The difficulty with ugliness

The Villa Malcontenta by Palladio is, I think, (mind you, I think, you may happily differ), a beautiful building; so is the Neue Nationalgalerie by Mies van der Rohe. But why?¹

Have you ever been bothered by a building in your neighbourhood? Maybe you find the building depressing; maybe it looks like cheap plastic or like a dirty bathroom.

Have you ever really hated a building? And why was that? Was it a childhood memory, a bad experience at work? Or did you simply find it ugly, hatefully ugly, crude, brutal, arrogant, banal or stupid? Was it built to replace something that was loved and is now gone? Is the world getting uglier and uglier in your eyes?

I am not going to stand up for ugly buildings in this story. They shall have to fend for themselves. It is you that needs help.

First a personal story. I studied in Leiden, in some very ugly buildings. Art History. I loved thinking about ‘things’. I was especially interested in finding out what other people thought about the things I enjoyed thinking about. Thinking things … that would become my profession.

So, I started combining art history with philosophy, especially aesthetics. Aesthetics is the runt of the family of philosophical disciplines. It’s about beauty, and what good is that? Well…, in any case, being of a monkish disposition, I wanted to surround myself with beautiful small things, things I could look at quietly, contemplatively, for hours at a time.

My philosophy teacher to whom I confessed all this, looked at me curiously and said, “yes but small, beautiful things are so easy. Why don’t you study difficult, ugly, big things instead, things that stand in the way!”

That word ‘easy’ irritated me at the time. How are small, beautiful things easy? And why are big ugly things difficult? I saw them everywhere! They forced themselves upon me! They were being built everywhere! These were the early eighties; it was the time of a bizarre, institutionalized ugliness! The last Brutalists were still briskly brutalizing the world with their endlessly repeating blocks of grey concrete, occasionally dyed a weak colour that looked as if it had been washed too often.

At the same time there were people who understood that this was not good, such as the post-modernists for example, God love ‘em, but they didn’t really know how to do it any better, trying to be funny when they weren’t, pursuing complexity for its own sake. Why? Whatever the reason, there was so much ugly stuff to study!

So, I thought, if I could catch the concept of ‘ugliness’ in its essence, then perhaps I could also learn to say meaningful things about the beautiful! Win-win, I thought. How naïve.

The period from 1945 to … (when? Today?) is the glorious era of architectural ugliness. And for the professional architect that was a conscious strategy. The word ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’ were banned from architecture courses. Cancelled you would say now.

The response ‘Because it is beautiful’, to a question like ‘Why do you want to do this?’, was not seen as a valid reason to make a design decision fall this way or that way.

The word ‘beautiful’ had been exposed as subjective. And its application as a label was reserved for things without interest; beauty was banned to the margins.

Not that many people knew exactly what ‘subjective’ meant but, like anything that one does not fully understand, fear reigned, and the fear was that a design decision based on something that you yourself found beautiful would be an arbitrary decision. And so, aesthetics became a bit of a dirty word.

The concept of the beautiful had to limit itself to things that were not to be considered important, the frills and ornaments that monkeys wear.

Form was weirdly assumed to follow function and function was the criterion against which every form had to be judged. Little did such judges realize that it is form that gives function its affordance, but never mind.

Beauty, we had learnt from Kant (by misunderstanding his work on judgment), ought to have nothing to do with function. Thus, function and beauty were from the beginning of the nineteenth century torn apart as if one excluded the other and the beautiful could not be of practical use, or the practical not beautiful…ridiculous! You tell Vermeer’s lady that an earring has no function. Ha!

The only sensible person protesting against the absurd nightmare of pseudo-Kantian disinterested beauty was Nietzsche. But no one appeared to listen to him. Perhaps that was a good thing, although I don’t know.

It is true that to find something beautiful or ugly is subjective. Beauty judges a thing against some idea we personally might hold clearly, with good reason or indeed as some kind of norm or value we haven’t really questioned, but just grown up with.

Holding an opinion and committing yourself to it is indeed a subjective act. Thank goodness for that!

The nice thing about that is that if I say I like something, you don’t have to agree with me.

That’s actually what subjective means. It doesn’t mean random or capricious. Subjectivity is about my relationship with something I am judging for my own purposes. Either the thing fits me and my ideas… or not. I’ll come back to that when I deal with analysis and critique in more detail.

In any case, I am unique because of my taste, my thoughts, beliefs, values, norms and opinions, and so are you.

