Beauty matters

I simply can't take CABE's contribution to this debate seriously - you are the people who "applaud the thoughtful design" of this monstrosity:

http://www.cabe.org.uk/design-review/highams-green-3

This major development with inadequate car parking for its cramped housing is totally out of proportion with the surrounding area. It's going to be built yards away from a congested main road which has a level crossing on a main commuter line to London. The development is widely opposed by the local community, the 2 local MPs and most of the councillors whose wards are anywhere near the site. But it'll be foisted on us anyway and CABE is complicit in this by giving Tesco a sheen of architectural respectability. Council meetings looking at the application have been packed and few members of the public support the proposal - plenty of us are trying to influence decisions in our local community; it's just that nobody's listening.

Why not try having a long hard look at what you've design-reviewed recently before you give us the empty platitudes about enivronments that inspire and enrich? At the moment your organisation is part of the problem.

Christopher

Thank you for your comments about the Higham’s Green development - you may be interested to know that CABE will shortly publish a report on its experience of reviewing 30 different supermarket schemes.

However, I think that you’re missing the point of our People and Places research.

It starts from the assumption that, while everyone has different, potential conflicting views about the places where they live, not everyone gets to express what they think and many, like you, feel that they are not listened to. A debate about fundamental principles such as beauty starts with by asking people want they want, not by presenting them with a development proposal. At the moment, public engagement only really begins when people get together to oppose a plan for their place.

Tom Bolton
CABE

At first glance the question about beauty seems like it could be problematic, but watching the video of people talking about Sheffield really brings it alive. Especially the bit about the boy in the ruined castle...

This is a fascinating and timely piece of research for sure. In the United States, the ugliness quotient for anyone experiencing a city outside of a car is pretty darned high. Through bizarre and prescriptive city planning and transportation laws and regulations, we have eviscerated giant chunks of city life (and many of the physical artifacts of built environments evolved to support it) that are ordinarily available to any American traveling abroad; and all for the convenience of drivers. In the Phoenix Metro area - and many similar regions across the US - the act of walking - or even wanting to walk - is a rarity. Inhospitable and incredibly ugly traffic intersections are all too common. These are places where pedestrians remain the least of concerns of the city and transportation planners even though the regulations they will cite speak of things like safety, walkability and pleasantness. Our experience of city life - such as it is - has become largely a windshield view of the world. The recent mid-terms have returned new state governors (Wisconsin, for example) bent on canceling high speed rail in favor of expanding highways and car usage. So its likely that the problems of making our cities more livable and healthy places for anyone outside of a car will worsen. We are already paying dearly in ways other than tax payer bailouts for that 70 year-old adage “What’s good for GM is good for America”. The price of continuing along this path in lives lost, wasted and impaired by a built environment designed for machines rather than people may prove to be too high – even for the United States.

The obesity epidemic and its co-morbid conditions of diabetes and heart disease aren’t all due to junk food and over eating. These incredibly expensive and debilitating diseases also result from the un-walkable, un-bikable and species-unfriendly urban and suburban environments we have created over the past 50 odd years. The pursuit of the American Dream of that two-car garage house in the suburbs fed by gigantic superhighways choked with traffic for most of the day, has relegated considerations of beauty in our built environment to at best a nice-to-have when economic times can support the little extra effort required to achieve it.

Ask any wildlife biologist what makes for a successful species and they will tell you all the time "Habitat". Yet we have turned over the design of the very thing that provides shelter and sustenance to our species to builders and developers who have had one and only one objective; to make as much money as possible in the shortest amount of time. Adhering to the volumes of prescriptive construction and planning regulations imposed by many of our city governments means fast planning approvals to feed the profits-at-all-costs beast. The results are all to plain for anyone to see; bland, often ugly places that suck the life out of anyone having to endure actually being in them.

Fortunately, within this tangled mess of regulations, traffic and blighted urban and suburban areas, many Americans are craving something better than what we have regulated ourselves into and what some new state governors want to continue. This craving appears to be very strong – and thus there is a ray of hope – among younger age groups who simply don’t buy into the lifestyle of bloated McMansions with the three-car garage in the suburbs. Beauty may seem to be one of those unscientific things that our technological society suggests rational people shouldn’t think about let alone do research into. Yet from time immemorial humankind has sought after this discovering Phi and the Golden Section and applying it to buildings, paintings and sculpture the world over. We can even measure the beauty of a human face using Phi and the degree to which facial proportions deviate from the 1:1.618 ratio.

If our species sets so much store in beauty as it surely does in people and the life partners we select, then its highly appropriate that we spend much more time and effort than we have for half a century, thinking hard about the visual impact that our built environment - our habitat - has on us and our well-being.

Phil Allsopp, RIBA, FRSA
Transpolis Global
Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
www.transpolisglobal.com

The timing of the launch of this report could not have been better, coming out as it did on the day that government announced it was going to be establishing national measures of happiness or well-being to sit alongside more traditional measures of economic growth, employment, poverty and the like. For what CABE's research in Sheffield eloquently suggests is that aesthetic experience generally and the quality of the built environment more particularly has an important part in most people's lives, regardless of their background, and affects their well-being. It will be interesting to see if the new well-being measures do concentrate the minds of politicians and policy makers, but if they do, this is likely to be good news for anyone who cares about the beauty and the environment.

I have written about CABE's research and the whole issue of beauty and public policy in the Summer edition of the RSA journal. Do check it out:

http://www.thersa.org/fellowship/journal/features/features/on-beauty

In Feb 2010 our team worked with twelve 6th form students from High Storrs School, who wanted to explore what Sheffield meant to them and the people who live in it. The film they produced really shows Sheffield as a vibrant place to live - check it out http://vimeo.com/10868677

for more info contact Paul@youthmomentum.org

Really interesting video hearing about people's thoughts - to hear the change from the beginning when the younger women think automatically about a person's beauty to the boy at the castle, hearing a young person speaking from the heart.

For me, in autumn now, beauty is seeing the golden and red leaves on the trees and lining the pavements, it warms up a up a cold day.

Beauty is an individual thing. Take the boy from the concrete block of flats, which he faces day in day out, ugliness to him, but to others this type of architecture is beauty, although not as popular these days! I also think architects sometimes think too much about how something looks and forget the purpose of their design, like the train station and its functionality mentioned in this video.

With decisions about planning being devolved more locally, research and discussion such as this is important to remind people that they can and have a voice to influence how their surroundings look and feel.

Beauty not only takes on resonances for individuals that run deeper than mere appearance but can enhance the uses or functionality of design and urban planning. Beauty not only speaks to people, as the survey research suggests and the video shows, but can enhance the ways we use and move through our environments. In a low rise mid 50s social housing estate, to take just one example, the differentiation between the pedestrian and car pathways can be attractively done in a manner that has a subconscious effect on drivers such that they automatically slow down (unlike other estates). The elegance of the design of the tube map enables people to use the map much more easily. The problem lies in the false idea that beauty is necessarily some kind of expensive, trivial decoration. Part of the point of my essay is to try and show how and why this kind of attitude is a mistake, which costs us not only economically but in terms of our happiness and well-being (for the essays see http://www.cabe.org.uk/publications/people-and-places-essays).

A great discussion and perfect timing, watch this brilliant talk/animation from TED.com Dennis investigates 'What the experience of beauty is.... the things we call beautiful are so different' That beauty is in the culturally conditioned eye of the beholder http://www.ted.com/talks/denis_dutton_a_darwinian_theory_of_beauty.html