On Beauty vs Quality at the "Better Design for Better Places" Conference
On Valentine’s day the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) held the “Better Design for Better Places” conference, seeking to raise the bar for design in the built environment. It drew together some of the thinking floating around since the announcement of the “Building Better, Building Beautiful” Commission and addressed the “Better” element of #MoreBetterFaster - the hashtag increasingly being used by government types when tweeting about housing delivery. Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth opened the conference which a speech, in which he stated: “We must aspire to beauty” This gave me pause, and I pondered the statement for the rest of the day as I attended various panels and breakout sessions. Is aspiring to beauty the best way for us to ensure that we create good, successful places? Is beauty necessary to create good design? And what do we even mean when we talk about beauty? We are told that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, meaning that our ideas ...