Dear Jean-François Nadeau,
How can we talk about beauty when everything is going wrong? You are entitled to your opinion on the style, for which I take responsibility, but, in your column entitled “The color of butter”, you are doing work Living in beauty the caricature of a “book of beautiful houses”, which it is not.
Yes, the two private houses presented in the book (35 pages out of 264) constitute projects for privileged people, who have the means to ask questions. But these houses are also laboratories. Triple-glazed windows from Poland are not decorative choices, but ecological; We need to learn how to make equally effective ones here. And if people who can afford to use geothermal energy all do so, prices will fall.
Above all, there is so much more to this book. Schools designed for a renewed pedagogy, places that expose children from all backgrounds to art, eco-districts, a call to think about urban planning for all, with public transport, the presence of nature and housing social at the heart of real estate development; not a word from you about all that.
It’s disappointing, and it contributes to polarization, as if to be truly left-wing, we didn’t have the right to invoke the role of beauty.
Beauty is a trapped subject. Kevin Lambert has eloquently shown that in architecture, we can both think about the common good and do everything to justify our privilege of not being part of the “commons”. But May our joy remain nor do we spare those who have terse judgment, who are content to reject ideas without bringing new ones.
There are always blind spots, and our book probably has some, but it is not blind. Yes, the system is broken; it is in our interest to channel all the energies of good will to move forward. And beauty does no harm.