MANUFACTURED BEAUTY

This year, the AIABaltimore and Baltimore Architecture Foundation Spring Lecture Series will take a critical look at Manufacturing Beauty.

Beauty has the power to arouse the senses and create a greater capacity for empathy. However, our modern understanding of beauty still tends to be limited and undervalued. We live in an era where everything is measured, material goods are prized and impersonal exchanges are the norm. And yet, beauty in the built environment can still move us and teach us something new about ourselves and the spaces we inhabit. At a time when efficiency, expense and the bottom line are often project drivers, has beauty for beauty’s sake become a lost model from a bygone era? What is the value of beauty?

This series highlights designers working to answer this question through science, details, place process, and innovation.

Lectures take place at MICA Brown Center/Falvey Hall at 6 p.m. with reception to follow.

Schedule

April 13 – The Beauty of PROCESS
Mark Smout of Smout Allen, London, UK

April 27 – The Beauty of INNOVATION
Lise Anne Couture of Asymptote, New York, NY