Without subjectivity there is no identity.

And subjective does not mean arbitrary. I can have very good very personal reasons to like something, and you can have very good reasons to like something else and to dislike what I like. Isn’t that wonderful?! Many people have good reasons to like or dislike something but don’t always know how to put them into words.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t have them. Feeling that something is right is really just having a reason. Having said that, maybe it could be made more explicit.

So how does that fitting work? Back in ancient Greece, you had two kinds of stonemason. The lithodomos, who cut stones to size, and the lithologos, who searched for stones to make them fit well together. There lies the origin of the word harmony, in construction!

To be in harmony means that something ‘fits’. Harmony is an ancient Greek word ἁρμονία. Originally it meant that a stone fits well on another stone, or that a joint between two pieces of wood sat satisfyingly well.

So, to find something beautiful it must fit, it must be in harmony with an idea that you cherish, that you find valuable, but…, and here comes the punchline, you are completely free to decide what idea that might be and even how the fitting with it is to be done and judged.

By having an opinion about something, about a building for example, you place yourself among things, you enter into a relationship with the things around you.

Subjectivity means that we own our opinions about those relationships, and that gives us a certain amount of freedom, which is very dear to me. I want to be free in what I think. Without subjectivity, there is no freedom! Without subjectivity I cannot disagree with you and learn to wrest myself from the chains of normativity that I have grown up with. Think about that!

At the same time, it is not so that objectivity imprisons me. Objectifying judgments say something about the world and how we think it is put together, how it works, regardless of exactly what you or I think about it.

Objectivity focuses on understanding, on what something is, how it is put together and how it works. Subjectivity focuses on our relationship to the object in use. Keep that distinction in the front of your mind; it will save you a lot of energy and will keep your thinking crisp and clear! We need both subjectivity and objectivity. Without a good understanding no good relationship is possible except through sheer luck.

I used to try to become good at finding things ugly. I wanted to try to explain why this or that building was really ugly, ‘objectively speaking’ as it were.

And it seemed to work sometimes. I mean something like the Gorbals in Glasgow, or the Corviale in Rome are surely bad buildings all the way through. How could anyone ever have thought that buildings like that would be okay to store human beings in? Surely?

Now let’s be honest, finding things ugly is very satisfying, just like a nice self-abandoning tantrum or ‘senseless’ violence on telly: delicious!

While walking around pretending to be a philosopher, I actually behaved more like a mediocre prophet. I had even founded a secret society with only one member, myself, called ATA, the Association des Terroristes Architecturale. (A French name would catch the authorities off guard … I thought). As a fantasy architectural terrorist, I then had buildings cancelled in my daydreams with a kind of imaginary and non-violent ‘vanishing gun’ that would make ugly things just… poof… disappear. I had, it appears, lost the philosopher in me.

So, what is philosophy? Philosophy is the activity of clarifying what is being said, finding the conditions on the basis of which something can be said that is consistent with those conditions.

That is what philosophy is. It is, before it can become anything else, an artform. It requires rigour to become good philosophy, but it cannot rely on truth and goodness alone. It needs more. It needs beauty.

A philosophical position would like to be judged in terms of its truth as a metaphysical or ontological belief. But that is not easy as we have to use language to model the world.

The relationship between the language we think with and the world we think about is complicated, full of traps and difficulties.

Philosophers want more than anything else that their model of the world is a truthful model.

Truth, as we shall see, is first of all the consistency of what has been said with the beliefs we sincerely hold and the way we express them. But truth on this level operates only at the level of the model and not on what is being modelled.

Therefore truth is little without accuracy. Accuracy measures the overlap between a description and what it describes. That has to be tested through observation.

So the road to truth is a long one.

Similarly, a philosophical position cannot so easily be judged in terms of goodness relative to human being alone.

The reason for this is that uses and purposes, the two notions against which all goodness must be judged by human beings, can change and thereby rearrange all our ideas regarding the world we think about.

That is not to say that the notion of goodness does not play a central part in philosophy. Goodness is the ultimate goal, to which truth and beauty contribute.

We now have an inkling of what truth contributes to goodness, but what does beauty contribute?

Philosophers must judge one way of describing the world better than another, must judge one way of doing things better than another and reveal their reasons for making such a judgment.

Inevitably, those reasons will involve some sort of perspective on use and purpose and on truth and accuracy.

