On Beauty: Books for a Contemporary Architectural Aesthetics

Annotated Book List

Abstract

This annotated book list reviews a selection of books published or especially influential over the last fifty years in order to map a contemporary field of architectural aesthetics in which beauty can no longer be understood as a stable property of form, proportion or style. Drawing on sociology, philosophy, media theory, heritage studies, everyday aesthetics, phenomenology, environmental history, feminist urbanism and theories of the commons, the text reconstructs beauty as a contested cultural and political category. The selected works show how architectural beauty is produced through taste, perception, mediation, memory, atmosphere, use, repair, climate, energy, care and collective negotiation. Rather than offering a single definition, the list traces the displacement of beauty from the autonomous object toward the social, bodily, institutional and environmental conditions through which architecture acquires value. “Common beauty” thus names not a universal agreement, but a shared and conflictive question: how different communities, bodies, histories and environments come to recognise architectural value.