Towards a New Aesthetic

What I'll do with my New Aesthetics grant.

At the end of last year, Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen put out “A Call for New Aesthetics”:

We, Patrick and Tyler, have differing views of the artistic merits of Bauhaus, but we are both very impressed by the movement’s success: they sought to define an aesthetic for the twentieth century, and basically did. Bauhaus obviously sits as part of broader tides—functionalism, constructivism, De Stijl, etc.—but the project also shows how intentional artistic ambition can succeed. Everything from modern offices to modern tech hardware is in some sense downstream of Bauhaus.

We’re more than a quarter way through the new century and we can now ask: what is the aesthetic of the twenty-first century? Which are the important secessionist movements of today? Which will be the most important great works? Today, futuristic aesthetics often mean retrofuturistic aesthetics. So, what should the future actually look like?

There will not be singular answers to these, but we are very interested in attempts to answer the questions. In particular, we would like to fund some artists who are thinking about them.

And now I’m delighted to announce that I was awarded a New Aesthetics grant to try to invent a new ornamental style of architecture. I’m going to do this through drawing, because just as writing is thinking, drawing is imagining. You might invent something new when you sit down to solve the problem of what your version of a thing should look like.

"America was supposed to be Art Deco."

Beauty Under the Cover of Darkness

I bemoaned the loss of ornamental architecture¹ in “‘America was supposed to be Art Deco’” and then expanded my ideas in “Beauty Under the Cover of Darkness,” in which I allege that the architects who denounced ornament succeeded through the power of drawing — emphatically not through the power of their actual buildings.

Le Corbusier was the primary popularizer of modernist architecture, because his drawings stole the hearts of the next generation of architects. His mentees, like Gordon Bunshaft, gushed over his drawings while calling his buildings “the shabbiest goddamn thing you ever saw.” Some of the most celebrated architects influenced by Le Corbusier, like Michael Graves, also focused more on drawing than building. (Tom Wolfe pokes fun at architects winning awards for drawing without building much in Bauhaus to Our House.) My personal favorites are the drawings of Paul Rudolph, which I find stunning, but they were in service of ghastly ideas like demolishing parts of Manhattan to build an expressway.

“A drawing by the architect Paul Rudolph… of a plan to drive a megastructure through Lower Manhattan. It was never built.” via the New York Times

Drawings, and the other visual arts, have the power to turn ugliness into beauty. When Claude Monet painted his impression of a sunrise, he transformed the industrial haze obscuring the port of Le Havre into a dream. Francisco Goya made a series of stunning etches about abuse, corruption, and murder that art critic Robert Hughes described as making “eloquent and morally urgent art out of human disaster.” Consider how the only time you’re happy to see flies land on fruit is within a still life.

It pains me that my own artform was the murder weapon. But if Le Corbusier could use drawing to kill ornamental architecture, then I can use drawing to resurrect it.

As I wrote in “The Power of Art in the AI Age,” artists have always synthesized the past to create novelty. I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time with great architecture — but not enough, so I’m going to use the New Aesthetics grant to travel to places I haven’t gotten to yet. I’ll start by targeting cities with Art Deco and Brutalist architecture — one of my favorite styles, and one I’ve written about with scorn. I’ll make sketches of the architecture while I’m there in person, like this study of a “Gothic Deco” Episcopalian church in my neighborhood. I like how the towers grow like crystals.

Drawing from life, rather than a photo, teaches you unexpected lessons. In “Learning How To See The Moon,” I described how drawing the moon every night for six months gave me an intuitive sense of its orbit:

All of us are accustomed to the phases of the waxing and waning moon, with its variety of crescent-shapes. But not everyone notices that the moon also rises in the sky nearly an hour later each night. Because the Earth is spinning on its axis, twirling around its center like a ballerina on pointed toe, our view of the sky changes as the planet beneath our feet points us in different directions. That is why both the moon and sun appear to rise in the east and set in the west, as this visual effect is caused by the direction of the Earth’s rotation. Imagine if the ballerina decided to twirl left instead of right, and how that would make the room appear to her in the opposite order.

At the same time, the moon is orbiting around the Earth, so that when our planet spins us ’round to see it again each night, we have to rotate a bit longer to catch up with the moving moon. It’s as if the room around the ballerina was also slowly rotating in the same direction as her, so that as she twirls, it takes her a moment longer to face the same side of the room again. For those six months of nightly drawing, this meant that my routines and sleep also chased after the moon, syncing the rhythm of my life to its cycle, as I became more or less nocturnal depending on where the moon was in its orbit.

Trying to visualize celestial movements can feel mind-boggling — the moon is a spinning orb circling a larger spinning orb, hurtling together around a rotating fireball that drags them all in a giant loop around an unfathomable hole in the center of our galaxy — but as my own body fell into step with the moon’s orbit, tracking its motion became more intuitive. Upon embarking on this project, I expected to learn the details of the moon’s face by drawing its portrait over and over again, but I had not anticipated how my observations would help me develop a more accurate mental model of our moving solar system. Prolonged observation teaches us how to see, so that until we have looked hard, we cannot know what we have hitherto been blind towards.

The grant will afford me an analogous experience with architecture. Anticipating the unknown unknowns I’ll discover while drawing is the most thrilling part of this opportunity. I wonder how my body will feel in these new places — and I remember what it was like the first time I turned the corner and saw Il Duomo looming over me in Florence, and when I stepped inside the temple in Nara where the massive Buddha gave me the same sensation of experiencing an optical illusion, as if these structures were too big to be real.

I’ll share my sketches, research, and observations here on Fashionably Late Takes as I travel. In upcoming posts, I’ll pair drawing studies with what I’m learning about architecture. And while stewing in my influences, I’ll try to invent something new.

1. Ornamentation is often conflated with old. There’s no reason why someone cannot come up with a new style, but there seems to be a wide-spread, baked-in assumption that we’re out of aesthetic ideas. When Americans debate what new buildings should look like, the terms are typically framed as a choice between modernism and traditional European styles.

Recent examples include Noah Smith writing a piece titled “Will Americans want more housing if it looks prettier?” but then only considering European pastiche for what pretty buildings might look like, because of “the kinds of building styles that intellectuals often yearn for.” Or Matthew Yglesias writing “Stop blaming ugly buildings for the housing crisis” but only discussing modernism versus “traditional styles” or “neoclassical.” Smith expresses support for deregulation that would allow developers to experiment with ornamentation and alternative styles, and Yglesias worries that “something new” inevitably results in avant-garde despised by the masses, but they don’t seriously consider the possibility of something both beautiful and new.

Although even if we’re pessimistic about the likelihood of new aesthetics, and stick to discussing historical styles, they could have considered how Americans would react to a pastiche of, say, Art Deco, which the French began but Americans perfected about a century ago. Smith complains that “If you plunk down old-looking European-style buildings in the middle of Houston or Seattle, people tend to ridicule them as cheesy and inauthentic.” This is irrelevant, because we have our own aesthetic history to plunder, without trying to ape Europe.