San Rocco 13 - Pure Beauty - Editorial

Nobody talks about beauty. Nobody dares. (Or, at least, not in archi- tecture; if you are in the soap business, then it’s another story.) If you mention beauty – meaning a universally evident beauty – peo- ple stare at you like some sort of dinosaur who forgot to acknowledge his own extinction. Actually, they also fear that just before you ac- knowledge it, you could still eat them. If you do dare to mention beauty, then some well-intentioned idiot says “beauty is subjective”, as if this indisputable truth (given that beauty is, of course, subjective) would implicitly mean that nothing subjective and shared (or universal, or common, or whatever you’d like to call it) could possibly exist; as if subjects could never agree, or could never admit their shared nature and recognize themselves in what, in the end, is nothing more than this: the sudden appearance of something that we all like, something to which we would all like to surrender ourselves (i.e., the sudden appearance of beauty).