Pretty pictures, ugly processes; since when does the sum of the image win?

We use aesthetics too often as an emergency brake in random phases, argues Pim van Meer in this Maze. But you can't start a project from a pretty picture. Because then the sums run behind the facts, while it should be the other way around.

I have to say right away: I am not against beauty. I worked as an architect for much of my career. I grew up loving good facades, streets that are right, careful corners. And I am in favor of welfare. This is precisely why the current system chafes so much.

But Welstand too often feels like a school teacher who says that your drawing is not beautiful, without putting the sumsheet next to it. As if aesthetics hangs loose in the air, above program, budget, sustainability, sound, daylight and fire safety. There are also multiple bodies within one municipality that are allowed to think something about the sculpture. Everyone has taste, no one is responsible for the arithmetic.

In this context, I often think of the gallery flat. The ultimate generic solution. Efficient, repetitive, technically extremely clever for its time, truly visionary! Then this was called beautiful! Unique in the world! A typology that a lot of people just built a good life in. Imagine if we had had testable ground rules for aesthetics back then. Not vague fitting in the environment, but hard criteria on anonymity, recognizability, orientation, transition between private and public. Then later we could have said honestly: the building complies with both the sum and the aesthetic rules. If we still find it too anonymous, then the problem lies with those rules - not with the architect who followed them.

Now we too often use aesthetics as an emergency brake at random stages. Sometimes we've already gone through the technical hoops, the schedules are tight, the contracts are written - and then somewhere a committee says that the not pretty after all is. Meanwhile, other requirements cheerfully checkmate each other: top sustainability, maximum daylight standards, minimum noise pollution, hard building lines, tight noise barriers, you name it. And then we are surprised that something neutral comes out of it.

The tender world makes it even stranger.

Twenty years ago in Delft I loved making pictures. But if you win a tender with a picture that you know doesn't really fit the program, then you are not a visionary. Then you are straightening out what is crooked. Explaining afterwards that the user doesn't understand it yet or that the vision is more important than the sum is not depth, it is drama.

As a developer, I now see the other side. For every tender won, there are several lost. Pre-investments in architecture, consulting and visualization that are never recouped disappear into the mist. Then, on the one winning project, you are told that your cannot make too much profit, while no one counts the risks and costs of all the failed attempts.

I recognize something of the same discussion around BIM. For years there was a fear that data-driven work would lead to Eastern Bloc architecture: everything straight, everything rational, everything boring. Meanwhile, the national standard MiniBIM has been the norm at VORM for years, and it is difficult to maintain that this has made our projects less ambitious or less special, rather the opposite. The people who thought that technology by definition leads to ugliness were simply wrong.

With aesthetics, why should we be afraid to make it measurable?

You can formulate criteria for anonymity, legibility, residential quality at street level, daylight at eye level, sightlines, transitions. No rigid regulations, but testable goals. Make sure residents can recognize their front door. Make sure plinths add something to the street. Ensure that a building contributes to safety and orientation. Objectively verifiable and later even digitally measurable. Stacked ambitions are not a problem. Conflicting ambitions are a problem.

So you get projects where afterwards someone says: this is not what i had in mind. But it does comply with the rules we agreed upon together. And then we can learn on a national scale and nuance the rules.

The essence is simple: first solve the sum, then do architecture. First program, target groups, sustainability, then construction, installations, finances. Then a volume that really fits. And then the question: how do we make this as good and beautiful as possible within these frameworks, according to aesthetic rules that do not clash with the rest.

Filing moment

As long as we start with a seductive picture and then try to bend the sum to the image, welfare is not a guardian of quality but part of the problem.

Whoever in 2026 still reverses the process - first the render, later the arithmetic - does not make beautiful cities possible, but ugly processes invisible.