In 2002, CABE [Commission for Architecture & the Built Environment] published their report The Value of Good Design: How Buildings and Spaces Create Economic and Social Value. Beginning with the Vitruvian triad as a sound basis for judging architecture ‘now as when they were conceived’, they offered a further disambiguation of good design: order; clarity of organization; expression and representation; appropriateness of architectural ambition; integrity and honesty; architectural language; conformity and contrast; orientation, prospect and aspect; detailing and materials; structure, environmental services and energy use; flexibility and adaptability; sustainability; rounding it all off with ‘a final point’ that a building is beautiful when ‘the resulting lifting of the spirits will be as valuable [a] contribution to public wellbeing as dealing successfully with the functional requirements of the building’s programme’.
The word ‘beauty’ appeared to be making a comeback, but only as an emergent property of the sound delivery of other things.
architect, verb, Reinier de Graaf, (Verso)
Much of the pure aesthetic pleasure of Leigh’s work comes from these unpredictable elements: the swirling colors of her glazes, the way they bubble and crack. But the emotional and intellectual force of the punctum lies elsewhere—in the small but noticeable drip of mossy green glaze hanging off the chin of an untitled bust in the first gallery at LACMA, or in the impress of a fingernail near the base of an ocher bust (also untitled) at CAAM. Details like these suggest something outside a flat binary of visible/invisible or seen/unseen. They suggest, to my mind, a redistribution of subjectivity—character, agency, will, private consciousness—away from the face and toward obscure or secreted regions of the body, where their meaning becomes less obvious but also more potent, no longer constrained or patrolled by a racist logic of surveillance.
Refusing the Eye, Anahid Nersessian on Simone Leigh, (NYRB)
