{"id":191611,"date":"2025-10-10T23:56:15","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T23:56:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/191611\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T23:56:15","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T23:56:15","slug":"who-should-decide-what-makes-a-building-beautiful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/191611\/","title":{"rendered":"Who should decide what makes a building beautiful?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But when it comes to the built environment, that ambiguity is contentious \u2014 particularly when demand for new housing is so urgent. The British government estimates that it needs to build up to 300,000 homes annually to keep pace with the country\u2019s needs; last year a Financial Times analysis<\/a> put the number closer to 500,000. Historically, such large-scale development may have not been welcomed, but a YouGov study in 2024 found that 61 per cent of Britons support new housebuilding, with only 10 per cent strongly opposed.<\/p>\n

What the public really does care about is how these homes look. In a survey of residents in London and the south-east by UK-based think-tank Policy Exchange, 85 per cent said new homes should fit in with their more traditional surroundings or be identical to homes already there. \u201cBeauty elevates everyone\u2019s environment and daily life,\u201d believes Michael Lykoudis, professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame. But who should decide what\u2019s beautiful? Architects, governments or the general public? Do you need expertise to decide which architectural style is more beautiful than another?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Late this summer, Policy Exchange released a paper titled Building Beautiful Council Houses. It calls for 100,000 council homes to be built a year, with an approach centred around \u201cthe core principle of beauty\u201d. The paper keeps the definition open-ended: \u201cThis paper does not seek to impose a unilateral idea of what is beautiful on planners, residents, architects or local authorities but it does implore all stakeholders charged with the delivery of council housing to accept that beauty is important.\u201d It also introduces the idea of a \u201cstrategic democratisation of beauty\u201d \u2014 releasing the definition from the hands of any one set of gatekeepers to something more collaborative.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ModernThe think-tank Policy Exchange suggests that Marmalade Lane in Cambridge\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009 \u00a9 Jim Stephenson\"Facade.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009and Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna are examples of beautiful housing \u00a9 B O\u2019Kane\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Inside, suggestions of what is beautiful veer from Marmalade Lane co-housing development in Cambridge and Peter Barber\u2019s social housing estate in east London to the Karl-Marx-Hof municipal housing complex in Vienna and the Boulogne-Billancourt suburb of Paris. From these examples, a \u201ccore principle of beauty\u201d is hard to settle upon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Although at an individual level there\u2019s a high level of subjectivity, at the collective level there are core themes<\/p>\n

Nicholas Boys Smith<\/p>\n

Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump\u2019s Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again executive order, a set of future building guidelines released in August, imposes a top-down prescriptive view. It states \u201cclassical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for federal public buildings\u201d \u2014\u00a0a turn away from design that \u201csometimes impresses the architectural elite, but not the American people\u201d. The emphasis on buildings modelled, like the early federal buildings in Washington DC, on those of ancient Athens and Rome, is said to benefit the \u201cgeneral public\u201d, which explicitly excludes \u201cartists, architects, engineers, art or architecture critics, instructors or professors of art or architecture, or members of the building industry\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, architects are up in arms. An official statement from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) accuses Trump\u2019s order of \u201creplac[ing] thoughtful design processes with rigid requirements that will limit architectural choice\u201d while \u201cremoving local input\u201d from Washington DC residents \u2014\u00a0essentially, disempowering both architects and residents.<\/p>\n

\"TheFor the US president, federal buildings should be modelled on those of ancient Athens and Rome, as the Capitol was \u00a9 Kent Nishimura\/Bloomberg<\/p>\n

\u201cIn architecture, we have always had the question: \u2018Do we build for the common good, or do we build for the ego of the architect or client?\u2019,\u201d says Lykoudis. Building beautifully is achieved through dialogue, he adds, and takes into account context, culture and architectural character in order to decide what should go where. Lykoudis calls Trump\u2019s approach \u201csimplistic\u201d: \u201cWhat the president has done, through identifying one style of architecture as beautiful, is to stifle that dialogue and short circuit everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nicholas Boys Smith, founding director of UK-based urban planning advocacy group Create Streets, who co-chaired the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, an independent UK government advisory that ran from 2018 to 2020, is in some ways more sympathetic to Trump\u2019s view. He points to a 2020 National Civic Art Society poll that found that 72 per cent of Americans prefer a traditional style over a modern style for US courthouse or federal buildings.<\/p>\n

\u201cBuildings are by their nature a public good,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat you have on the walls of your home doesn\u2019t bother me. But if we\u2019re going to spend taxpayers\u2019 money, it\u2019s certainly the right starting point to build not what the individual wants, but what the public recognises collectively as attractive and meaningful.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it comes to homes, it\u2019s not difficult to find \u201cbeautiful\u201d architecture that has stood the test of time. In the UK we only have to look at much-copied Georgian architecture, or the reappraisal of 1930s council houses \u2014 as much praised for their herringbone brickwork and bay windows as their functional cavity walls. \u2018\u2018Although at an individual level there\u2019s obviously a high level of subjectivity, at the collective level there are core themes,\u201d says Boys Smith.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"TwoThe brutalist World\u2019s End Estate towering above a Georgian terrace in Chelsea, London \u00a9 Chris Harris\/Alamy<\/p>\n

