Aesthetic Theory: Essential Texts for Architecture and Design

A collection of pivotal ideas about beauty from throughout history, with an introduction and critical headnotes.

This collection of writings on beauty includes selections from twenty key philosophers and theoreticians spanning two millennia:

Plato • Aristotle • Vitruvius • Alberti • Kant • Burke • Fiedler • Nietzsche • Wilde • Bergson • Bell • Scott • Benjamin • Bataille • Sontag • Jameson • Scarry • Nehamas • Zangwill • Freedberg and Gallese

With an introduction and critical headnotes explaining the importance of each text, Mark Foster Gage offers a framework for a provocative history of ideas about beauty as they relate to contemporary thinking on architecture and design. In a world increasingly defined by sumptuous visuality, the concepts of beauty and visual sensation are not mere intellectual exercises but standards that define the very nature of design practice across disciplines and that are essential to the emerging worlds of design and architecture in the twenty-first century.

Mark Foster Gage is acting assistant dean and associate professor at the Yale University School of Architecture. His writings on aesthetic theory and design innovation have been published in academic and popular publications internationally. The founder of Gage/Clemenceau Architects, his work has been exhibited worldwide at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Deutsches Architektur Zentrum in Berlin.