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More Than Skin Deep

A Polemic on the Importance of Beauty

By Nikos Kitsakis, December 2025

I had a rather depressing encounter the other day. I was sitting with a group of businesspeople (as if that by itself wasn’t already depressing enough), and everybody was introducing them­selves and their jobs. I talked about my writing and about how I see myself as an advocate for more beauty in the world. We were sitting in an older part of Zurich and, to make my point, I pointed to two buildings in the vicinity: Both were Neoclassical buildings, but one had decorated window pedi­ments (little sculpted roofs above each window), and another, right next to it, had those pediments and other deco­ration removed – some­thing which probably happened around the 1960s when such crimes against old buildings were still being committed.

I told these people that, of course, today you don’t necessarily have to apply ornamentation – doing so could easily devolve into kitsch – but still, you shouldn’t just build things in a com­plete­ly pragmatic manner either. Namely without any consideration for aesthetics and beauty, a sense of organic quality, or the human condition. After having ex­plain­ed all that, I got blank stares. One of the people in the group asked me what exactly my point was. I was taken aback by this, but in the dis­cus­sion that followed, it became clear that this person, and many of the others, really didn’t understand why any sort of beauty would serve any kind of purpose in the world, or how it po­ten­tial­ly could.

When I came home that evening, I remembered what I had once read in a 1930 essay¹ by Bertrand Russel and looked it up:

The knowledge of good literature, which was universal among educated people fifty or a hundred years ago, is now confined to a few professors. All the quieter pleasures have been abandoned. Some American students took me walking in the spring through a wood on the borders of their campus; it was filled with exquisite wild flowers, but not one of my guides knew the name of even one of them. What use would such knowledge be? It could not add to anybody’s income.

In the minds of the people I have described, ap­ply­ing ornamentation to a building (or planning it in such a way that the result will be con­sid­ered beautiful) doesn’t add to anybody’s income either. And that is the essence of the problem we have today: If there isn’t a direct line from the work you do to money, it’s considered worthless.

This is hardly a new problem and monetary considerations are im­por­tant, of course, but the extent to which we have lost touch with what really matters in the last few decades concerns me. There is such a thing as balance after all, and when money becomes your sole con­cern, it will inevitably lead to a world that no one wants to live in.

Ugly Things

The problem can be seen across disciplines. Architecture takes a special place, because the resulting work will last a couple of decades at least and is always public. Forget what people say about public architecture. There are buildings that were paid for by the public and buildings that are open to the public but everything that gets built can also be seen by everyone. It is in that sense that everything is public architecture, and I strongly believe that this brings with it a rather large amount of responsibility: One should never put ugliness out into the world.

One cannot talk about ugliness in the context of architecture without mentioning Le Cor­bu­sier. This pretentious prick and political op­por­tunist, this condescending authoritarian, somehow managed to make a name for himself and is considered – by far too many people in my opinion – to be a good architect. Take a look at one of the buildings which is representative of his style, the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille from the early 1950s:

If you ever wanted to kill yourself by jumping off a building, the habitation units by Le Corbusier provide not only the necessary height but also a reason to do so. In those aspects, at least, they excel. The image is from Wikipedia.

Le Corbusier ruined many plots of perfectly good land with these monstrosities. At least the habitation units (which is what Unité d'Habitation means) are honest in their names: After all, habitation units are for carbon units² – not human beings.

If you think I’m overly polemic with my choice of words about Le Cor­bu­sier, believe me when I say that I’m holding back tremendously. Read a bit about his role in the Second World War or how he treated other people for ex­am­ple. And if you think I shouldn’t say anything be­cause I’m no architect and those people would, of course, know better, then let me tell you another thing: I have eyes with which I can see. Just like the kid who saw that the emperor was, in fact, naked.

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