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【Lecture 09.04.2024】 Beauty - the Indispensible and Irreducible, Sui Generis Category Explained and Justified
Release time：2024-04-08
Beauty as the manifestation of aesthetic responses and valuations is a human universal. We all navigate the world aesthetically. Therefore, beauty should be an indispensable category of all design discourses, including architectural discourse. However, beauty is an increasingly embattled and by now nearly extinct category within a conscientious discourse that is rightly aspiring to rational accountability and evidence-based propositions. Beauty has been eliminated from the discipline’s discourse because it is seen as subjective and irrational, as an irresponsible diversion or distraction from architecture’s societal tasks. However, beauty is clearly not being abandoned by the end-users of design. Nor are aesthetic choices absent from actual contemporary design practice. Its just no longer talked about. This paper shall argue that the characterization of beauty as subjective or irrational is fallacious, and that the abandonment of the category is a grave mistake. The bashful discursive muting of beauty impoverishes our discourse, and compromises our discipline’s effectiveness.
Patrik Schumacher
ZHA
Patrik Schumacher is principal of Zaha Hadid Architects and was seminal in developing Zaha Hadid Architects to become a 500 strong global architecture and design brand. He won the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Stirling Prize for excellence and is an academician of the Berlin Academy of Arts. In 1996 he founded the Design Research Laboratory at the Architectural Association in London where he continues to teach. In 1999 he received his PhD from the Institute of Cultural Science, Klagenfurt University. Since 2007 he has published a series of manifestos promoting Parametricism as the new epochal style for the 21st century. In 2010/12 he published “The Autopoiesis of Architecture”, in two Volumes, theorizing architecture’s societal function and elaborating architecture’s historical tasks. His latest book, ‘Tectonism – Architecture for the 21st Century’, was released in 2023. His current research focuses on the metaverse as opportunity for architecture.
Patrik Schumacher is a visiting International PhD Supervisor at Tongji University College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
Time: April 9 19:00-21:25(UTC-+8)
Address: D3 Lecture Hall, 5th Floor, Building D, CAUP, Tongji University
Zoom ID：842 4442 5511 Password: 9uK1bE
Architectural DigitalFUTURES is launched by College of Architecture and Urban Planning(CAUP), Tongji University and Shanghai Digital Architecture Fabrication Technology Center (SFAB) in 2011. International Union of Architects (UIA), Architectural Society of China (ASC), National Engineering Technology Research Center for Prefabrication Construction in Civil Engineering, and The Architectural Society of Shanghai China (ASSC) collaborate with global renowned scholars, architects, designers, enterprises and academic media in this field to establish an online and offline integrated educational platform relying on Architectural DigitalFUTURES. The events are consisting of lectures, conferences, workshops and exhibitions, etc. Nowadays, Architectural DigitalFUTURES as a global architecture exchange community, with the platform www.digitalfutures.world, encourages the inheritance and innovation, collaboration and communication of global knowledge in architecture and emphasizes scientific research about digital design theory, technology and artificial intelligence algorithms, robotic fabrication, etc. in the field of architecture and built environment.
