What Makes Buildings Beautiful (And Why Beauty Does Matter)

why are some buildings more love than others and why do some places attract enormous crowds While others are ignored some would say it is because these popular places and buildings are well known and the others are not but the places that do attract these massive amounts of visitors or which are always photographed must have some other quality that makes them attractive this quality makes people climb mountains Traverse jungles or travel all over the world to see them showing how badly people crave it which quality is it or you might have guessed it Beauty welcome this is the ascetic City and in this video we're going to investigate why you find some buildings in urban environments beautiful and others less so and why the beauty of our buildings in our cities is indeed more important than you might think so let's get started it seems that their modern cities have become increasingly ugly over the years giant concrete overpasses outdated business Parks strip malls and depressing concrete housing complexes so much has been built that makes you wonder who on Earth thought that that was a good idea did anyone even consider the beauty of the design of this building or place because everybody still yearns for some beauty in their lives that's why millions of people visit beautiful cities like Amsterdam or Barcelona it's here these tourists don't go to the rundown business park at the edge of the city they don't walk around underneath concrete overpasses to take pictures and they certainly don't go for a picnic next to a stinky random Pond somewhere no they go to the historical inner city with its beautiful buildings its parks and boulevards and it's obvious why those are beautiful places so adding one plus one together what we should be doing is obvious right just build more beautiful places well that's where things get a bit difficult because when talking to an architect a person who designs the building she will see around you he or she will give you all sorts of reasons why building beautiful is too limited or more problematic because of some philosophical reason the thing you will hear most often is that beauty is subjective let's dive a bit deeper into the concept of beauty the idea that beauty is subjective and it's therefore not useful to discuss any further is quite common it didn't used to be that way in older works on architecture and urbanism Beauty was always named as one of the Essential Elements one of the goals of a building or an urban area but today it doesn't seem to be important in architecture schools creative personal expression and Innovation and of course the concepts are most important complete artistic freedom and a future oriented mind is necessary to push the art of architecture forward we see this in the architecture of today that sometimes gets quite crazy in our increasingly technocratic World many civil servants decision makers and politicians but also developers don't consider Beauty they have bought into the other way of thinking namely that architecture should always strive forward for progression's own sake beauty is too difficult to translate into numbers too much objective debate so why bother it's easier to build a glass box anyway although it might be true that the ultimate interpretation of what you see in here is a mental process that the resulting opinion is slightly different for every person studies show that there are striking similarities in how people react to certain qualities of things they see in their surroundings in other words people tend to like the same kind of things we'll dive a bit deeper into that later if there is consensus about what is beautiful then still why should decision makers and developers care well according to multiple studies there is a measurable emotional attachment to places that are beautiful for instance a 2011 survey in the United States found the strongest correlation between the place's physical Beauty and people's satisfaction out of any other attributes that's quite remarkable but listen to this in a Gallup survey of 43 000 people in 26 U.S cities the same results came out aesthetic attraction to their city was the third most important even scoring above allocation safety and basic Services finally in another study in the UK using an online crowdsource database of pictures that were judged for their scenicness a strong correlation was found between health and scenicness of the area so not only the presence of nature turned out to be important to People's Health but also how Scenic the nature looks like in an area in other words it's Beauty so if you are a decision maker and you want a happy healthy Community if you want to bind skilled workers to your area you better start caring about beauty as well but how then do we build beautifully what are the features and buildings and environments that people like and why does the majority of people prefer a very different type of architecture compared to what contemporary Architects design according to many polls and studies before we go into practical matters let's dive into the philosophical side of beauty philosophers have had great trouble with the concept of beauty and if this objective or subjective earlier thinkers believe Beauty lay in the object itself but in the 18th century they started to change thinkers like human can't argued that beauty was subjective as the feelings connect to the experience of beauty were always created in a mind of the beholder what do more recent thinkers say of this well according to a British philosopher Roger schuten Beauty does have properties which you can recognize he talks about how Beauty pleases us how one thing can be more beautiful than another thing and that we give attention to things because they are beautiful he also states that beauty is the subject matter of judgment which is the Judgment of taste one of the interesting things about taste is that it can be learned this is often visible among architecture students over time their taste for buildings changes this leads us to an interesting phenomena which is called the design disconnect Architects and the public each seem to like different kinds of buildings this effect was discovered by psychologist David Halpern he did a study in 1987 with students in the UK a group of volunteer students were shown photographs of unfamiliar people and buildings and asked to rate them in terms of attractiveness some of the volunteers were Architects some weren't all the students had similar views of which people were attractive but this changed when they were raiding buildings the architecture student's favorite building was the least favorite building of the other students and vice versa one of the most interesting things was that the longer the architecture students have been studying the stronger this effect was these outcomes are shocking because it is the architecture students that are supposed to later design buildings for a popular that's exactly the opposite views on what is beautiful in a building but this study does not give the full picture there is something even stranger going on but Architects like professionally and what they like in private might be different as well even some of the most avant-garde Architects seem to prefer living or working in traditionally designed buildings instead of modernist buildings like they design take REM kohas for example he was the founder of the office for Metropolitan architecture which has designed buildings looking like this you would expect that he lives in something like a minimalist apartment himself right well no he lives in a Victorian townhouse in London that is quite different from what he desams himself apparently he finds London townhouses so attractive that when he got the means to live in one he paid the premium to live there but he would probably not agree that something looking like Victorian townhouse got built today in our time there are many other examples of modernist Architects living or working in traditional environments