Beauty: the Flower of Humanization

I am to Bruno Leon as Bruno is to Eduardo Catalano.

Catalonia is a beautiful place, hugging the northeast curve of the Mediterranean from Barcelona and the Costa Brava through France’s Cote d’Azur and into Italy’s Cinque Terra.  The land, like the lithe young Catalan people, runs to the sea, from the foothills of the Pyrenees past villages clinging to the seaside slopes, across white sand, into the waves, the waves, the waves.  The architecture in the cities that dot the stretch of land spans centuries, including the gems of Antonio Gaudi, who imagined buildings’ structures and thus their forms not like pure straight lines from rulers, but like trees, like the nearby peaks of Montserrat, softened by rain, rain, rain.  But the architecture of the towns and hillsides between the cities is nested in the gardens, in the vines and flowers of the south-facing shores.  Like a ring on the finger of a beautiful woman, the sparkle of the architecture draws us to the beauty of the face of the land, to the flowers.  The habitations are built not to steal the eye, but to invite it to look around.

Back on campus in Detroit, I heard my favorite music – the sound of a circular saw – and saw some dust coming from the Architecture building. During the summer, the campus really slows down.  Most faculty members are off for the summer, most students gone to summer jobs.   Bruno Leon, the Dean of the school, was there with his son Mark installing exhibit boards along the length of the central hallway of the building, bridging the spaces between the doors of each studio.  The floor-to-ceiling boards would allow the students to post their work for all of us to see, and facilitate their “crits”, their practice of presenting their work to classmates and visiting architects for critique.  By the time the students returned in September, the boards were ready for their work.  

Above the door of each studio was the name of a great designer.  But above the entrance portal into the building was this inscription: “Beauty is the Flower of Humanization”.  This was Bruno’s Manifesto, his invitation and caveat to all who entered.  Architecture is about designing places of beauty, but beauty is not the sparkling ring, but the face.  Good architecture guides the spirit of its inhabitants and pedestrians to their own humanity, to the beauty that is innate, urges it to erupt, to grow, to blossom.

A few weeks months ago when Bruno told me that his mentor was dying, the name Eduardo Catalano did not hold significance for me.  Then he mentioned the flower..the flower that Catalano built, Floralis Generica, the flower that is made of shining metal, the flower whose 40 foot long petals open with the Buenos Aires sun and close with its setting.  Born in 1917, he was 85 years old when he designed, built, and donated The Flower to the city of his birth. 

But it is Bruno who I think of like that flower, that flower that opens in the light, that reflects its surroundings.  Bruno was a student of Catalano when both were young, at North Carolina State University.  Catalano would go on to MIT, Bruno would come to University of Detroit and start his School of Architecture, where he would do for his students as Catalano did for him – to open to the light, to the source of beauty, to grow large with it, to stretch...not to dazzle but to reflect the beauty, the beauty, the beauty that is humanity. 

Who has been mentor to you?  Who has opened you to receiving and reflecting beauty?  Who do you mentor?  Learn more about Eduardo Catalano by clicking (here). 

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.