"Buildings designed with careful attention to aesthetics arouse and enlighten their occupants and that promotes their good health"
About this Quote
Evans is making a quietly radical claim: beauty isn’t decoration, it’s infrastructure. By tying aesthetics to arousal and enlightenment, he rejects the idea that design is a luxury layer added after the “real” work is done. The intent is persuasive, almost strategic: if you can link good design to good health, you move architecture out of the realm of taste and into the realm of public necessity.
The subtext is a rebuke to modern building culture that treats people as units to be stored efficiently. “Careful attention” signals craft and deliberation, a push against value-engineering and the bland, fluorescent logic of cost-per-square-foot. “Arouse” is an interesting provocation from a director: he’s thinking in terms of stimulus, mood, attention. Good buildings, like good films, choreograph feeling. They don’t just shelter bodies; they cue curiosity, calm, alertness, belonging.
Context matters here. Evans lived through the postwar decades when cities filled with fast, functional structures: office towers, housing blocks, institutional buildings that often prioritized speed and scale over human experience. Against that backdrop, his line reads like a defense of sensual intelligence in civic life. He also smuggles in a moral argument: if the built environment can brighten the mind, then neglecting it isn’t neutral - it’s a low-grade harm.
What makes it work is its causal chain. Aesthetics -> emotion and cognition -> health. It’s not mystical; it’s pragmatic. Beauty becomes measurable not by applause, but by how well people live inside it.
The subtext is a rebuke to modern building culture that treats people as units to be stored efficiently. “Careful attention” signals craft and deliberation, a push against value-engineering and the bland, fluorescent logic of cost-per-square-foot. “Arouse” is an interesting provocation from a director: he’s thinking in terms of stimulus, mood, attention. Good buildings, like good films, choreograph feeling. They don’t just shelter bodies; they cue curiosity, calm, alertness, belonging.
Context matters here. Evans lived through the postwar decades when cities filled with fast, functional structures: office towers, housing blocks, institutional buildings that often prioritized speed and scale over human experience. Against that backdrop, his line reads like a defense of sensual intelligence in civic life. He also smuggles in a moral argument: if the built environment can brighten the mind, then neglecting it isn’t neutral - it’s a low-grade harm.
What makes it work is its causal chain. Aesthetics -> emotion and cognition -> health. It’s not mystical; it’s pragmatic. Beauty becomes measurable not by applause, but by how well people live inside it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Health |
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