On Architecture and Beauty

Sorry for the surfeit of quotations lately, but I'm not sure that it's going to let up at the moment. Here is Roger Scruton in his article, "The High Cost of Ignoring Beauty": (with my own parenthetical responses following)


"Aesthetic judgements may look subjective when you are wandering in the aesthetic desert of Waco or Las Vegas." (I appreciate this, because I was with him in Waco, and during my year there, I certainly had a sense that it was an aesthetic desert. When I was seeking advise about graduate schools after college, one man advised me almost solely on the beauty of the location, which, in retrospect, wasn't a terrible criterion.)
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"Maybe we see beauty as subjective only because we have given the wrong place to aesthetic judgement in our lives—seeing it as a way of affirming ourselves, instead of a way of denying ourselves." (This made me think of Zadie Smith's article, "Fail Better," which, I think, advocates an aesthetic standard the praises true self-expression, in opposition to T.S. Eliot's aesthetic standard that praises true expression of one's tradition in his essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." For the record, I'm not certain that I agree with either: I think that they may be doing exactly the same thing, only at different levels.)
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"When it comes to beauty, our view of its status is radically affected by whether we see it as a form of self-expression, or as a form of self-denial. If we see it in this second way, then the assumption that it is merely subjective begins to fall away. Instead beauty begins to take on another character, as one of the instruments in our consensus-building strategies, one of the values through which we construct and belong to a shared and mutually consoling world. In short, it is part of building a home." (While I think that beauty certainly must be simultaneously an expression of one's self and of one's community and tradition, I don't think that this, either, is all that there is to beauty. I don't think that making beauty an expression of one's tradition avoids subjectivity completely [neither do I think that beauty ought to be completely subjective]. I am a strong defender of art's role in forming and influencing political and social life, which is something that Scruton points to here. On the other hand, I don't think that art is solely social and political.)
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"In that case, however, there has to be a place for aesthetic judgement in the planning and building of cities. In a celebrated work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, Jane Jacobs argued that cities should develop spontaneously and organically, so as to enshrine in their contours the unintended results of the consensual transactions between their residents. Only then will they facilitate the peaceful evolution of urban life. A true city is built by its residents, in that every aspect of it reflects something that results from what uncountably many residents have wanted, rather than something that a few self-appointed experts have planned. And that is the aspect of old Rome, Siena, or Istanbul that most appeals to the modern traveller. Some urbanists interpret Jacobs’s argument as showing that aesthetic values can be left to look after themselves; others, on the contrary, have insisted that her examples really derive their force from the aesthetic values that she smuggles in as side-constraints." (Scruton's summary of Jacobs encapsulates my question regarding "conservative" attempts to create new cities influenced by new urbanism--is it conservative for a few self-appointed experts to plan and implement a city? And yet, as Scruton shows, aesthetic values don't always flourish when they are left to look after themselves [this, incidentally, reminds me of the title of Eric Gill's, Beauty Looks after Herself, a significant portion of which is written in aphoristic outline].)
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"Perhaps the wisest response to Jacobs’s argument therefore is to point to the distinction between plans and side-constraints. Although a free economy is needed if we are to solve the problem of economic coordination, freedom must be contained, and it is contained by law. Legal side-constraints ensure that cheats will not prosper. Likewise with the city: there must be planning, but it should be envisaged negatively, as a system of side-constraints, rather than positively, as a way of “taking charge” of what happens and where."
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"The failure of modernism, in my view, lies not in the fact that it has produced no great or beautiful buildings—the Chapel at Ronchamp, and the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright abundantly prove the opposite. It lies in the absence of any reliable patterns or types." (I am skeptical of anyone who denigrates Frank Lloyd Wright; Scruton gets points from me here by praising him.)