This February for example, a University of Sussex study found infants as young as four months old are more drawn to visually complex buildings than their simpler counterparts: baroque facades, for example, fared better than brutalist ones.<\/p>\n

Humanise<\/a> is a global 10-year campaign designed to \u201creinvite\u201d the public into architectural conversations pioneered by architectural designer Thomas Heatherwick. It encourages the industry to draw upon neuroarchitecture \u2014 a cross-disciplinary field exploring how our brains and bodies respond to the built environment \u2014 to gauge how people feel about a building\u2019s visual appearance. \u201cWe\u2019re drawn to natural materials, visual complexity and curves, while blander, less visually complex buildings have the opposite effect,\u201d says Lisa Finlay, a partner at Heatherwick Studio. She cites a 2025 University of Cambridge study that demonstrates the relationship between built design elements and users\u2019 cortisol levels. Such studies, Finlay argues, help channel public sentiment into planning conversations: \u201cIt helps us understand and communicate design decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n

But not everyone believes we should be \u201cbuilding beautifully\u201d. The movement is a \u201cdistraction\u201d from more urgent priorities such as functionality and sustainability, says Barnabas Calder, senior lecturer in architecture at Liverpool University and author of Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism. \u201cThe moment you say \u2018beauty\u2019 and \u2018buildings\u2019 in the same breath, people jump to heritage \u2014 the old styles we admire but can\u2019t easily recreate,\u201d offers Finlay. \u201cAt present, this means we risk either dismissing contemporary design or slipping into pastiche.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The\u2018Visual complexity\u2019 rather than \u2018beauty\u2019 in the Paris social housing project 12 Rue Jean-Bart by Christophe Quinton\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009 \u00a9 : Florent Michel \/ 11h45\"The.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009and in London\u2019s Cosway Street development in Marylebone \u00a9 Kilian O\u2019Sullivan<\/p>\n

While our notions of a \u201cbeautiful building\u201d might be tied up with historical, classical elements, the term \u201cvisual complexity\u201d is more style-agnostic \u2014\u00a0and therefore, Finlay continues, more expansive to our thinking. \u201cYou can get inherent visual complexity in a stone, or from a man-made design,\u201d she says. She cites the example of two buildings: Parisian social housing project 12 Rue Jean-Bart by Jean-Christophe Quinton, and Cosway Street, a residential development in Marylebone, London. Both employ a scalloped design, but while the former does so with natural limestone, the latter uses man-made bricks in keeping with the surrounding late Victorian and Georgian architecture.<\/p>\n

Heatherwick and others are not alone in rejecting \u201cbuilding beautifully\u201d. In July 2024, former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner removed the word \u201cbeauty\u201d from government housing policy (which was added in 2020 by then housing secretary Michael Gove under the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission). She did so on grounds of subjectivity: \u201cBeautiful means nothing really, it means one thing to one person and another thing to another,\u201d she told BBC Radio 2.<\/p>\n

Prior to that, after the release of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission\u2019s report in 2020, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) urged the authors to replace the term \u201cbeauty\u201d with a \u201cbroader definition\u201d of \u201cquality design\u201d. \u201cBeauty is an objective of architecture. However, it is only one element of creating a successful building or place,\u201d reads the official response.<\/p>\n

\"LichfieldCathedral Close in Lichfield, Staffordshire was built following a thorough consultation process with locals \u00a9 lowefoto\/Alamy<\/p>\n

So how should we decide what gets built, and in what style? The UK\u2019s current public consultation approach is far from sophisticated. In a podcast for BBC Radio 4, Heatherwick bemoans the convention of posting a laminated sheet on a lamppost to alert locals to a consultation. A 2019 report by property firm Grosvenor, based on a YouGov survey of more than 2,000 members of the public, found that just 2 per cent of the public trust private developers to act in a way that is best for the community when making decisions about large-scale development (a distrust largely driven by a perception that \u201cthey only care about making and\/or saving money\u201d, according to 75 per cent of respondents). Meanwhile, only 7 per cent trust local authorities to make decisions in the best interests of the area.<\/p>\n

Alternatives that deepen public engagement have been proposed. The Humanise campaign champions the use of community review panels, which invite local people to make detailed comments at the pre-application stages of urban design.<\/p>\n

Beautiful means nothing really, it means one thing to one person and another thing to another<\/p>\n

