LAA#121: We came so far for beauty

Do we need beauty?

Beauty would seem to help, as beauty eases pain. In November 2008, Art Monthly
Australia reported on a University of Bari, Italy study that asked volunteers to select
the twenty most beautiful and the twenty ugliest paintings from a group of three
hundred. They were then asked to stare at each in turn while a laser was applied to
their hands. Measurements revealed that the pain was a third less intense when the
volunteers were gazing at works they found beautiful.

Google lists 4,400,000 entries for “measuring beauty.” Following is a selection of
information gleaned. The study of beauty has occupied a large chunk of philosophical
thought since the early Egyptians. The Ancient Greeks distilled beauty to symmetry
and exactness. Aristotle listed the components of beauty as order, repetition of
measure and exactness. Augustine said that beauty consists of unity and order, which
emerge from complexity. Beauty was seen as interchangeable with excellence,
perfection and satisfaction. Then beauty entered a dark period – the Christian church
did not favour research of art as a pleasure of the senses, holding that the definition of
beauty had to be found in the Holy Scriptures (that sounds painful!). It was not until
the Renaissance that the debate developed a direction that gave rise to modern
psychology of perception. In the 1500s, the French architectural theorist Philibert de
l’Orme rebutted the theory of absolute beauty of proportions. A later French
philosopher borrowed the name “aesthetics” from the Greek aisthetikos, “related to
perception.” In 1928, the American mathematician George David Birkhoff distilled
beauty to: aesthetic value equals the amount of order divided by the complexity of the
artefact.

How did concepts of beauty translate to the new continent of Australia? While early
British convict settlements were clearly not interested in unlocking the beauty within,
Francis Greenway’s architecture at least had some Georgian symmetry and a
reductive ornamentation. Lachlan Macquarie’s early town planning, seen in his
Hawkesbury towns, was also grounded in the Enlightenment. Architecture in the late
1800s to my taste was a little over-ornamented, but it would be hard to call the result
ugly. So what of the last fifty years in Australia? Robin Boyd’s The Australian
Ugliness was published forty-nine years ago – what would Boyd think today? I think
most of us would look back fairly nostalgically at a notion of beauty in the Australia
of the 1960s. By any measure, with our nascent skyscrapers we were a very naive
suburban-state. We were a meat-and-three-veg population, made flesh in the
landscape, and we were all as burnt in summer as our barbecued meat. Maybe it was
ugly; maybe, as Boyd said, it was featurist. It is certainly worse today. In 2008, the
late-boomer culture is all-pervading, manifested in our vast mall culture, McMansionstyle
housing, the dominance of vehicular traffic planning and our consequent status
as the world’s highest per capita greenhouse gas emitters. There is certainly a lot of
order in new subdivisions; each house looks the same as the other. There is also a lot
of complexity in roof forms. How does that balance with Birkhoff’s equation?

The Australian Ugliness wasn’t on my study list at secondary school and university,
but the following texts were, and they have a deeper resonance now than when they
were first published: Small is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher and The Green City by
Roger Johnson. The Daily Mail’s review of Small is Beautiful reads: “A book of heart
and hope and downright commonsense about the future … The basic message in this
tremendously thought-provoking book is that man is pulling the earth and himself out
of equilibrium by applying only one test to everything he does: money, profits and
therefore giant operations. We have got to ask instead, what about the cost in human
terms, in happiness, healthy, beauty (that word again) and conserving the planet?”
Does that ring any bells? The Green City also thinks small is beautiful: “Small is
beautiful in cars, in offices, in buildings, in transportation, with a balance of modes
rather than a reliance on the one …We should attempt to create diversity wherever it
looks as if we have too much uniformity.” Johnson’s view would finally seem to put
the stake into the heart of the Greek philosophers’ position.

These 1970s definitions of beauty added “small” and “diverse” to the debate. Beauty
popped up again in the Walter Burley Griffin Memorial Lecture here in Canberra last
week – titled “Griffin after Garnaut,” it was delivered by John McInerney and
Caroline Pidcock and discussed the role beauty can play in a low-carbon environment.
So can beauty provide the answers to a viable (and happy) environmental and
economic future? Does beauty matter? Our new housing developments must deal with
all the technical requirements for lower carbon use: in transport planning, mixed
zoning and mixed land uses, maintenance of biodiversity, appropriate orientation of
buildings and construction methods, mixed building forms, integration of a public
realm landscape that provides a microclimate that reduces energy use, provision of
adequate private landscape for privacy and reflection and community facilities
including local food production.

If we get all that right, I predict that such developments will also be beautiful. This
issue of LAA features articles on new developments in Western Sydney. Will they
deliver beauty?