‘Beauty Will Save the World’?
Pictured on the thumbnail is Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I; an artwork which has become an allegorical portrait of myself as I’ve been stepping into this new chapter of my life. The winged designer in the portrait is surrounded by scientific tools and paraphernalia and is seemingly frozen in contemplation; an understandable motif for the Renaissance period. Similarly, Ive been paralyzed in anticipation over my incoming start of the faculty of architecture. I’m walking away from the humanities and towards a more stem-adjacent field where stress is a certainty. The dream of doing architecture and design clashes against this stale, profit-worshipping zeitgeist that design students like me are unlucky enough to be a part of.
I think my fellow classmates - whom I’ll meet tomorrow - feel the same as I do; we’re all excited, terrified, overwhelmed, we want to be singular poster children of awe, inspiration, and jealousy to our peers, but also all feel like we’re behind compared to everyone else. When I asked a local architect for advice for the faculty and my future career, he told me to “loosen-up” and to “have faith.” This instantly reminded me of ‘The Idiot,’ one of Dostoyevsky’s novel which I read over this crazy summer. Reading this book actually changed my perspective on life, and thus design. Before reading, I knew I’d have to tackle Dostoevsky’s assertion that ‘beauty will save the world’ and though it’s only explicitly said twice in the entire book, this assertion undergirds the whole story.
Prince Myshkin’s character, a Christlike figure thrown into late nineteenth century Russia, fully explores what it would look like for a truly ‘beautiful soul’ to exist in our world. ‘Beauty will save the world’ is never said by him throughout the novel, but other characters - Ippolit and Aglaïa - mention in passing that this is something he proclaimed more than once. (Spoiler Alert) Myshkin doesn’t even get close to saving the world, let alone his circle, but maintains the same feverish faith in humanity and beauty throughout the entire novel. It could be said that this pursuit of beauty is what saves his world from becoming like the wretched worlds of the other characters. Similarly, I know that ahead of me lies lopsided power dynamics, unpaid internships, all-nighters, and more hardships I won’t mention, but I can’t wait to experience it all. This year has been so crazy for me. What should have been the worst summer of my life became a much-needed reset and reconfiguration. Being so open and vulnerable (with this website, for example) allowed me to feel in ways I just couldn’t before. With faith, I decided to relentlessly look towards a world where my hardships are worthwhile, while also feeling the process as much as I can.
As for the things I learned in school, unlike the intro architecture courses from my first year, taking Art history and other humanities courses allowed me to zoom-in on the micro rather than the macro. I’m thinking of the film course I took in which I had to write 500+ words for a single one-second shot, my professor in an art history course who made us examine the same painting for 2 hours and made us write as much as we possibly could about said painting, and the same professor, without giving any hints, telling us to find our ‘blind spots’ with said papers on the painting. My devotion to examining art and its praxis across different cultural and historical contexts leads me to believe that ‘beautiful things’ have the capacity to change society or at least lead us to question our status-quos.
Ironically, I can’t help but to think of Taylor from The Yearbook Committee’s call for the destruction of Art, which I feel compelled to believe in despite the intense love for art/art history which i’ve fostered over the past year or so. He puts it this way:
“When I talk about art and my desire to destroy art, I’m talking about a narrow form of art which emerges with the renaissance, and which may have already ended, right? This historically specific period of bourgeois Art. That’s not to say that a transformation of society beyond bourgeois society wouldn’t have what I would call, instead, aesthetic objectifications, that we would turn the world… transform the world into objects of aesthetic pleasure and objects of beauty. That in fact, I think that we would endeavour to turn the entire world into a beautiful object. But, [Art] happening as this narrow thing that you put on the wall of a gallery, like, we should get rid of that, right? That most of the world is ugly and awful, and then you walk into the rarified space of the gallery where you could get a glimpse of beauty, a glimpse of what the world could be. That rather than art being that, the world would be the beautiful object, the world would be beautiful.”
I’ll say this again, is this not a casting call for architects? We, the actual designers of the future, should believe that this could be our role in this incredibly unique position that we are in. This world in which ‘beauty’ is mostly confined to approximations on our screens - and often, said beauty isn’t even made by us - is in need of ‘big’ changes. I know that i’m not the only person who yearns for this, and, as Mies Van De Rohe puts it “Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.” I’m talking big about a macro beauty/art despite having virtually no means to accomplish this proposal - again, I haven’t even started the program of environmental design yet - but I can’t have much else but feverish faith that this pursuit of beauty could ‘save the world,’ and if not, I will carry myself as though it has the capacity to do so anyway.
Link to The Yearbook Committee’s video
