But what if you're not into smooth-textured concrete? Is there really an objective measure of architectural designs' worth (no pun intended to the real estate valuers)?
Throughout history architects have tried to create objective systems for design of buildings. Vitruvius and Renaissance architects with their application of golden section, and more recently Le Corbusier via his Modulor. All were guided by rational principles, systems for standardising disparate architectural elements and "problems" of proportion. Systems that would unify design and create harmonious cityscapes.
While the older examples were restricted with what they could do with design (gravity), churning out unifrmed cityscapes indeed, Le Corbusier had more his disposal: free-flowing forms of reinforced concrete in copious quantities, as well as other technological wonders of modern age. Yet Corb too got carried away with finding perfect proportions, in endless calculations and ambiguous assumptions, perhaps realising the futility of this exercise in the process.
It's no wonder that many a student from places as far flung as Kuala Lumpur's University of Technologi to Melbourne's RMIT still struggle with these ideas. Naturally, their design proposals reduce the guy known as Modulor to an imprint on an external precast wall. What else could you do with a stylized image of a person who's hardly a perfect specimen anyway (French male and 175 cm tall with extraordinarily large spatular hands)?
The systems such as the Modulor or the Golden section really reduce architecture to a mere two-dimensional shape. They bring to architecture compositional order from domain of fine arts such as painting. Yet we know that architecture is not just a building's face viewed on paper in its abstract topographic layouts (plans, elevations etc). It is experienced in space with all our five senses, with time and reflection. It is part of a bigger context and lives whose identities it helps to shape.
In other words design of buildings is more akin to fashion than it is to fine arts. And hence it also more prone to mass consumption and marketing strategies, to bad taste and general public disinterest to it. After all majority of people really don't give a damn about fashion either. Yet just like we need to be clothed (and feel good wearing those clothes), we also need (good) architecture.
This is where the plot really starts to thicken: The judgement of architectural aesthetic is really based less on rational criteria, but rather on more intangible, intuitive perception. You don't get up in the morning and when putting your clothes on, apply the golden section or the Modulor to guide the composition of the fabrics covering your body, or even to judge others' looks.
While one must recognise the objective criteria, and these usually to deal with project's response to need and functionality, subjective aesthetic tastes are key in perceiving architectural design. Hence we are often at a loss of why certain projects win architectural competition and others, seemingly more innovative and polished, end up as wall decorations in losing architects' offices. Hopefully there will be more democratic architectural competitions in the future where citizens themselves could participate in choosing winners of public buildings.
Architects don't have a monopoly on knowing what constitutes good design, but (in a perfect world) are trained in marrying this gap between (their clients') subjective taste and objective rationale and design needs.
As I always say, architecture is a mirror of society, so in a truly democratic society it should naturally reflect people's own tastes.
Or to use a gross generalisation, when these two clash, we have bad architecture.
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