THE PROJECT OF UGLINESS
Only the ugly is attractive.
Champfleury (Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson 1820-1889)
Venustas / Beauty was originally associated by Vitruvius with both a formal adjustment to the natural proportion of the human body and with a symmetric configuration. Consequently, any prospective built incarnations of the Beautiful would always necessarily point towards architectures of hierarchical, compositional nature, and anything that fell outside of this narrow organizational framework would be contemptuously deemed as “ugly”. However, Ugliness as a counter-notion to the platonic concept of Beauty need not be considered negatively, and can in fact constitute a very productive path of actualization for the current critical approach to the validation of architectural work.
Following this approach, the Ugly immediately becomes resonant with a wide array of contemporary architectural design methodologies that, by deliberately failing to comply with the formal constraints imposed by platonic beauty, keep falling outside the outdated scope of our collective critical framework.
Thus, the Project of Ugliness will focus in the organizational qualities of the anti-symmetric, as well as in lack of proportion understood as a loss of scalar reference. This leads us to mobilise the notion of Diagram as a topological mapping of dynamic transformations, a non-scalar abstract machine awaiting actions on specific material traits. The static, homogeneous idea of classical beauty is then be actualized towards the production of differentiated formal instances with the ability to absorb and integrate multiple possible contextual affiliations.