The History of Beauty, a work by the eminent Italian intellectual, philosopher and writer Umberto Eco (1932-2016) , was published in 2004. In his own brilliant, but at the same time insightful way, the author, using the example of a hundred masterpieces, shows how the beauty of nature, including flowers, animals, the human body, the stars, or mathematical proportions was understood. Quoted texts of philosophers, writers show how the concept of beauty was understood and defined in different ways.
A sort of supplement to this work, and in fact a negative of the history of beauty, is "History of Ugliness". - perhaps more intriguing and fascinating than describing the category of beauty. This collection of more than a dozen essays and various illustrations, as well as quotations from different eras, shows the nightmare, the violation of classical canons, various deformations, distortions and decadences. Umberto Eco describes the ugliness of nature, disharmony, dissonance and everything that arouses disgust disgust and fear. He describes ugliness so refined that it is somehow a negative of classical beauty. Ugliness can also be classified in terms of aesthetics.
While the categories of beauty have become a thing of the past, and today one is more likely to describe the history of beauty rather than its contemporary definitions or its current search for beauty, ugliness has become such a common phenomenon that we no longer even recognize its ubiquity. A description of today's ugliness would no longer have anything to do with sophistication and fascination, but would be a boring tale of a deluge of banality and pejoratively conceived mediocrity, so different from the examples described by Umberto Eco. It's worth stopping for a moment and looking at this modern ugliness of ours.
a flood of ugliness
Uglinessaccompanies us on a daily basis in the form of aggressive commercials, garish morning TV shows, packaging, home-store furniture, computer games, and, unfortunately, large and small architecture, more littering the space than enhancing its value. However, there are periods and places where there is an escalation of ugliness on a larger than normal scale.
The first is the eagerly awaited time of vacations and vacations. Coastal towns fill up with rows of stalls with almost identical trash, plastic ships, toys, shovels and sand rakes inflatable ducks and mattresses, T-shirts, shell dummies, printed hats and other items undoubtedly necessary for a successful vacation. Silhouettes of historic towns on the coast are obscured on the beaches by inflatable castles with slides for children, manifesting their holiday dominance. By force, a somewhat different, but equally tasteful and charming, assortment is offered in mountain towns. All this festival of ugliness goes on against a backdrop of banal architecture, offering the delusion of comfort and luxury in accordance with the advertising slogan: "True relaxation in a beautiful resort - we recommend a luxury hotel with a pool and spa."
The second period is the time leading up to Christmas, although religious naming has little or nothing to do with this time anymore. It seems that shopping malls and the media are waiting in full readiness until All Saints' Day has passed, however, still prompting reverie, to launch a campaign encouraging thoughtless shopping of everything that can be bought in the pre-Christmas frenzy. Anyway, this artificially created Christmas atmosphere organically fits into the autonomous world of magnificence of shopping malls, which are the pinnacle architectural achievement of consumer society, while being the quintessence of ugliness. Prisms of glass baubles and other Christmas tree decorations fill the arcades of shopping malls, presenting an appeal to the most common tastes. It is almost bordering on a miracle to find in this flood of kitsch, something that doesn't flash, shine, glitter and reflect this ragged world of gilding, and that is natural, modest and not falsely understood covenant aesthetics.
Heaps of glass baubles and other Christmas tree ornaments fill the passages of shopping malls, presenting an appeal to the most common tastes
© Piotr Średniawa
This deluge of ugliness is addressed ostensibly to all of us, but in fact the actual target is precisely defined by marketing specialists. These are, unfortunately, children. How do you refuse to let a child buy a plastic mermaid, an artificial fiber jellyfish, or any other creature? How about being tempted by a beach hat, sunglasses or a souvenir from the Baltic, Adriatic or Côte d'Azur? As a result, along with the dubious memories of a vacation, we bring home the waste of our civilization, no longer needed by anyone. A similar mechanism is at work with Christmas. How can we resist the narrative of a merry, joyful, family Christmas and provide the family, especially the children, with a magical atmosphere and wonderful, but really unnecessary gifts? How not to visit with the children a charming, magical, illuminated Christmas palace, a sleigh with reindeer, or meet Santa Claus at the mall?
