The Beauty Formula
Perspectives from The Artist's Road
In a still very relevant article from The New York Times titled, “Why We Love Beautiful Things”, the late architect and author, Lance Hosey, wrote about research findings and his opinions on the subject. Lance Hosey, former chief sustainability officer at the architecture firm RTKL, was the author of the book “The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design.”
The focus of his article is on all the effort and money that is being applied to attempt to quantify and systematize the sort of designs and images which appeal to most people. Studies have found that workers tend to be more productive when they can see the outdoors from their work spaces and that images of landscapes can help to speed patient recovery in hospitals. Hosey writes that findings also show that the visual patterns of fractals in nature at a particular mathematical density can reduce test subjects’ stress levels by as much as 60 percent, simply by being in view. The …