What I’m talking about here is aesthetics, the branch of philosophy dealing with the beautiful, and its relation to the human mind; in particular the sensations and emotions which can be evoked by beauty. This epiphany came to me after reading ‘The Architecture of Happiness’ by Alain De Botton where he argues that buildings and the objects we fill them with affect us more profoundly than we might think. In fact it can be argued that our environment determines who we are, in terms of which persona we are at the present time. The greatest example of this is the comfort we feel in our own homes – a place we feel our true selves.
Another author, John Ruskin, while studying the beauty of Venice believed that buildings – rather than only provide us with shelter, should also speak to us and serve to remind us of all the things which are important to us. They are memorials to ideas and this is why we value them. But with so many of our buildings looking so much alike and albeit, quite ugly, it is not hard to see that all is not well between Engineering and aesthetics. Today’s school of thought seems to have adopted the idea that form should follow function, that is that the way something looks should only go as far as to suggest what it does and anything else is only timely and costly. How did we get here? Well its partly to do with specialisation and the formation of the technical specialty profession that engineering is today. But it is also the suppression of intuition and feeling by the engineer and instead relying on reasoning and sensing. Perhaps by the nature of their work today, Engineers prefer to be objective and quantitative rather than subjective and qualitative. Where renaissance men such as the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci embraced ambiguity and considered themselves to be craftsmen, Engineers today fear ambiguity and try to manage risk at all cost. It is no wonder then that engineering education has also suffered.
It may seem vain or materialistic given the scope of issues we already face in our world. But I would suggest we need beauty just as much as we need truth in our lives. Beauty can have quite a profound range from a sunset to a move in sports to a mathematical theorem, but one thing is always constant – beauty always inspires. So What then is Beauty? It has been said that there are as many definitions of beauty as there are definers, however to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder or any other cliché seems to only encourage defusing the debate when in fact we should be encouraging it. Arguments about beauty are no easier to resolve than disputes about what is just or what is right. Just as we can attack or defend ethical or legal positions we can do the same about a concept of beauty. and if we start to think about beauty in the design of buildings and objects around us we need to be open to pain because much of the world is in a sense, very ugly. It is perhaps the reason there has been an absence in discussion of this topic. It is not that we are insensitive to beauty; but we chose to deflect the sadness we would face if we did open ourselves up to the absence of beauty in design in the world around us.
Personally, I favour Stendhal’s definition when he stated that ‘Beauty is the promise of happiness’. This seemingly simple statement differentiates our love of beauty from an academic concern with aesthetics and takes it a step further to integrate it with the qualities we need to prosper as whole human beings. If the pursuit of happiness is the fundamental search in our lives, it seems only natural that it should simultaneously be the essential theme to which beauty alludes to. Thus our sense of beauty and our understanding of the nature of a good life are intertwined. The 31st President of the United States Herbert Hoover, himself a renowned Civil Engineer, alluded to this when he said, (on engineering) that “It is a great profession. There is a fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realisation in stone, metal or energy. Then it brings homes and jobs to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer’s high privilege.”
It was this idea of creating better lives for people which he called the engineers high privilege. I believe Engineers have the power to create a happier society and that should be part of this privilege, but this raises the question of the purpose of Engineering. Perhaps a definition is in order. Webster defines engineering as an ‘applied science concerned with utilizing inorganic products of earth, properties of matter, sources of power in nature, and physical forces for supplying human needs in the forms of structures and machines’. This idea of supplying human needs comes up again and again in the question of engineering purpose. It is evident all around us, engineers make the world go round, but even this analogy only deals with physical needs. To our detriment, emotional needs have been left in the corner, ignored and forgotten. Not since the renaissance has there been successful and intentional integration between the technical and the aesthetic into a unitary philosophy and practice.
The fact of the matter is that Engineers are problem solvers and solutions need to be holistic. Add to this the responsibility of supplying human needs and aesthetics then becomes a human concern of the engineer and needs to be considered as part of a complete solution to any problem. However how can an engineer solve the problem for emotional needs? There is no hand book that can itemise an emotion along with the correct formula for satisfying them. Furthermore the rules which govern engineering do not dictate any particular style, leaving it open to interpretation.
It becomes an issue of education. There are three things we can do to educate undergraduate engineers about aesthetics and beauty. The first is to directly address aesthetics in lectures, discussions and assignments in engineering courses. Ideally an entire subject should be dedicated to aesthetics but it definitely needs to be carried across a range of subjects also.
The second is to collaborate with the schools of the liberal arts so that the courses taken by engineering students provide the groundwork for and reinforce the notion of engineering design aesthetics and apply it to their particular field.
The third and most important is to lead by example. One of the simplest ways we as people learn is by imitating. Engineering education teaches them the skills to do their work and in turn the world can function, but with aesthetics and good example we could teach them that Engineering is not just about the known but about the ‘what might be?’.
Finally, if not for ourselves than in the words of De Botton “we owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the building we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness”.
