Beauty as Outcome of Reason and Emotion in Architecture

Our capacity to think affords us to be conscious of what we experience, learn, remember and judge. The results are understanding caused by reason and emotion, the latter being reaction to the former. In turn, remembered emotion may be the cause for seeking additional understanding. This dual aspect relates to the processes in which beauty, defined in this essay as positive aesthetic feeling, plays a role in the perception and development of architecture.1 Sensation and instinct are addressed in search of how they influence our understanding beyond knowledge toward meaning through creativity and judgment. Before we get to that, however, it is necessary to look at the very foundation from which experience and thinking evolves. It is what we call reality, defined here in short, as form-matter unity. Built examples are analyzed regarding properties which let feelings of beauty arise.