ARCH 715: Contemporary Aesthetic Theory
This course offers a framework for a provocative history of ideas about beauty as they relate to contemporary thinking and their production of form in architecture. In a world increasingly defined by visuality, the concepts of beauty and visual sensation are not mere intellectual exercises but standards that define the very nature of design practice across disciplines, and that are essential to the worlds of objects, automobiles, furniture and architecture in the twenty-first century. Aesthetic theory is about beauty and about form and how it affects us every day. As architecture practice changes, the tools that are used to create form change due to new technologies, new materials and new tools for fabrication and aesthetics gives us an important way in to understanding the relationship between the object created and the user. This occurs in contemporary cultural landscapes in which we exist, and aesthetics is the organizing element.
