In
Jeffrey Tumlin's talk last month, one of the very last things he mentioned was the role of beauty. He didn't give it much air time, and he admitted that it was a problematic topic due to differences in taste among individuals and beauty's resistance to being quantified and measured.
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That Belluschi Bank: Not Lovely.
A cold, sterile, box, and unfriendly at the sidewalk |
An elusive quality, beauty doesn't work its way into policy and planning very easily.
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| Step 9 in Jeff Speck's Walkable City |
The notion's in the air, happily enough. Though
Jeff Speck doesn't use the word, his criterion of the "interesting" walk suggests he'd agree beauty is an important ingredient. Something "friendly and unique" is often going to be something attractive, even beautiful. His
Step 7 on shaping spaces and step 8 on street trees, also point to the aesthetic dimension of walking and perception. So even if he doesn't mention beauty outright, beauty is lurking in the background of several of his points.
Back in February, in a comment on a note about the Belluschi Bank,
Jim threw down a challenge,"What building have we built in Salem since 1940 that is as good as this one?"
Salem doesn't have a lot of mid-century architecture, and in addition to needing to think about the virtues of simply reusing existing building stock, we are also now at the point asking how much of it we should be preserving as historically or architecturally significant. It is, unfortunately, also an era that has produced some terribly ugly things, and the general style cues don't very often say "beauty." More often they say instead things like "order" or "function," or "exposed," and it might take effort to see something interesting or even beautiful.
With
the Saul Zaik home tour in Portland,
the Gordon House tea getting press for Mother's Day, mid-century has been in the air lately - since Jim threw down a good question, here's the start of an answer!