Beauty Matters Human Judgement and the Pursuit of New Beauties in Post-Digital Architecture

Beauty in architecture matters again. This issue of AD posits that after 80 years of aggressive suppression of engagement with aesthetics, the temporarily dormant preoccupation with beauty is back. This is evidenced by a current cultural shift from the supposedly objective to an emerging trust in the subjective – a renewed fascination for aesthetics supported by new knowledge emanating simultaneously from disparate disciplines.

Digital design continues to influence architectural discourse, not only due to changes in manufacturing but also through establishing meaning. The very term 'post-digital' was introduced by computational designers and artists, who accept that digital gains in architectural design are augmented by human judgement and cognitive intuition.

The issue takes an interdisciplinary approach to this re-emerging interest in beauty across neuroscience, neuroaesthetics, mathematics, philosophy and architecture, while discussing the work of the international architects, in both practice and academe, who are generating new aesthetics.

Contributors: Alisa Andrasek,Izaskun Chinchilla, Marjan Colletti, Peter Cook, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Winka Dubbeldam, David Garcia, Graham Harman, Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, Alan Powers, Gilles Retsin, Kristina Schinegger and Stefan Rutzinger, Fleur Watson and Martyn Hook and Semir Zeki.

Featured architects: Archi-Tectonics, ecoLogicStudio, NaJa & deOstos, Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA, soma architecture, Studio Gang, John Wardle Architects and Tom Wiscombe Architecture.

Yael Reisner is a practitioner, researcher, educator and writer. Born in Tel Aviv, she has lived in London since 1990 and is the director of Yael Reisner Studio. She trained at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London and is a registered architect in Israel. In 2009, she gained a PhD from RMIT University, Melbourne. Her doctoral thesis focused on the relationship between beauty and architecture. This research developed into a book: Architecture and Beauty: Conversations with Architects about A Troubled Relationship, written with Fleur Watson (John Wiley & Sons, 2010). Since 2005, Reisner has been teaching architecture internationally. In 2017, Reisner was appointed a guest professor at the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences.

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