Beauty, Style & Design

Beauty, style and design determine the aesthetic appeal or disapproval of an object or space. All three are intrinsically intertwined, having a relationship to each other, yet each function separately. Each are debatable and worthy of inspection, yet it’s hard to discuss one without it melding into another.

The idea of design is all too often equated with the over designed, decoration as seen on magazine covers; or high end pieces that boost an ego. I’m apt to consider design in any man-made object or building I gaze upon, consciously or sub-consciously noting the intention and whether it succeeds or fails in its purpose...whether the design process was celebrated or grudged through...whether it’s a copy; or a reflection of something deep within the ‘designee’. Whether we realize it or not, all objects have been designed. The product reflects the love, the joy, the creativity, the success or failure, drudgery or complete satisfaction in the creation of something that hasn’t been seen or used previously.

DESIGN

• Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. -Steve Jobs

• Design is the art of planning, and it is the art of making things possible. - Paula Scher

• Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future. - Robert L. Peters

• Everything is designed. Few things are designed well. - Brian Reed

• The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring. - Paul Rand

• Design is not style…Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, & beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing. - Paola Antonelli

• If you look at any designer you admire, whose work inspires you, and whose approach somehow resonates with you, I promise you’ll find a person who does not think of what they do as just their job. - Alexander Isley

• From where stems the idea that our streets should look as if they were created by the same client or the same architect? Diversity, and not its opposite, is amusing. - Gunter Behnisch

• People who build their own home tend to be very courageous. These people are curious about life. They’re thinking about what it means to live in a house, rather than just buying a commodity and making it work. - Tom Kundig

BEAUTY

• When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution isn’t beautiful, I know it is wrong. -Richard Buckminster Fuller

• Architecture is not worthwhile unless it is beautiful, creating an emotional response. - Amy Seek

• I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves-such an ethical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty….The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. - Albert Einstein

• Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly. The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life. -Frank Lloyd Wright

• To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life. - TS Eliot

• This is the view that beauty is a big, transformational thing, the proper goal of art and maybe civilization itself. This humanistic worldview holds that beauty conquers the deadening aspects of routine; it educates the emotions and connects us to the eternal.

  By arousing the senses, beauty arouses thought and spirit. A person who has appreciated physical grace may have a finer sense of how to move with graciousness through the tribulations of life. - David Brooks, “When Beauty Strikes” The New York Times

• If there’s one word I’d like to remove from any conversation about design, it’s ‘pretty’ – Aarron Walter

• Buildings becomes architecture only when the mind of man consciously takes it and tries with all his resources to make it beautiful, to put concordance, sympathy with nature, and all that into it. Then you have architecture.” - Frank Lloyd Wright

• When we awaken to the call of beauty, we become aware of new ways of being in the world. We were created to be creators. At its deepest heart, creativity is meant to serve and evoke beauty. When this desire and capacity come alive, new wells spring up in parched ground; difficulty becomes invitation and rather than striving against the grain of our nature, we fall into rhythm with its deepest urgency and passion. The time is now ripe for beauty to surprise and liberate us. - John O’Donohue

• Beauty…is the highest integrative level of understanding and the most comprehensive capacity for the effective action. It enables us to go with rather than against, the deepest tendency or the theme of the universe. - Frederick Turner

• It is a beautiful thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world. - Mary Oliver

• The interpretation of beauty is based upon cultural, economical, political, and ethical tendencies. Buildings speak of democracy or aristocracy, openness or arrogance, welcome or threat, a sympathy for the future or a hankering of the past. They speak of visions of happiness. “To describe a building as beautiful…implies an attraction to the particular way of life this structure is promoting through its roof, door handles, window frames, staircase and furnishings. A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation certain of our ideas of a good life.”

  Buildings strike us as offensive because they conflict with our understanding of the rightful sense of existence. We can learn to defend or attack a concept of beauty in the same way we might defend or attack a legal position or an ethical stance. We can understand why we believe a building to be desirable or offensive on the basis of the things it talks to us about. Values we want to live by, versus merely how we want things to look. - The Architecture of Happiness

STYLE

• Create your own visual style…let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others. -Orson Welles

• Fashion icon Iris Apfel was told by the manager at the department store she worked at, “you’re not pretty. And you will never be pretty. But you have something mush more important. You have style. - Iris (2014)

• Styles come and go. Good design is a language, not a style.” - Massimo Vignelli

• It is never necessary to have a consistent “style” in your work, for then you are conceding or conforming to other more superficial factors than the search for the nature of the thing at hand. - Louis Kahn

• I don’t believe that styles just start and stop – they evolve and branch off in various directions. - Jim Olson

• Style is time’s fool. Form is time’s student. - Stewart Brand

Sophie Cook's porcelain vases