The paper addresses the topic of “venustas” throughout two different kinds of competences (aesthetical and architectonical), hence in an inter-disciplinary fashion, given the architectonic as well as historic-philosophical extent of the subject. The first paragraph stresses the semantic ambiguity of the Latin term as well as of the multiple translations in modern languages. The analysis of several texts concerning more or less recent projects of architecture and urbanism, in the subsequent two paragraphs, shows that a renewed attention to beauty aroused in response to the challenge of the industrial revolution, although in the preservation laws the term “aesthetics” is given since then little consideration. Aesthetic evaluation, i.e. evaluation understood in terms of a judgment about beauty or ugliness of what one sees, is mostly replaced by historical or functional references. The acknowledged value of a building is then related to what role or function it used to accomplish in the first place, and the new projects are constantly associated to criteria such as quality, governance and management of spacebased relations, or efficiency. The aesthetic criterion seems thus to play a marginal role in the institutional discourse today, and the paper gives an account of this change examining two relevant case studies.
Intervenire nel contesto urbano. Travestimenti e traduzioni della Venustas
GRASSO, DAVIDE ANTONIO;
2010-01-01
Abstract
The paper addresses the topic of “venustas” throughout two different kinds of competences (aesthetical and architectonical), hence in an inter-disciplinary fashion, given the architectonic as well as historic-philosophical extent of the subject. The first paragraph stresses the semantic ambiguity of the Latin term as well as of the multiple translations in modern languages. The analysis of several texts concerning more or less recent projects of architecture and urbanism, in the subsequent two paragraphs, shows that a renewed attention to beauty aroused in response to the challenge of the industrial revolution, although in the preservation laws the term “aesthetics” is given since then little consideration. Aesthetic evaluation, i.e. evaluation understood in terms of a judgment about beauty or ugliness of what one sees, is mostly replaced by historical or functional references. The acknowledged value of a building is then related to what role or function it used to accomplish in the first place, and the new projects are constantly associated to criteria such as quality, governance and management of spacebased relations, or efficiency. The aesthetic criterion seems thus to play a marginal role in the institutional discourse today, and the paper gives an account of this change examining two relevant case studies.
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