Modernity can pretty much be summed up in a simple phrase. What is important is what can be measured. All we know is statistics.
It’s impossible to not sound like a middlebrow fake intellectual making this argument, but that doesn’t make it any less true. We treat the world as a purely quantitative place, ignoring that what is qualitative is equally important, and often more important.
How much money will this generate?
How much does it cost to build this?
How many followers will this generate?
Nothing is more qualitative than beauty. Consider beauty and its effect on your own daily life. What is the dollar value of passing by an attractive stranger your age? How valuable is the awe-inspiring building that you pass during your daily commute? Of course, there’s a price that a buyer would be willing to pay and that the seller would be willing to accept, but how valuable is it to you?
This all may sound overly abstract, but I promise you it isn’t. What I mean is that more often than not, as a society, we optimize based on price and price alone. Whatever is cheapest is best.
We more or less do the bare minimum. What’s the cheapest solution that gets the job done? Alright, let’s do that. That’s not to say that we don’t occasionally go above and beyond and build beautiful things. We do. It’s just that beauty is a feature now rather than a necessity, especially with commonplace things like public buildings.
As a society, we tend to believe that buildings are meant to be functional. They exist solely to fulfill their stated purpose. You might stare at me with your mouth open and say that a school just a place where classes can be taught and blink your eyes. A post office is a place where letters and packages are processed. As long as they fulfill their design, they are good buildings. Beauty is irrelevant.
You might think like this dear reader and that’s alright. But which one of these post offices inspires you? Which one of these buildings gives you a sense of awe for human achievement? Grand buildings, regardless of their purpose, motivate us to do great things, by reminding us of what we’re capable of as a people. Imagine a world devoid of beauty, a world where buildings are rectangular and bland shades of beige and gray. We are building that world.
At the very least, you must acknowledge that we’re borrowing from the beauty of the past, and eventually that gift will cease to keep giving. Old buildings, make up the lion’s share of what makes so many areas in our united states beautiful, and eventually these buildings will crumble into dust.
My point is not that we’re doomed as a society because we build crumby buildings or that we should revert to a different time period. In fact, I’m not sure that I have a point, just an observation. I just think that we can do better as a society. Let’s reject the temptation to be mediocre and only fulfill the basic requirements and lowest expectations. Let’s build buildings that inspire us. Let’s acknowledge the importance of beauty.
Thanks for reading guys.
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Lovin this content Dan
Makes me think society is too stressed to enjoy beauty. It’s all doom and gloom, we need to build ugly, un-extravagant shit because the worlds gunna end faster if we waste our resources. Pride in wealth/ ability isn’t allowed