From Harmony to Atmospheres: The Mutations of the Idea of Beauty in Architecture

Abstract

This article shows how and why the word “beauty” has
become rare and progressively devalued in architectural discourse, as it
has been in the discourse of other arts and that branch of philosophy
known as aesthetics. The devaluation of the word “beauty” in architec
tural discourse, its rarefaction, and its changes in meaning, are incom
prehensible without broadening the focus of reflection to the history of
ideas. I will therefore outline the genealogy of this devaluation by distin
guishing three historical-conceptual paradigms, and showing how the ar
chitectural and theoretical works of Vitruvius and Alberti, Blondel and
Perrault, Norberg-Schulz and Zumthor bear the mark of these subter
ranean mutations.