Chasing Swans

Abstract: The last few years have seen an increasingly infected public debate about the appearance of contemporary buildings. Regardless of where one personally stands, this ought to be cause for architects to examine their own understanding of aesthetics. This project is an exercise in articulating and examining questions of architectural form. The project is divided into three parts; Theory, Observation, and Design. The first aims to establish a broad overview of the theoretical discourse surrounding the subject of aesthetics in architecture, as well as formulate a position within it. The second part is an observation of aesthetic experiences in practice, in which three existing works of architecture are broken down into component formal properties, and the experiences these evoke are put into words. The final part is an exercise in articulating the reasoning behind aesthetic design decisions. A small self-imposed design task serves as the catalyst for a sequence of explicitly formulated and documented design choices, leading from inception to finished design.