Trabeation | Why Buildings Look Like They Do, pt.2 – Beauty



David McCullough Pulitzer Prize winning author said, “We’re raising young people who are, by and lDavid McCullough Pulitzer Prize winning author said, “We’re raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate.” A lost sense of history may not be the reason people don’t always use architects, but it’s part of the problem. How can we know what something could be if we never learned what came before it. And If everything is judged by what it looks like instead of how it got that way, we’re missing half the story.

The Greeks and Romans learned that proportion and scale were critical to pleasing design. Symmetry in architecture was pursued vigorously for centuries. Slowly qualities like asymmetry, and much later pure function or unconventional form became commonplace. Today architects test the limits of shape and material. At times idea, theme and message have become as important, or more so, than how a building works.

It’s not unusual that one person thinks a building is beautiful and another the opposite. Beauty is a mercurial subject defined and argued about since the beginning. What is definitive about beauty is that it’s subjective to some, objective to others or both. What we know about architecture is that the early architects set precedents from which we build today.

All the world’s a stage and the architect is an integral part. And buildings serve as more than just habitable sculpture, they inspire. What follows is a little history—a loose educational framework. The fabric of which should help clarify why buildings look like the do, or at the very least where some of their traits came from.

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