Salon at the Dark Side Club, Venice 26th August at palazzo Ca Salvioni, Venice Italy.Beauty - The troubled relationship between architecture and beauty.
Curator Yael Reisner
Salon contributors include: Wolf Prix, Thom Mayne, Peter Cook, Eric Moss, Mark Goulthorpe, Marjan Colletti, Ricardo de'Ostos, Farshid Moussavi, Peter Cachola Schmal, Hitoshi Abe, Ashley Schafer.
"Those outside the architectural profession often perceive a building to be brilliant for the aesthetic experience it offers. And yet bizarrely, from the advent of modernism, architects have invented a multitude of strategies to absolve themselves from making visual judgments.
The prevailing architecture of the 20th century with its impersonal nature resulted with a consistent reduction of the complexity of our profession where its cultural, artistic, poetic, or metaphysic aspects were questioned too often while rationality, economy, utility and technologies were always deployed.
Objectifying the design process, enhancing a cerebral input and reducing the intuitive personal moves, especially involving the eye as a tool of judgment (the ‘I’ and the ‘eye’) and not resorting to it as a secret weapon, led in time to a lack of confidence in how much intellectual depth can be captured by intuitive architectural imagery.
The modern usage of ‘aesthetics’ mean taste or ‘sense’ of beauty and that tied the term to a personal attitude. Eeventually, architecture with no personal visual discrimination while commenting on a broader, collective cultural spectrum, deprives people of an emotional environment: since if there is no emotional input there is no architecture that touches people’s emotions.
Now more than ever before it is our creative role to bring a new beauty to cities and to substitute alienation with widening the pallet of emotions."
Yael Reisner 2010
