There is a page here I have followed for a long time.
It is not because I am an architect, but because that strange shift, where the Western world at some point stopped producing *beauty* and instead began producing *ugliness*, has occupied me for years - and it still does.
Today someone in there has once again asked a machine to redraw Magasin, the old department store. Not the old building facing Kongens Nytorv, which still stands there with its domes from the 1890s, but the brown box behind it with the vertical louvres, the SALE banners and the bicycles stacked in under the columns - and I have sat looking at the pictures for longer than I had meant to over my morning coffee.
It is the same grey sky, the same street and the same Copenhagen weather, which none of us has chosen (or would choose). And yet something happens in the body before the head gets round to having an opinion about it, because in one picture you walk past, and in the other you sit down.
Nobody needs to explain why. That is exactly the point.
The English philosopher Roger Scruton once made a little film for the BBC, where he began roughly like this -
Had you asked a cultivated person at any time between the middle of the 1700s and the 1930s what art, music and buildings were for, the answer would have been the same every time.
Beauty.
Then something happened. Art wanted to *shock* instead of lift, and architecture wanted only to be useful. Scruton's point, which I have not been able to get around since, and which I see everywhere, was that what is built only to be useful very quickly becomes useless, because nobody can be bothered to look after it.
He did not settle for saying it. He ended his life helping to lead a British government commission that was to work out how one could build beautifully again. A government that asked the question out loud, and that was not even very long ago.
Beauty matters, and there is really not much more to say than that everything else follows from it. And yet for fifty years we have built as if it were a private matter, a question of taste or a luxury you can allow yourself once the budget and the sustainability report and the international trend™ have been satisfied.
And it is the last one that is worth noticing, because it always comes with a new word meant to *challenge*... our notion of the beautiful, *problematise* the classical and lovely, or *decolonise* a facade. 🤡
By all appearances not much of this has been understood at City Hall. Not because the people in there are stupid... or.. well, that is another matter.. but because they have forgotten the question that comes before ALL architecture.
What is Man, and what lifts him?
This is where Scruton was old-fashioned in the good way. For the Ancients it was not an open question. The true, the good and the beautiful were not three different things, but the same reality seen from three sides, and Beauty was the side you could see with the naked eye.
It is not decoration on top of Truth. It IS Truth that has been given a body, an order that does not shout, but that you feel, because something falls into place around it. You slow down, and you stay standing a little longer.
The way you do with a beautiful woman. Or a beautiful man.
"Wow, look at her there..."
Every man knows it, and they also know perfectly well what they would sacrifice to be allowed to live close to Beauty that has been given a body - and how far they would go to defend and preserve it.
And then there is the thing no city planner will ever write into a zoning plan.
Beauty forces no one. You can walk straight past it without paying anything for it. When people stay standing anyway, year after year and generation after generation, it is not manipulation, and it is not nostalgia. It is a recognition.
THAT is why hundreds of millions of people make the pilgrimage to Europe every single year, to see the Beauty our forefathers built from one end of the continent to the other.
We say sustainability, well-being and mental health, and we build boxes that are torn down after a quarter of a lifetime, because nobody ever loved them enough to fight for them.
It holds for the inner as it holds for the outer.
What you love, you do not tear down. That is the most sustainable architecture there is, and it is not new.
The ability to create Beauty comes from within, like Strength and Wisdom. A culture that forgets to plant the understanding of Beauty in Man, and instead teaches him to look for everything that is wrong with him, loses the ability to create Beauty in the outer world. Then it begins to build whatever takes up the most room inside.
Draw your own conclusion about the last 50 years.
So imagine.
Just for a moment.
That we simply decided it. Without a new theory, a new manifesto or yet another commission, just a city that once again built as if the people who would walk past were worth building for.
Because a city that stops building beautifully has not changed its taste. It has changed its mind about what a Human Being is.
And you can see that from the pavement.
And feel it inside.
So imagine that we simply decided it.
This is how we build. Here.
Full stop.
Just like a Human Being who makes that decision - to look for the Beauty within. And to summon it on the outside and weave it around himself.
So it is with a city.
And a country.
❤️🔥🪽
Happy Thursday, friends 🌞
