The philosophy of beauty

Why beautiful places move us, and why that should shape the cities we build.

Beauty is not a luxury. It is a human need.

In 1817 the French writer Stendhal visited the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence and described being so overwhelmed by what he saw that his heart raced and he felt he might fall. More than a century and a half later, the Florentine psychiatrist Graziella Magherini documented the same reaction in visitors to the city and named it after him: Stendhal syndrome.

Few buildings will ever make anyone faint. But the effect runs on a scale, and most of us know the milder version: the pause in a great railway hall, the lift of walking into a square framed by fine facades. People are moved by beautiful places. We cross the world to stand in them.

If buildings can do that for us, they can also do the opposite. A city of blank, repetitive boxes is not neutral. It quietly tells the people who live in it that nobody cared. Building beautifully is how a city says the opposite.

One building can change how the world sees a city.

In 1957, Sydney chose the design for its new opera house from an international competition that drew 233 entries. Most were the kind of conventional, sensible concert halls that could have been built anywhere. Jørn Utzon’s sketch of white sails on the harbour was something else entirely.

It is not a traditional building, and that is not the point. It was ambitious, and it was made with care. Today it is the symbol of Sydney, visited by more than ten million people a year, and a 2013 Deloitte study valued its iconic status at A$4.6 billion.

The lesson for New Zealand is not about style. A building designed to inspire, rather than simply to function, can define a place for generations. A safer design would have cost less to build and been worth far less to the city.