Thinking about and investigating perception

Eleonora D’Agostino (SIMBDEA)

Lucrezia Eritrei (Università degli Studi di Bologna)


Taste and distaste, beauty and ugliness, good and evil are perceptions connected to innate instincts, but among humans they are no doubt shaped and re-signified, socially and culturally, impacting deeply on our lives and behaviors.

Aesthetic taste, therefore, reflects the hegemonic models produced and promoted inside a socio-cultural field, and even the concept of art must be read as a vehicle for specific social, political and cultural messages: an "artistic taste" is affirmed by dominant “elites” that impose aesthetic canons and a hegemonic art market; while, on the other hand, “countercultures” often embrace the concept of "bad taste" to assert their power, defining divergent identities through aesthetic and artistic practices.

The lesson will focus on how aesthetic canons affect the perception of concrete architecture too, because concrete is generally seen as unaesthetic in a world where ancient ruins are the prototype of beauty and ecological best practices. The myth of concrete as a “material of the future”, indeed, has ended soon, and it is now linked to ideas such as decay and ugliness.

In the case study analyzed, the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe", concrete architecture is revealed to be a “thick” material, still connected to “modernity” – both in its positive and negative features – in the collective imaginaries, creating a particular sense of “unfamiliarity” and feeding doubts about its value as a work of art.

To further investigate the topics proposed in this lesson, we recommend you look at the following resources: