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

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 architectural discourse, its rarefaction, and its changes in meaning, are incomprehensible without broadening the focus of reflection to the history of ideas. I will therefore outline the genealogy of this devaluation by distinguishing three historical-conceptual paradigms, and showing how the architectural and theoretical works of Vitruvius and Alberti, Blondel and Perrault, Norberg-Schulz and Zumthor bear the mark of these subterranean mutations.