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I mourn the steady loss of beauty in our time. One would think in a
sophisticated,
wealthy society like ours that while we make plans to colonize Mars we
could figure out how to surround ourselves with beauty, like our poor,
overworked, simple ancestors did. If you look at a local factory, power
station or pumphouse built in the 19th century, you can tell–– following
the carefully curved brickwork or decorated entablatures–– it was built
by people who cared about people as well as money, offering (for free!) uplifting beauty to anyone passing by. The message is that you, too, are worthy of this gift.
Now it is rare to find public beauty outside of natural features like trees and lakes. I recently traveled to do some relief work in the US and I found no human-made evidence of beauty. Really. Anything built since about the early 20th century bears the clear marks of materialism. Everything is built as cheaply as possible, as if built for machines. Nothing else matters if someone is making money and we should all be oriented to those values, a message screamed at us from every angle in the contemporary built environment.
Having said that I’ll point out that the images on the right above are well designed! They are the best we can do now, not typical examples of the kind of public views we see around us everywhere, which are usually supremely ugly, as if the designers would have made it uglier but they just couldn’t figure out how!
In my own life I try to do everything with a respect for beauty. It is like my religion. I want to feel the pleasure of beauty in and around my house. So I fill it with images and objects of beauty. I hope you do the same. Your mind might like the economics of efficiency, but your body craves beauty!
