“A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” wrote poet John Keats. The human heart naturally gravitates toward beauty, finding in it joy, rest, and inspiration. One wonders, then, why our public buildings and spaces, at least in America, so often lack this quality. The public infrastructure we interact with on a daily basis in the United States has not been designed, as a general rule, with an eye toward beauty. Modern architecture and city planning have veered away from the aesthetic principles that underpinned the design of buildings and cities from ancient Rome all the way through the early 20th century.
In the 1920s and ‘30s, the German Bauhaus art and architecture movement emphasized function and affordability instead of beauty, designing and constructing buildings that contrasted starkly with the classical architecture they sought to replace. The movement was influenced by Marxism, with many members being Communists. It essentially made a direct assault on the traditional “bourgeois” notions of beauty and design behind the world’s buildings and cities in favor of a more “egalitarian” form of architecture and furniture for the working class that could be industrially produced using scarce resources. When the Bauhaus movement was stifled by the Nazis, many of its figures fled to other countries, spreading their ideas about art and architecture internationally.
