The Empress Is Naked… or Some Properties of Beauty

Abstract

This essay offers a critical reflection on the contemporary crisis surrounding the concept of beauty, particularly within the realm of architecture. It begins with the premise that beauty is not democratic—a fact that generates social tensions and complicates both its definition and its appropriation. Throughout history, beauty has been subject to myriad interpretations—ranging from an ideal, objective dimension to subjective, cultural, or political facets—without ever achieving a stable synthesis. Today, this lack of a clear definition has intensified as beauty fragments into multiple categories, thereby diluting its meaning.

The text identifies three fundamental properties of beauty—time, precision, and complexity—as cross-cutting analytical tools. Through these lenses, it examines how beauty can manifest as either an instant or a duration, depend on technical accuracy or emerge from autonomous technological processes, and oscillate between the self-evident and the revealed.

Against this backdrop, the essay critiques contemporary architecture, which is dominated by the imperatives of sustainability. While these imperatives address urgent needs, they have relegated the pursuit of beauty to the background, resulting in an output that is homogeneous, utilitarian, and devoid of an inspiring aesthetic canon. Sustainability, understood as both a technical and moral narrative, cannot on its own generate meaningful aesthetic experiences.

The essay concludes that beauty remains an essential and irreplaceable component, the absence of which impoverishes the discipline of architecture. Reclaiming it requires transcending mere normativity and reactivating a creative dimension capable of integrating technical requirements without sacrificing aesthetic and cultural power.