An essayist explores why certain buildings please us, arguing that beautiful architecture embodies psychological needs and ideas about how we want to live.
We call something beautiful when it holds, in concentrated form, the qualities that we personally or our society are short of. A calm room moves a frantic person; a simple form moves someone drowning in clutter. What we want is not to own the beautiful thing but to become inwardly like it.
We easily forget who we want to be, so we arrange objects and rooms that keep reminding us. A building or a picture on the stairs acts like a mould that holds us to a helpful vision of ourselves. Any place that does this, even an airport or a roadside diner, deserves to be called home.
Calling a building beautiful is more than a matter of taste. It approves of the way of life the building promotes, a 'promise of happiness.' Buildings constantly speak of values such as openness or arrogance, welcome or threat, nature or artifice.
Beautiful things gain their value in dialogue with pain, so we respond most when life is going badly. Being moved is a bittersweet contrast: joy at the perfection in front of us, and grief at knowing how rare such happiness is.
Plain regularity bores us. We admire order when many varied elements have visibly been brought together into one scheme, so the simplicity feels hard won. Beauty comes from a skilled balance between opposites, which mirrors what mental health is in a person.