and form accompany each other. Using a typology that grows out of the common experience, it remains within reach of intuitive understanding and satisfies our need for consistency in perception. In contrast, the aesthetics of a modernist building often contradict the qualities we associate as “innately architectural”- leaving the viewer untrained in interpreting the style vulnerable to confusion and disgust.
Architecture for our time
One of the leading experts on the subject, Semir Zeki, likes to say that the artist is actually a neurologist - putting together forms in a way that appropriately stimulates the human brain. In this context, a look at pre-modern architectural theory extremely often provides a picture of the science of specific, proven methods of satisfying the sense of sight. Despite the rationalistic aspirations of modernism, the advent of this current in the building arts led to the almost complete displacement of the aforementioned theory by ideology - the effects of which are still being felt today; in the quarters of ordinary tenements seeking respite from block housing and minimalist office buildings.
In the twenty-first century, can we still create architecture that - by referring to basic mechanisms of perception - will simply give us pleasure? Can a contemporary building still look like a building? A look at the countless realisations of the neo-traditional current (such as the new Yale campus, the picturesque villas of Quinlan Terry or the temples designed by Duncan Stroik) seems to provide an affirmative answer.
The problem outlined in this short essay goes beyond aesthetics in any case.
Ultimately, a happier society is a healthier society. And a healthier society is a wealthier society.
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