Event

Beauty Memory Unity: A Theory of Proportion in Design

Architect Steve Bass presents a view of the proportional idea based in the ancient philosophical systems of Pythagoras, Plato and later Neo-Platonists. In this view number and geometry, the substance of proportion, are endowed with qualitative, harmonic, life-like properties. These ideas are then linked to numerical and geometrical methods of application: the methods used to describe the elements of classical architecture in reference literature such as Vitruvius, Vignola and Palladio. A central theme is the philosophical nature of beauty as a form of the good, beautys relation to proportion and its significance in classical art. Such a view of beauty not only fully justifies the study of the classical elements today but could even provide a pathway out of the alienation, anxiety and intentional ugliness of modernism.