Beauty matters. In all things. Take a well-crafted wooden chair. Naturally, it’s polished. The texture of the wood is sanded and smooth, the angles are subtle and affirm structural integrity and support. It is pleasing to the eye, as well as other regions of the body.

The same goes for beautiful women, or men. Attractiveness conveys fertility and appeals to the very basic of instincts. In other words, beauty is universal and eternal. In the words of Keats, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’

The same, then, can be said for architecture. A beautiful building has symmetry, character and integrity. It employs the laws of size and shape, the Rule of Thirds and the hierarchy of scale, for example. These ideas have been tried and tested by the masters throughout history and have withstood.

But what makes something beautiful and another thing ugly?

A few years ago I found myself crossing the Pyrmont Bridge in Darling Harbour and was struck by the downcast faces passing by. The same kind you might find in the built-up town centres. Like silhouettes in the daytime they trudged with their eyes on the pavement in front of them. With the looming office blocks beyond the embankment, a young child was the only cheerful soul in sight and sat on his father’s shoulders watching the flapping flags above the water.

It was not until I came up to George Street, nearing the gorgeous Queen Victoria Building, that I saw all the joyful and sunny faces. Then the thought occurred to me… People are simply happier in the presence of beauty. In this case; beautiful buildings.

In his article for The New Criterion, Between Art & Science, the late, great Sir Roger Scruton wrote that modern architecture ‘throws all humility to the winds in its urgent need to stand out’. Scruton deconstructed the ‘starchitects’ and referred his readers to the arguments in John Silber’s Architecture of the Absurd: How ‘Genius’ Disfigured a Practical Art, which rightly posited that architecture is not a private art like poetry, painting, or music, but a public enterprise. Indeed, the jokingly named Ugliest Tower in Sydney, the UTS building, and Frank Gehry’s ‘paper bag’ building too, are fundamentally appalling.

Architecture must be the lingua franca of a city. It must harmonise the ‘street and the sky’. Scruton said this is what makes a city like Venice and Paris, where ‘even the great monuments – St. Mark’s, Notre Dame, the Place Vendôme, the Scuola di San Rocco – soothe the eye and radiate a sense of belonging’.

It reminded me of my time in Paris a few months ago. Each apartment building had a unique door. The wood was often beautifully carved and ornate, some of them were framed with a fantastic relief statue carved into the stone above. Many were simple and inconspicuous, but all of them had their own charm.

However, aesthetically beautiful buildings are not the end of the story. What people really want is not ‘me’ but ‘us’. Most modern architecture, in its Brutalist and imposing dissonance, is less a building for the people and more of a monument sculpted by an inspired artist with bright red glasses for his own ‘expressive ends’.

The enemies of ‘progress’ – traditionalism and disciplined education – have been replaced by deconstructionist gobbledygook.

In my curiosity, I endeavoured to find out what the ‘world’s ugliest building’ was. Moments later I was in agreeance with those who voted it to be the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh. It is the kind of building that revolts against all sensibilities of the sane and leaves one beginning to sympathise with those poor politicians. It is the kind of building Anthony Daniels wrote about in his article for The New Criterion, Propaganda & Uglification, a title which certainly doesn’t prevaricate or pussyfoot, that while looking at Brutalist architecture like the Cité Rateau in Paris or the ‘almost comically dreadful’ Casa del Portuale in Naples, one can almost smell the ‘urine that must impregnate many of the ground-floor concrete walls’.

Alternatively, Theodore Dalrymple in his article Artificial Architecture for the New English Review put it briefly, that architects ‘no longer have the skills to build other than inhumanely’. The two world wars had ‘thinned’ them out, thus giving an opportunity to the untrained. The ‘holy trinity of modernism’; Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, who would have sunk into obscurity, have now left their indelible mark on apartment buildings and office blocks that make you involuntarily pine for sandstone. Is it possible to sit in a Mies van der Rohe chair and not feel like you’re in a cold, sterilised therapist’s office?

From a scientific standpoint, psychological studies involving wearable devices that measured subjects’ physiological response in situ arrived at an interesting, though by no means surprising, conclusion. Researchers in Canada discovered people are strongly affected by building façades. When walking a group past the smoked-glass frontage of a Whole Foods store in Lower Manhattan, their mood took a nosedive. This cannot only be due to lack of aesthetic, but lack of neighbourhood, community, and a general sense of ‘us’.

Visual complexity involving natural elements act as a kind of mental and perceptual balm that aids in making a stimulating equilibrium, a natural balance. As visual dissonance and megalomania take the reins of the cranes and blueprints, we see the risk of developing mental illnesses like schizophrenia doubling in the cities. We are corralled into tight apartments and yet separated from each other with only the lucky few in view of greenery.

Scruton observed the ‘real opposition’ to the modernist housing projects, which took on the socialist post-war paradigm that people ought to be gathered up into ‘hygienic towers above open spaces filled with light and air’, came not from critics but the ‘very people that the projects were designed to serve’. In reference to Nathan Glazer’s arguments in From a Cause to a Style, Bauhaus architecture was therefore more of a ‘by-product of freedom than a conscious choice’.

It might appear obvious now that people don’t want to live up in the air in concrete blocks, staring out at nothing but rusting generators and chunky, opaque neighbouring apartments that pop out at you with a mismatch of childish colours that almost seem to patronise. They want to feel life around them, while also having the choice to shut it out or let it in.

The great traditional buildings of the past use a timeless method. It’s thousands of years old and makes you feel alive and part of something. Austrian-born British architect Christopher Alexander said such buildings take on an ancient form as old as the trees, hills, and our own faces.

I touched on it in the beginning – the secret of this natural order is contained in the concept of scale. Buildings achieve success by means ‘partly mathematical and partly intuitive’. According to Nikos Salingaros in his A Theory of Architecture, argued a hierarchy of scales enables us to view larger dimensions as amplifications of the smaller. Such rules are thrown out of the perhaps-not-so-metaphorical window, Scruton would say. Skill is not the same as art, Daniels wrote, and skill exercised for a ‘worthless end is morally worse than incompetence’.

Daniels also remarked that such buildings ‘redolent of psychosis’ could serve as a model for architects in training to design something even uglier, as a kind of warped creative exercise. Though I wouldn’t open Pandora’s Box any further.

To this end, I see it fitting to clarify that I’m not asking for the Tower of Babel by any means, just something that isn’t completely void of character or overly ambitious, just something with a touch of humanity.

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