Norman Foster for example or the headquarters of herzogen De meron or Jean novel in Paris or zaha Hadith I think we can safely say that there is something going on here that goes beyond taste and ideology of Architects we must look deeper is what we find beautiful in our surroundings perhaps linked to our human nature every day we look at our surroundings since humans started Living in cities buildings are an important part of those surroundings however our brains evolved to survive in nature long before buildings existed in those days we were always looking for safety shelter food or things like fertility cues from an evolutionary point of view happiness comes from the natural forms and patterns that we as humans associated with a higher chance of survival we are basically still Stone Age beings agriculture in modern cities are only a blip on a timeline of our species Homo sapiens that goes back at least 200 000 years and according to recent findings maybe even more Denis Dutton an American philosopher who gave an excellent tattoo from beauty he states that we experience Beauty because beauty is Nature's Way of acting at a distance it can magnetize certain things by giving us pleasure looking at it according to Dennis Dutton all things that we find beautiful have three things in common firstly they have a shape or characteristics we inherently like secondly they are fit for their purpose and thirdly they are well made and displays skill in our making but why is that what happens in our brains when we see something and what happens if we see something we don't like our brain has a part called the thalamus which is a part of the limbic system or our emotional brain the thalamus transfers visual data to the amygdala which also processes fear and takes us into a fight or flight reaction sometimes even without us knowing what is in front of us this way our brain keeps us safe and Alive some features of the built environment like sharp angles evoke exactly that fight or flight response and cause stress we need to be aware that everything we design will lead to some form of interaction with our deeper brain structures we can choose to design things that make us feel safe and pleasant or stressed and anxious so now it's finally time to take a look at shapes that we as humans are hardwired to like According to some intriguing research by among others and Sussman and Dr Justin B Hollander in the book cognitive architecture they describe how a hard-wired behavior relates to what buildings and environments we like they even used eye-tracking technology to see exactly what their eyes focus on you will probably not be surprised to hear that the shapes and features we like most are those we have been surrounded with in nature for many thousands of years animals plants faces and humans all these things draw our eyes there is a word for this love of nature biophilia we cannot get rid of these preferences they were pre-installed in our Hardware we simply have to deal with them so let's finally look at the features which I keep referring to here we go fractals these are nested structures self-similar on multiple levels of skill you'll find them everywhere in nature but buildings can have fractal qualities in the facades as well symmetry symmetry is also a very important biophilic element there are various kinds of symmetry like bilateral rotational and translational symmetry symmetry makes a building feel balanced and it is often used to invoke the feeling of power spiritual might or wealth humans seem to strongly prefer symmetry above asymmetry which is according to biologists a preference that is embedded within our DNA ornaments according to Professor Nico salanggaros details and ornaments allow human beings to connect to geometrical structures like buildings our brains have evolved to quickly recognize areas of high contrast and patterns the right amount of ornament stimulates our brain and a studies show humans need a certain amount of informational load from our environment to function in a normal way finally ornaments can give a surface to fractal and symmetrical qualities we enjoy from nature in the form of plants animals and human bodies and faces organized complexity as humans we seem to need some complexity or diversity of form but not too much only order is boring but only complexity is chaos we seem to like things that are somewhere in the middle a plane facade is two orders so we ignore it a facade like this on the other hand is too chaotic this facade gives the clear structure the brain prefers curves many psychology research papers have shown that people find curves more beautiful than straight lines in architecture arches are a beautiful example of Curves domes and spirals as well nature finally and this should speak for itself we find nature attractive according to studies it makes people feel calmer heal faster and even increases happiness plants and trees in right amount always add to the beautiful place no wonder people love parks and fountains Architects know this all too well they often use it in their architectural renders as a sort of trick to hide an otherwise boring or ugly design proposal now we have a better grip on what we naturally find attractive let's put this Theory to the test by analyzing and building the Louver in Paris so what do we see we see symmetry curves and ornaments the facade has a lot of detail but it is structured so we get organized complexity as well so far for the features we inherently like but what about Dennis dunton's two other requirements for beauty well the building looks fit for purpose the building looks strong and solid it also displays a lot of skill in its making all in all we could predict that this building will pass the test now let's look at some other buildings almost all of them lack one or multiple Elements which we have discussed these buildings will probably not be widely judged as being beautiful sure many modern buildings do have some feature or quality looks cool or iconic but will this still be valued in 50 years because gimmicks like fashion get outdated at some point many buildings built in the last 50 years already need to be torn down as they did not have the qualities that made people connect to them all these renovating and rebuilding requires massive amounts of new concrete glass and steel all at a huge cost for society and of course for the environment the good news is that any designer can use the qualities we described and create buildings that were predictably comfort in the lightest we need to design and build using this evidence to create environments people really like this is called evidence-based design many Architects actually dislike evidence-based design as it is a limit on Creative expression and design freedom but it could really help as it would prevent designers from making obvious errors such as creating huge blank walls uncanny dark spaces or monotonous gray slabs let's at least collectively aim for beauty again as it might be essential for the well-being of millions of people living in cities all over the world you have made it this far into the video which means you must be somewhat interested in this topic or also Value Beauty in our buildings and our cities I wonder what your thoughts are put them in the comments below also if you like this and you want me to make more of this type of content please help me by liking this video and subscribing to this channel it really matters a lot also check out the podcast on the patreon link if you really want to support this initiative that's all for now thank you and cheerio [Music]

Channel: The Aesthetic City

Views: 421,106

Keywords: beauty, architecture, urban design, urbanism, what makes buildings beautiful, beautiful architecture, beautiful building, how to build beautiful, buildings, building, how to build, why is everything so ugly, ugly building, modern buildings ugly, modern architecture ugly, ugly architecture, modernism, modern architecture

Id: C9pg2j2oGy0

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2022