However, those same reasons will need to show an internal consistency and coherence in some way. They will need to form a harmony amongst themselves. In order to arrive at enduring and robust judgments of the the good as well as enduring models of the true and the accurate, we first have have aesthetic judgment, judgments of the beautiful, the fitting, whereby the whole construction of reasons shows an inner harmony.

Philosophy, like pure mathematics, literature, and the arts has beauty as its first and last judge: the harmony of reason has to be maintained at all levels of evaluation.

Everything has to fit with whatever idea we choose to serve as a benchmark, standard, ideal or wish. For many of us that idea is unity, the idea that, in the end, the universe is one coherent and consistent system, with which even its seeming inconsistencies are consistent.

Using beauty in that way a philosophical position can stand like a beautiful, well-made wall. When it is built it is useful in one way, to shelter, to defend, to divide, to make us look up; when those uses become obsolete it might well find another, to stand for example as a landmark to contemplate and reflect upon, and admire for its beauty.

Philosophy is —for me at least— emphatically an artform before it can be anything else, it has to have that je ne sais quoi that great art has. That philosophy is a clarifying activity I rediscovered myself only when I learned, reluctantly, to understand what I was so busy condemning.

It took a long time and took a lot of energy, but my excursions into the ugly forced me to nuance my strong opinions. And lo and behold, I actually began to appreciate the buildings that I loathed with such delightful abandon!

There turned out to be reasons behind the appearance of buildings, reasons why concrete was used, why horizontal windows were used. In fact, there appeared to be reasons behind everything! Not always irrefutable reasons, sometimes quite bizarre and even silly reasons but reasons nevertheless that had been carefully and lovingly considered at the time, and especially under the circumstances of the time. The reasons together formed a harmonious unity, at least if you wanted to see it…

Beauty is a judgment that comes from our interaction with our environment and reason seeking the fit with some idea. And now you may be saying “nooooh it isn’t! Beauty… that’s pure feeling”. Well, the difference between you and me is not as great as you might think.

The question is whether reason and feeling are opposites. I don’t think so; they complement each other, work together. Think about it: don’t you get a satisfying feeling when a sum you were working on is correct? And don’t you get an unsatisfying feeling when you don’t understand something? And isn’t that the motivation to find out what it is you do not understand? Well, a sum is a piece of reasoning. And if the answer is correct then it gives a nice feeling. So feeling is not opposed to reason, they complement each other, they work together as one whole.

“Beauty”, said the architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti nearly 500 years ago, “is the reasoned harmony of parts in a whole so that nothing can be added, taken away or changed without violating the whole”.

Architects, when they thought they had erased the word ‘beautiful’ from their dictionary, continued to use it anyway, either in an unspoken indirect way uttering ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ at the right moment or just unconsciously or secretly.

And perhaps you should start paying attention to when exactly you yourself use the word ‘beautiful’, ‘nice’, ‘lovely’, ‘gorgeous’, ‘wonderful’, ‘great’ or one of its many cognates….

In fact, being banished to the margins did the actual use of the word ‘beautiful’ a bit of good. Because people gave up on aesthetics the word was actually brought back to its proper role in language, for example by architects expressing a feeling of satisfaction when all the elements in a building, a detail or in a design, were found to fit together according to their own ideas of what was good.

A well-designed building is beautiful because it is well-designed according to a number of ideas: ideas about practicality, sturdiness, placement, you name it.

But the architect is not the only one who gets to judge. The architect says something is beautiful if it fits with their intentions. The owner wants their investment back; the resident thinks it is beautiful if it fits with their use of the building, their well-being and self-image. The neighbours like it if it fits with their idea of a pleasant environment, and so on.

In order to come to such a judgment, people must also be given time. I noticed that when I liked the reasoning behind some design decision, I then also slowly began to find the product of that reasoning, the design decision, more sympathetic. After all, they started to fit with an idea that I was slowly beginning to form.

It turns out (and I discovered this only years later) that my philosophy teacher had not incited me to a crusade against ugliness as a fake prophet, as I first thought; they had encouraged me to begin an inner philosophical search for my own limitations.

That was the difficult part. That is the difficulty with ugliness!

So, are you suffering some limitation when you find something ugly? The only answer to that is… Yes (…).

But, there is good news, a river needs its banks. We need restrictions in order to take a direction and human beings, like all living creatures, suffer the contingent necessity of having a front to move forward and a behind to turn their back to.

Should you get angry or sad about the ugly? You can. You too can start a crusade. And maybe that actually makes sense. Because… and that’s the other side of the story… Everything can be found beautiful!

