“Beauty,” as Umberto Eco tells it, “has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country.” So how is beauty defined today in our increasingly globalized world? Perhaps a more interesting question to ask is whether arriving at such a conclusion remains relevant to our society.
Ian Gillespie believes it does. The founder of Westbank, a Vancouver-based real-estate development and culture company, Gillespie has undertaken a great number of projects throughout his career, building along with them a peculiar idea of beauty that has permeated every new endeavor and shaped his company’s mission to produce more layered, complex and enriching outcomes. Projects such as BIG’s Vancouver House or Kengo Kuma’s Alberni by Kuma propose a new dynamic for the city of Vancouver—one in which the developer looks beyond mere return on investment, focusing instead on buildings’ potential to spark social engagement and change or, as Bjarke Ingels stated in the foreword he wrote for Westbank’s book Fight for Beauty “where buildings look beautiful purely because they perform beautifully.”
The book has taken on a new form as an exhibition in Vancouver bearing the same name and featuring a slew of Westbank-commissioned projects as well as objects from the firm’s collection. Architecture, art, and fashion come together in the space as evidence of beauty’s place and value in our contemporary society. “All too often beauty is mistaken, and therefore diminished, as a decorative frill, a final touch or a camouflage of what is really at work underneath,” writes Gillespie in the book’s introduction. “We have never seen beauty as anything less than essential.”
