{Grace and Beauty [continued]}[19th February 1989]

[Redbook6:100)][19890219:1218h]{Grace and Beauty [continued]}[19th February 1989]

19890219.1218

[continued]

It is easy to be deceived into considering artifice beautiful, until you ask: is there Grace? Grace is closely linked to Innocence, and so to Love and other related manifestations, in people as in works of Art and even in Landscape: a slagheap and an office block are not beautiful as is a mountain, because they* are forced to Men’s purpose whereas it* is open to the Spirit which made it.

This might explain the failure of Architecture to achieve greater beauty by revealing the principles of its engineering construction (or even its utilitarian purpose) in its form. This is because the engineering rules and the use of the building are themselves forced by and to Man’s purpose; a mediaeval Cathedral, by contrast, without concealing its principles of construction subordinates the employment of those principles – that is, the purpose of its builders – entirely to their conception of the purpose of the Spirit. The former is selfish, the latter self-less.

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This only works, I think, when you treat architecture and its purposes as collective expressions, eg of cultures rather than individuals.

*[Underlining added later]

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