This involvement of children in the consumption of ugliness and infantile aesthetics, does not go unpunished. It develops a certain sense of quasi-aesthetics, or rather the lack thereof, and artificially created needs to consume ugliness, which will remain for the rest of their lives.
Architecture, on the other hand, is deliberately and consciously addressed already to adult customers, whose taste and needs are precisely defined and told by advertising. After all, a sense of prestige and comfort is more likely to be satisfied by scaled-down four-star hotels on the Baltic coast or the longest hotel in the Beskids than by agritourism with chickens and cows, while a visit to a shopping mall is a remedy for gray reality and everyday troubles.
positive aspect of ugliness
Increasingly, the holiday season, intended to be a period of relaxation and leisure, appears as an aggressive expansion of ugliness. The period before the holidays, on the other hand, is a veritable paradise for shopping malls, with festive music, crowds of Santas and angels, and circulating holiday décor intended to put people in a joyful mood, and in fact - like the holiday scenery - to force them to spend money or the holiday and Christmas loans eagerly offered by banks. So year after year, these two seemingly happiest periods have been turned into festivals of shenanigans and cash squeezes.
From the usual indignation and smile of pity over this ugliness, it is much more interesting to take a careful look at the discreet labels with which these products are equipped. Well, most of them are made in China and distributed by domestic companies. It is equally surprising that most of the devotional items sold in our country, offered at pilgrimage sites and stores, are also made in China. However, it is much more difficult to buy any authentic product of traditional Chinese culture, such as lanterns or paper garlands. It's interesting and intriguing to see how one of the oldest and most sophisticated cultures in the world has been caught up in the mass production of rags and trash, and at the same time in the global world of consumption. This shows how authentic values are becoming increasingly difficult to find in our reality, mass trash wins, by the way, very quickly finding its place in the trash, like holiday gadgets or Christmas ornaments. Besides, not only those purchased by us, but also their great quantity unsold in the pre-Christmas period, which is not worth storing for the next year and its short fate completes in landfills.
One may disregard these phenomena and attribute them to mere temporalities during vacations and festivals, but they take place against the backdrop of a more permanent setting, which is architecture. Just as on the Mediterranean coast or in the Atlantic resorts and winter resorts, in Europe, including Poland, we see the process of devastation of the Baltic coast with monstrous blocks of hotels and guesthouses. A similar fate has befallen Podhale, and is affecting the Sudetenland. It is almost unbelievable how thoughtlessly we are degrading those areas of our country that offer the most beautiful landscapes. To some extent, by the powerlessness of the previous system, protected from development, they are now becoming a field for the expansion of the bitterest commercialism. This process does not happen by itself and not only with the consent and approval of local authorities tempted by immediate benefits, but, what is worse, with the acceptance of local communities, and the whole cancerous tissue of hotels, boarding houses, gastronomy is designed by representatives of the public trust profession, i.e., architects harnessed to the vehicle of consumption.
But perhaps, instead of being indignant about our modern times, it is worth seeing some positives as well, by way of paradox. Umberto Eco basically showed that ugliness can be to some peculiar degree beautiful. It's hard to say that about our global ugliness; it's commonplace rather than fascinating. However, one can see a shadow of hope in this flood of ugliness. If everything were beautiful this dream world of ours would be the negative of ugliness, and we would probably live in it with equal indifference. In our world, it really doesn't take much to disassociate ourselves from ugliness and offer something aesthetically positive. It only takes a few moments of reflection to abandon the conformity and opportunism of conforming to the consumerist model. It's a pity that somehow we don't want to see this opportunity as an architectural community and continue to subscribe more and more to the production and offering to society of banality and ragma, embedded in the global lifestyle. Isn't stopping the rags also a demand for sustainable development and a resilient city?
Piotr Średniawa
Member of WKUA and MKUA in Katowice,
Since 2003, has run the Office of Studies and Projects in Gliwice with Barbara Średniawa