REIA #28 - Call For Papers

The Common Beauty: Who Defines Beauty in Contemporary Architecture?

Across politics, planning, and culture, beauty has returned to the centre of architectural debate, but not without controversy. Recent campaigns to “build beautifully” have often looked backward, invoking classical form and nostalgic order, even as new technologies and neuroscientific tools promise to measure beauty in data and emotion. At the same time, brutalism, once widely scorned, has become both fashionable and profitable, its raw concrete rebranded as authenticity.
The REIA 28 Call for Papers, The Common Beauty: Who Defines Beauty in Contemporary Architecture, invites architects, scholars, and policymakers to examine this renewed struggle over taste and meaning. Who decides what beauty is, and who benefits when it is defined? By bringing together voices across disciplines, REIA seeks to explore beauty not as consensus, but as a field of power, imagination, and ethical negotiation shaping the cities of tomorrow.

Theme Overview

Across the world, governments, architects, and citizens are rediscovering the word beauty in housing and urban development. Yet this revival has been far from neutral. Political movements that advocate “building beautifully” often carry a distinctly traditionalist bias, equating beauty with familiarity, heritage, and a return to classical form. In the United Kingdom, initiatives such as the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission or Policy Exchange’s Building Beautiful Council Houses promote aesthetic alignment with local vernaculars and traditional streetscapes; in the United States, the Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again order declared classical architecture the “preferred” public style. These programs are not only about design, they express a longing for order, identity, and reassurance amid social change. In Paris, beauty has likewise become an explicit political concern, framed through policies of embellissement, and repeated appeals to the “beauty of the city” in municipal and national discourse. Beauty, in these contexts, becomes a moral and political instrument, one that can stabilise cultural anxiety but also constrain experimentation and diversity. In this sense, appeals to beauty can function as a mechanism of cultural exclusion, serving to delegitimise other social, aesthetic, or political identities.

Yet beauty’s re-entry into planning discourse has also unleashed formal and technological innovation. Designers and researchers are redefining beauty through perception, biology, and data. From Thomas Heatherwick’s Humanise campaign to new studies in neuroarchitecture and affective computing, the discipline is exploring how spatial complexity, light, and material textures influence emotion and well-being. Artificial intelligence and immersive simulations are now being used to visualise collective taste or predict aesthetic response. This new “sensorium” of design raises both promise and concern: beauty becomes measurable, even programmable. Can empathy and algorithm coexist? Can data-driven design foster emotional connection rather than reduce it? Beauty, long dismissed as subjective, is returning as a technological frontier of architectural imagination.

Meanwhile, brutalism, architecture’s once-reviled aesthetic, has undergone a remarkable cultural rehabilitation. Once dismissed as oppressive, brutalist estates now circulate as symbols of authenticity and grit. They serve as cinematic backdrops for fashion shoots, music videos, and social media aesthetics, while London’s Barbican, Trellick Tower, and Southbank Centre have evolved from the imagery of social housing into coveted luxury addresses. This reversal exposes beauty’s entanglement with economics, nostalgia, and class. When “ugly” becomes iconic, we are reminded that aesthetic value is not fixed but socially produced, a mirror of shifting desires and power relations.

Beyond questions of style or perception, beauty is also a performative and political practice. It emerges through the infrastructures that decide what becomes visible and desirable, through planning committees, media representations, algorithmic rankings, and cultural institutions. These apparatuses construct not only our built environment but also our collective imaginaries. To ask “Who decides what’s beautiful?” is therefore to examine the power structures that choreograph aesthetic consent: the ways in which architecture mediates social relations, gender, ecology, and the public sphere itself.

Across these movements, beauty emerges as both nostalgia and innovation, exclusion and aspiration, an ethical question as much as an aesthetic one. This REIA Call for Papers invites contributions that critically and creatively examine how beauty operates as a field of power, negotiation, and potential in the built environment.

Key Questions

Governance and Authority. Who holds the right to define architectural beauty: architects, planners, developers, governments, or communities? How do political appeals to “beauty” serve as instruments of reassurance or exclusion?

Democracy and Dialogue. What might a “strategic democratisation of beauty” look like? Can genuine participation reshape taste, or does consultation merely legitimise pre-decided aesthetics? How is beauty produced as a social performance, through media, institutions, and publics, rather than as a fixed aesthetic object?

Technology and Mediation. How do AI tools, neuroarchitecture, and immersive design processes measure or simulate aesthetic experience? Do these technologies expand imagination or constrain it to algorithmic taste?

Cultural Memory and Change. How do aesthetic reversals, from brutalism to neo-classicism and gothic revivals, reveal the social and economic forces shaping taste? When does “ugly” become heritage?

Ethics and Sustainability. Can the pursuit of beauty coexist with the demands of affordability, functionality, and ecological responsibility? Is beauty an ethical right or a cultural privilege?

Contributions Invited

We invite:

• Academic papers (10.000–30.000 characters)
• Design research, visual essays, or speculative proposals
• Literature reviews

Submissions may draw from architecture, urban design, planning, philosophy, political theory, neuroscience, digital design, cultural studies, or allied disciplines.