The beautiful mess. From the Vitruvian harmony to the discovery of the chaotic as a source of architectural aesthetics

Abstract

The beauty is, from the classical tradition, one of the essential components of the good architecture, but at the same time one of the most elusive and difficult to be defined. Faced with objectively evaluable issues such as solidity or functionality, the beauty escapes from any pretension of being univocal understood and it seems to appeal to the subjectivity of the observer, their relationship with the architectural fact and their own cultural context. There have been several attempts to limit that concept of architectural beauty throughout history. This paper addresses some of the contributions that during the 20th century wanted to identify beauty in features that, according to the most classical formal tradition, should be devoid of it: the absence of order and harmony. These, unlike other attempts to legitimize disorder through its association with certain aesthetic canons such as the sublime, the grotesque or the ugly, tried to redefine the cultural concept of beauty itself. And in doing so, they not only re-connected this value with the other principles of the classical tradition –durability, utility–, but as well with some of the challenges that contemporary architecture has to face.