The quest for beauty

What we cannot name...

When I was fifteen I read an interview in a woman’s magazine with the then-famous French actor Alain Delon, in which he named the most beautiful sentence he knew: ‘She looked back to see if he was looking back to see if she was looking back to see if he was looking back at her.’
Apart from this quadruple storyline and the creation of a narrative dramaturgy, which evoked a kind of mini Marcel-Proust bubble in my mind, what fascinated me the most was the square in which the action took place.
When I repeat Delon’s words in my head, I consistently see the same park-like square with young lime trees in a simple grid, in a semi-paved space defined by the cast-iron cages protecting the trunks of the trees. Pigeons strut between simple benches; there are some distant city noises, and certainly a lot of light and the sound of a church clock. A place of hope and future in which the story of two young lovers might develop. If their relationship – already made complex by its basis in assumptions and reciprocal promises and expectations – could exist and triumph, it’s thanks solely to such a clear and simple city square.

Scenery

When I was eighteen I saw a performance of Shakespeare staged in an empty factory building in Brussels by the company of the British producer Peter Brook. It was 1969, and his book The Empty Space was creating a furore in the theatre world. How, in an immense empty space, could someone bring to life Shakespeare’s complicated themes with such simplicity – even bathing them in the springtime Florentine sun while we sat on hard benches in the cold? The actors crouched against the crumbling walls, awaiting their turns with the utmost concentration, leaping up in sudden bursts of energy, their clear voices heard like mountain streams rivers in the void. During the dialogues, their voices were not lost in a mountain torrent, but circled one another – twisting lines in the empty air, only millimetres apart, then veering unexpectedly away. No scenery or stage props were used, there were no robes or costume, there was no stage-lighting or artificial smoke. Only space. But it was all of a crystalline beauty, an elegance of movement and a courtliness of approach.

Incomprehensible silence

These are but two anecdotes to clarify my decision to spend my life in the creation of beauty. It was a conscious and unequivocally clear choice – as I see it, a choice that might help both the audience and myself come closer to self-realisation.
Because I worked in the theatre until the age of forty, I was late in becoming a student of garden and landscape architecture. Thus, still possessed by the various arts and their underlying philosophies, I came late to the world of ‘outside space’ – a world in which, after some years’ apprenticeship, I am now beginning to feel at home. Through the specialist literature, concepts such as design process, analysis, spatial composition, historical reference, continuity, functionality and flexibility have come to infuse my thinking.
All the same, a distant question keeps puzzling me – a rhetorical question that is never asked aloud:

Why do we never speak of beauty?

Are people in the rational and analytical world of garden and landscape architecture not allowed to speak about what is intended to be beautiful? Is this a form of powerless shame, or of misplaced modesty? Is it a timidity that is supposed to mask our impotence, or a puritan fear of stirring up something for which we have no words?
Or, to paraphrase the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, are we merely silent on those things we may not name?

Philosophical excursion

In daily conversation, the concepts ‘nice’, ‘beautiful’ or ‘aesthetic’ are frequently confused, are unthinkingly interchanged. The confusion is compounded when the terms ‘taste’ or ‘artistic sense’ are used: this usually leads to platitudes such as ‘you can’t argue with taste’. But this (and here I humbly agree with the German philosopher Immanuel Kant) is a great misconception. In my view, beauty should be the subject of nearly ceaseless debate, and aesthetics should belong to our most trivial subjects of conversation.
Kant’s doctrine can be found in the Analytik des Schönen, the first book of the Kritik der Urteilskraft from 1790. He presents four standpoints from which he then derives four definitions, which I summarise as follows:
– Taste is the ability to discriminate on an object or mode of representation according to a wholly disinterested sense of well-being or discomfort; the object of such well-being is named as beautiful.
– Something is beautiful if it pleases without the intercession of understanding.
– Provided that the beauty in an object is perceived without representation, beauty is the form in which an object is appropriate.
– Something is beautiful if the inherent sense of well-being is recognised without being objectified.

Kant thus proposes that the term ‘art’ applies to work whose purpose is inherent, or whose purpose does not transcend another purpose. There is thus an autonomy of aesthetic judgement that is independent of appropriateness or usefulness.