That is both weird and a little frightening. It does not mean we have to find everything beautiful. But we can. It is possible. It is possible in so far we are free, and we are free insofar as we can learn, and learn to to learn.

Only by learning do we achieve a measure of freedom to think for ourselves; and any judgment is entirely subjective, always.

We can have good reasons or bad ones for constructing an opinion about something. But that little bit of freedom we have comes through hard work. We are shaped by our environment, by our genes and our culture.

But the beauty of human beings is precisely that they can learn, they can free themselves with knowledge and a lot of energy, to make something of themselves.

And this is where we arrive at the punch line: our genes have evolved over millions of years. We are, because of the physical and cultural effects of that evolution, crammed with much-needed norms and values, and these provide us with precious preconceptions on the basis of which we do not have to constantly reinvent the wheel for everything we deal with in our daily lives.

We can break those norms and values, if we feel we need to, and sometimes we really do. I no longer wonder whether a building that has been found ugly can also be found beautiful. Everyone builds their own unique taste with their own reasons complemented with the appropriate feelings.

A personal taste is like a fingerprint, unique because each person uses their whole life to shape and reshape their taste.

Subjectivity, within which we build a life with its developing taste, using the norms, values and newly discovered opinions we acquire over a lifetime, means that our judgment is closely tied to our biography, who we are.

Sometimes liking or disliking something that we have not evolved to like or dislike ‘naturally’ simply takes too much energy.

I feel very sorry for the single mother who, with three bleating children returning from the local supermarket carrying her lacklustre shopping, has to walk down a rainy, windy gallery to her lonely, cold flat.

To find life beautiful at such a moment is an inhuman task. Isn’t it?

I also have every sympathy for a resident of one of our beautiful historic city centres who is in deep mourning over the things that disappear without thought, and the cheap, ill-conceived, quick-profit-hunting clutter that then replaces it.

I also understand the disgust for flashy nonsense. All that glitters is not gold, and gold has become a standard of value for very interesting historical reasons. It is not by itself worth something, it is worth something because we make it worth something.

The value of gold like the value of everything is a careful cultural construct. But cultural constructs are real in their consequences. A wall is a construct and is likely to hurt your head if you bump against it. And if the value of gold changes, that can affect your life in real ways.

Anyway, as far as I am concerned, architecture is allowed to be a celebration, or to celebrate the ordinary.

All that is allowed… But, as with so much, be considerate of each other! Just as you don’t smoke on the train, you shouldn’t be too concrete-y in a brick town.

And if you are busy getting on with your life then it is fair to ask whether and to what extent you should be subjected to someone else’s miserable taste. While commuting you may have other things on your mind than the beauty of concrete.

My message is this: Beauty lies in the harmony of reason, fitting a situation or thing with one’s own idea about it.

That means that the reasons can change, the idea can change and your notion of what constitutes a fit can change.

That leaves a lot of possibilities for beauty. Reason begins and ends in feeling. Begins perhaps with wonder and ends, if all goes well, in a feeling of harmony, of satisfaction, joy… admiration. Everything can be found beautiful.

But that certainly does not make everything beautiful! Indeed, for a healthy society, some things really have to be rejected and found ugly. Things that hurt others, that humiliate others, that exhaust others may legitimately be found horrible.

That is why I am giving you a set of user instructions for when you next venture out:

1. Look at your environment and judge it by all means. Enjoy your judgment whatever it is and feel free to find what you find.
2. If you have time, and the inclination, then look further, try to understand things, how they are put together, how they work. Only carefully objectified knowledge gives real subjective freedom because only a clear understanding of the way things work can help you make good use of it. Ignorance and wilfulness sometimes look like freedom, but they are not… they make you squander that little bit of freedom allowed us, namely the freedom to learn to do well. They ultimately are oppressive, either to yourself or to those on whom you impose your taste.
3. Then look again at yourself and how you might fit into this new picture of your understanding. Those two movements of objectifying analysis and subjectifying criticism, they make your life easier in the end, and perhaps less angry, less disappointed, less sad.
   That is what the rest of this book is about; it will try to give the arguments for what I have spoken about so far. The language used is a little more technical, but only a little.

1. This essay was first published in Jacob Voorthuis, Theoria, use, intention & design, a philosophical reckoning; Analysis & Critique: Gardening in the metaphysics of the beautiful, the true, and the good, AHT, Tu/e (2024) ↩︎

© jacob voorthuis, 2025. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.