Do You Trust Me When I Call This Beautiful?
Constructing an Argument
This essay serves as part of the STSC Symposium for May: “Beauty”. A monthly collaboration from STSC's writers around a set theme.
It was midnight. I stood at the end of the Williamsburg pier that overlooks the Manhattan skyline. The lights blinking and wavering in the late summer heat were like stars in the sky.
In fact, lean into that analogy: what, really, is different about the visual awe of uncountable expanses of stars to the visual awe of uncountable window lights of a city? To be sure, the scale is different — by untold magnitudes. And different values behind where the light comes from. Visually the two are similar; meaningfully they’re different. Normally I would argue that the magnitude of the stars places us at the point of awe.
But, that night, I realized the cityscape holds awe too. Not because of the diminution of humans in context to the Universe, but because of the immensity and scale of the things they have built.
I take pictures of buildings.
That’s the tagline of my Instagram feed, @ambientgeometries. It’s been unchanged since I opened the account.
It’s a neat little semantic trick, innit? I don’t take architectural photography, I take pictures of buildings. More street photography than fine art. Sometimes the subject of the photograph is the particular architecture, and then I use the hashtags such as #architecture and #architecturalphotography, but buildings aren’t always about the design of walled structures people live and work in. “Buildings” are also public spaces, hiking trails and playgrounds, urban decay, and infrastructure.
And sometimes buildings are the construction itself.
“Mom, did you know about every 20 miles on average, there’s a construction zone?”
Mom groaned. Intended reaction achieved.
I was about 8 or 9. I had learned that factoid from an advertisement for a motor vehicle in a Newsweek magazine. I couldn’t tell you which looming, polished black vehicle was being advertised or how, theoretically, it was supposed to help alleviate the problem of construction-induced delays for commuters nationwide. I don’t even know if its trivium was factual.1
But the advertiser knew what I knew: drivers hate construction. That’s truth. It’s our cultural understanding of what construction means to a commuter everyperson.
We all hate construction. It’s logical. Construction is messy, it pollutes, it’s loud and disruptive, and it’s inconvenient. A common term to describe construction sites is “an eyesore” — and here, my viewpoint deviates from most.
Construction is quite beautiful.
When is something beautiful?