In his principal work, Sein und Zeit (1927), Martin Heidegger states that man was thrown (erwurfen) into the world and was not calculated or planned. It is on the basis of this ‘thrownness’ that we should understand our own potential, which would not have existed if we had been planned or calculated. Man can discover himself – which, to Heidegger is synonymous with unthrowing (entwurfen) – by using his own potentialities to ‘design’ (again, literally, entwurfen) his real being (dasain). Because man is, he has already been designed, and will continue to design as long as he exists. Available to him are potentialities which by definition cannot be established permanently, for otherwise he – the designer – would be robbed of his future.
Ann van Sevenant writes about this in her book Ademruimte (2000): "Thrownness is the basis of human existence. While we always design on the basis of this throw, it is by no means one-way traffic. For we have not merely been thrown – a fact that would serve only to make us indifferent towards being thrown. Instead we are, are as it were, thrown into potentialities. Put differently, we cast ourselves onto the possibilities into which we are thrown; we focus on the possibilities that are thrown at us."

In his book 'Chaos en Liefde', Gerrit Teule writes the following about beauty: "The structures and vibrations in our ancient memory resonate with the structures and vibrations we observe in the outside world. This resonance of vibration-patterns and structures, morphic resonance, is what we experience as beauty. We see beauty in what our mind has devised and constructed during evolution."
In a certain sense, Teule follows the thinking of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – that the human species has experienced each phase in the evolution of those less conscious and complex species below it. During this process of evolution, our species has stored in its memory everything that was valuable to its progression. If, like Teilhard, we accept that our evolution is focused on our returning to the Creator, we experience as beauty whatever brings us nearest to our final goal. It is the highest level, at which aesthetics and ethics meet.

This means that if man were to surround himself with beauty, he would be a step nearer to his goal of self-realisation. Because outside space lends itself perfectly to this goal, and can be used as an instrument, designers should make thorough use of concepts such as beauty and aesthetics. But can this be achieved for a wide and unknown group of users (ranging from the garden owner to the great urban public)? What would this evoke in people in their process of becoming aware? Is the man or woman in the street prepared to take this step, and can they bear the responsibility for it?

The substance of a painting

Not so long ago a visitor to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, unable to stand the presence of Barnett Newman’s monumental painting ‘Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III’, slashed the work to shreds – very soon prompting a debate about its content and meaning. Is such a painting merely the expression of an idea, or can it also evoke feelings? The answer is provided by Renée van de Vall, who took the following quote by Barnett Newman as a benchmark for his book, Een subliem gevoel van plaats (2003): "My painting is all about giving people a sense of place: that they know they’re there, so they’re aware of themselves."

"That’s how we see the world" argued René Magritte in 1938, during a lecture on his version of La Condition humaine, a work in which a painting merges seamlessly with the view in front of which it has been placed. "We see it as something outside ourselves, even though it is only a mental representation of something we experience inside. What lies behind the window of our comprehension," Magritte added, "needs to be drawn before we can properly distinguish its form, let alone experience satisfaction at the perception. And culture, convention and cognition all cause this drawing to present itself to our eye as the quality we experience as beauty."

Art for all

Just like artists, architects and designers of outside space should dare to give form to beauty. They should in any case have the ambition to help people and lead them into their unknown journey to beauty. Many plans and designs have this beauty, but it is never discussed.
How can the public at large, the garden owner, the user of a park or square, the motorist, the walker in nature, the woodland wanderer or the urban tourist have an inkling about beauty if its makers hesitate to talk about it?
The person who knows nothing about mushrooms never sees mushrooms.

The architecture of space evokes such a range of divergent factors that, compared to the other arts, it is a domain in which synaesthesia – constant links between the perceptions of the different senses – find a complete application. Our world is evolving towards a phase in which garden and landscape architecture will be regarded as the most general of all arts. Not only can man restore to his world the balance he has himself disturbed, he can also shape his own destiny by creating for himself an environment that is a projection of his abstract ideas onto the natural world – something that might produce garden and landscape art on a scale never previously seen.
The ‘New Babylon’ project of the Dutch painter Constant may have been an early move in this direction, a project heralding a new man with a different way of life: one passed in play, not focused on utility, working towards a new world – New Babylon. What we can learn from this is that, to escape fruitless debate, we must steer a more promising course. This means that our educate should aspire towards a new type of man, one not geared towards usefulness: homo ludens – quite literally, playful man.

Michel Lafaille
december 2003