I can never stop saying that, for me, beauty is number one in whatever I try to accomplish both personally and professionally.
The captions from Beauty that I showed in the last post belong to two consecutive chapters of it, “A short history of beauty” and “Experiencing beauty”, in parts of which the authors take against the historically more fundamentalist currents of Modernism. It was the American architect Louis Sullivan, one of the forefathers of this movement, who coined the slogan form follows function, and its more fervent followers actually took issue with beauty as something to be eradicated once and for all. The book examines how this trend evolved in several disciplines, as architecture, typography and design, and the perverse effects it generated worldwide, while bringing into play a number of very telling refuting counterexamples showing why beauty does matter.
Beauty is a book full of good food for thought and truly beautiful.
Whenever a journalist brings up beauty in interviews with designers, the standard reaction is one of indignation: “Of course our work is not about making pretty things! We are problem solvers!”
2018 Phaidon Press Limited, Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh Beauty, p. 69.
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