Yesterday, while I was summing up at a meeting what my education in architecture had given me, I found I had said that "architecture taught me to recognise the beautiful when I see it". In truth, the matter of "beauty" has for a long while been among the first of the subjects that worry my mind and my heart. I am someone who needs every kind of beauty made by human craft as much as I need to breathe, who is nourished by its subtle manifestations, and I know that I am not alone. The curious part is that "beauty", despite the good meanings the word carries, has become dangerous enough that the moment you include it in what you expect of life, of work, of the city, of the home, you may be labelled naive, elitist, even at times shallow.
For years I have been more than tired of finding an excuse for every sort of ugliness by saying that the heart calls beautiful whatever it loves. Even my own mother, with lines such as "the other day I saw a really outlandish building, you would definitely love it", says quite easily that an expectation of design, even an education in it, can find no place in daily life, is perceived as a luxury, and is treated as other. As if to grasp the beautiful, to define it, to go looking for it, belonged only within the authority of architects and designers.
If we stick the needle in others and the awl in ourselves, we may find that we helped these labels stick: our terminology, whose merit we take as self-evident; our habit of discussing, only among ourselves, works whose subject is not architects alone; our outlook, the last remnant of the modernist ego, that "we have the right to educate the client"; and our love of "cool", which can at times amount to snobbery.
When we step back from every definition and grow simple, though, the heart has no difficulty recognising the beautiful. If I have to define beauty in the field I know, which is architecture: a trained eye can usually separate into certain parameters the pleasure felt in a good space, and that skill does not mean the eye will take more pleasure than the people who experience the space. We may like a beautiful woman's face even if we do not know that it pleases the eye because it agrees with the golden ratio. When I carry over into my own profession this freedom from expectation where beauty is concerned, I think the greatest problem is that what an architectural service actually means is still not fully understood, even in this period of the building sector's great leap. Clients, for the most part, somehow cannot feel themselves on the same team as the architects to whom they entrust a very important investment. Where the relationship has been set up in harmony, we can already feel it at every point of the final result. Quite simply, the buildings become "beautiful". In work finished under tension, inside a struggle of egos, the result always comes apart somewhere. What I observe is that clients are mostly the victims of their own prejudgment that architects' "demands" (it is more accurate to say choices) are naive, expensive and unsuitable in the face of worldly realities. When I dig into this a little further, I see underneath it the traces of a cultural split and a power struggle. The client can even take the skill of taming these choices as a source of pride.
In reality, each of our aesthetic expectations is nothing other than the sum of the photographs we have collected in our pocket up to that day. Everyone has an idea of what a "home" ought to be. The problem, in the relation between client and architect, is that these collected photographs are very often a long way from one another. That distance could be a kind of potential energy. Most of the time it becomes a wall that drives the work into a dead end.
There are a great many people who take it as normal to feel well under the dome of Hagia Sophia, in the courtyard of the Rabi and Salis madrasas at Süleymaniye, and in the garden of the Şemsi Paşa Mosque, and who feel that this feeling cannot be caught with the "new". Yet a person can feel perfectly happy at the side of the window, in the stairwell, under the eaves of a house that has been well designed, even if that house is far from the monumental and is new.
To incline towards the beautiful is a need in all of us, if we are to make meaningful this time we spend in the world. There are professions whose work is to seek the best solution to this, and architecture is one of them. Unfortunately (and fortunately) it is not a job that can be done alone, the way sculpture can. The hidden subject of the work of building, which is expensive, which has many stakeholders, and which requires at least a minimum of respect and harmony among those stakeholders, is, I think, the user who will ask for the beautiful in every condition. Beauty's relation to time, place, material and context is long enough to be the subject of an entirely different essay. For this very reason, speaking for myself, I am not giving up in the least on inclining towards beauty, on imagining it and on demanding it.