Former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner<\/p>\n

A complementary approach, from Create Streets, comes in the form of local area-specific design codes produced in collaboration with public consultation, which provide a clear framework for planners, developers and communities. Boys Smith references a consultation in Lichfield, England, which led to wide public consensus. \u201cWe asked questions like, \u2018What\u2019s your favourite local building? Can you rank these buildings 1 to 10?\u2019 It wasn\u2019t unanimous, but there has been a high level of agreement.\u201d<\/p>\n

The outcome was a \u201cgentle density\u201d approach featuring mid-rise buildings and Georgian-style buildings featuring deep red Staffordshire bricks distinctive to the area\u2019s history. While neo-Georgian architecture may not be everyone\u2019s cup of tea<\/a>, it was certainly a line of best fit approach for the public of Lichfield, which deemed the design code \u201chighly appropriate\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Tornagrain, a village and hamlet in the Scottish Highlands with detailed master planning by Ben Pentreath & Associates, new-style traditional design was informed by a 10-day public design workshop, known as a charrette. The 4,960-home development, began in 2012, has been widely praised, with one of its homes named 2022 House of the Year in the Scottish Home Awards and resident landowner the Earl of Moray receiving an award from the King\u2019s Foundation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ATornagrain, the village in the Scottish Highlands built to emulate the local vernacular \u00a9 Ben Pentreath<\/p>\n

Could AI fast-track the public consultation process? Research conducted by Boys Smith found that AI dovetailed with public opinion in selecting preferred building designs for department store buildings, sports stadiums and viaducts. Through combining AI tools (including imaging to quickly communicate possible designs) and neuroarchitecture with traditional consultation processes, it could be \u201cmuch easier to create buildings with a high level of public support\u201d than it might have been 100 years ago, Boys Smith believes. Certainly, modern advances might deem what the people want \u2014\u00a0at least, what they want right now.<\/p>\n

Because beauty fades, to draw on an old adage. Calder points to the \u201cturnover of fashion\u201d in architecture; brutalism, he argues, is only now \u201cemerging from a bad phase\u201d. Discussion around \u201cbeautiful\u201d new-builds will inevitably impact conversations around what is considered ugly enough to knock down, Calder fears. An emphasis on \u201cbeauty\u201d may lead to the \u201cavoidable demolition and replacement\u201d of unfashionable architectural styles \u2014 which he sees as a \u201csoft target\u201d for developers.<\/p>\n

Is there a middle ground? Can the public be persuaded to find non-traditional building styles beautiful, creating more support for innovation while preserving the old?<\/p>\n

\"TorreTastes change: Torre Velasca, Milan, opened to mixed reviews but is now a mixed use historical site that includes housing \u00a9 Tupungato\/Dreamstime.com<\/p>\n

Some believe that better communication holds the key. \u201cDesigners can help to bring people along by communicating the craft, and level of care, that goes into good design, and making that something people can understand and respond to,\u201d says Finlay.<\/p>\n

Lykoudis agrees: \u201cWe have to broaden architectural education, especially now that we are building more than ever before. In the past, the common person had a good understanding about how things were built. Today, nobody has a clue \u2014\u00a0we defer to experts. We require dialogue, but that starts with being somewhat educated in the building process.\u201d Such discourse might even broaden public perception of what is beautiful, suggests Finlay: \u201cWe don\u2019t yet have enough modern examples we all agree are beautiful and interesting. It\u2019s not about a lack of talent, it\u2019s that our collective imagination hasn\u2019t caught up.\u201d<\/p>\n

House & Home Unlocked\"\"<\/p>\n

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History has shown that even unlikely architectural styles such as Richard Rogers\u2019 bowellism might win public support. Key examples of the modern style, characterised by mechanical systems like ducts, pipes and elevators on a building\u2019s exterior, include the Lloyd\u2019s Building in London and Paris\u2019s Pompidou Centre, which was \u201cgenerally thought of as awful but is now accepted as an oddity and appreciated by most\u201d, says Lykoudis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cA building can be loved for many reasons, not just an aesthetic one,\u201d he adds, citing examples such as the Torre Velasca in Milan (which \u201copened with mixed reviews but now is a historical site that is being used as housing and mixed use\u201d); and the Pirelli Building in New Haven, Connecticut, built by Marcel Breuer \u2014 a former office building for tyre manufacturing that has found new commercial value as an eco hotel. Whether it\u2019s beauty, sentimentality or the sheer oddball factor that has preserved these buildings \u2014 it has achieved the same end proposed by the Building Beautiful movement: lasting value.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Recommended<\/p>\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Perhaps, then, the question is less about who should decide what makes a building beautiful, or what that beauty constitutes, and more about respecting the decision-making process in a way that invites each of the stakeholders \u2014\u00a0public, architects and government alike \u2014 into the conversation.<\/p>\n

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