Une certaine idée du beau, Talks #4

Une certaine idée du beau (“A certain idea of beauty”) was published by Éditions 205 in the “Talks” series dedicated to writings on architecture:

Beauty and architecture are closely related. One can suppose that long before its most notorious appearance two thousand years ago in the form of venustas in the Vitruvian triptych, beauty, or at least its research, occupied as much those who wished to do architecture or those who criticized it. However, the very use of the word beautiful poses a problem. If the term is omnipresent in our daily lives and in the non-knowledgeable criticism of architecture, it seems that this term is if not banished at least obsolete or vulgar for the discipline that animates us. Benoit Goetz invites us on the contrary to think that any thought of architecture which approaches the question of inhabited environments must have the concern of beauty, because it would be an “essential component” of it.

Bureau 205 used the typeface Muoto designed by Matthieu Cortat and available from 205TF. For both body text and the condensed headlines, the designers created custom widths from the variable font version available on the 205TF website.