Beauty Memory Unity

Beauty Memory Unity is dedicated to an exploration of one poor architect’s search for meaning and beauty.  In the visual arts, particularly architecture, beauty has been dismissed in modern times.  If we are to regain any sense of harmony or connection, and to defeat ugliness and despair, a concerted search must be made for the experience of beauty.  The search has taken your present author to various parts of the world, even into the presence of various spirit beings.

In the late 1970’s I began a search for consistency in design – for some clear method for evaluating my own design products – After several years of reading modern authors without results, they were opaque romantic and subjective, I turned to the ancient architect Vitruvius; whose book I had been required to buy in college but not required to read.  Now I read it. 

In book III Vitruvius gives a numerical ‘canon’ or method of proportioning to create the classical portico.  The method was clear and rational When I followed his directions as exactly as I could I had drawn a correct portico in a few minutes.  When a person who was not a designer saw the drawing, they said ‘That’s beautiful’.  That was the day I became a classical architect. 

Vitruvius can only lead one so far, perhaps 90% of the way but some of the details have been lost.  Further searching led me to study the Orders of classical architecture with architect Alvin Holm who was teaching the only course in the orders in the country, at least as far as I could find, under the auspices of Henry Hope Reed’s organization Classical America.  He made it clear that there is more to the classical than meets the eye. 

Vitruvius repeatedly cites Pythagoras and Plato as the sources of his canon but to find a teacher in the ancient spirit in the present moment was not going to be an easy task.  In the present environment Pato has been reduced to a hairsplitting game of twisted word meanings.  Eventually I began to study with architect, artist, author and teacher Keith Critchlow at the Royal College of Art in London.  While studying with Critchlow I was introduced by architect Richard Sammons to Don Rattner and Richard Cameron who had recently founded the Institute for Classical Architecture & Art in New York.  Richard Sammons was teaching a course in proportion for the ICAA and asked me to take over the course from him.  Having no idea what to teach – Richard only having given me a cryptic list of lecture titles – I began to create a course. 

That was the beginning of over twenty years of presenting proportional material at ICAA and a number of other venues.  That course became the source for the book ‘Beauty Memory Unity’.  Much additional material had to be edited out of the syllabus and the book for the sake of concision.  Some of this will be the content of this site.  Another part of the site will be from the architectural work of your present author, Steve Bass.