As a technically interested child I was excited about wheels and transmissions, rails and locomotives, engines and hydraulics – all that was and still is fascinating to me. My interest in school was physics and mathematics. This world dominated my life roughly from age seven to age twenty-eight. Already before, in my mid-twenties, my field of interest began to widen again. Also as a young child, before school, I had a wider range of interests including life and art. I lost that over time wile growing up. Now I am slowly winning it back again.
As a student I started to wonder why there is such a drastic aesthetic difference between the university buildings. On the one hand there are beautiful buildings, mainly used by faculties like law, humanities and business. On the other hand there are very austere and even ugly functional buildings, mainly used by engineering, science and medicine. That was apparent not only at my university, but also abroad, for example in Boston, Massachusetts. We can find more than one reason why it is like that. Buildings were erected at different times, by different people. Architecture is subject to fashion, wich is evolving and changing. The materials and machines used to erect buildings have developed further. All that contributes to the different buildings. But the crucial factor is the interest of the people who finance and build new infrastructure and real estate. Do they care about the aesthetics of a building? Or is the building simply a necessary shell that should not cause more effort than it has to? When a building just needs to serve a purpose and otherwise must pay for itself quickly, we are happy to allow the money to decide what is useful and what is not.
If mankind was a purely rational species, acting only based on cold intellect, there would be no reason to make anything beautiful. Ultimately, for most people beauty is something entirely subjective. Still, there are humans with an interest in creating beautiful things. And there are people with an interest in acquiring beautiful things. That is why we design packaging and sometimes even the product itself. However, this can also be motivated by other interests. It can be detached from my own taste, even be in conflict with my aesthetic judgement. Then it is no longer important what I consider beautiful, but what is fashionable. What makes me part of the trend, what presents my success. Suddenly it is no longer about beauty, but about self-presentation. We have returned to usefulness. The clothes, the car does not need to be beautiful, but needs to be noticeably new and expensive. It is not about beauty but about status. Many designers realize this and prioritize a different and recognizable design, sacrificing beauty to stand out more. For this approach it helps to consider beauty as subjective, so we can easily justify to not consider it much.
The topic becomes even more explosive because we all have a body, and because many of us are not happy with it. And this is usually not about the bodies functionality, but about its beauty. The closer something is connected to our appearance, the more important its beauty becomes for us. And this assessment we do not do based on our own judgement only, but also on our expectations we have about other peoples judgement and on the feedback we get. Doing so, we can dive deep into a role that we keep playing. We align with what we believe returns the most recognition, what is most useful to satisfy our needs. Whatever gives the most reassurance from the outside. We can become very unhappy in this process. Because we can only be comfortable when we consider and value our own judgment. When we trust in our own discernment. And we should not focus to much on our appearance, but value all of who we are.
Humans are generally interested in beauty. That includes the buildings that we surround ourselves with. Money is only interested in beauty if someone pays for it. That is not the case for many buildings. The money comes from sources managed by people who have little or nothing to do with the building. The things we create while working are often not a part of our private life. So why should we make them beautiful? Often there is no time, or the job does not allow this kind of initiative. As long as we work for money, not for what we actually do, we will not find a reason. We quickly loose sight of beautify and push full steam into usefulness. Or the other way around. It would be desirable to create an environment where we can always combine both. And keep it in balance.