Mark Foster Gage, from the Yale University School of Architecture and Gage Clemenceau, has put together a wonderful collection of text that together shed light on the various ideas about beauty through history. Gage’s added commentary helps relate each of the text to contemporary thinking on architecture and design. The text range from Plato, Aristotle, Vitruvius to Nehamas and Zangwill. (I, personally, found the last piece by David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese very intriguing. It bridges many of the theoretical positions with advancements in cognitive science.) If you are interested in the theoretical side of architecture but don’t where to start or you prefer the practical side over the theoretical this book is a good one to have under your belt. It gives you the basics from which you can expand upon, if you are so inclined.

You can see an ArchDaily interview with Gage here, and some of his work here.

007 Preface
013 Acknowledgments
015 Introductions
029 Plato
045 Aristotle
065 Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
073 Leon Battista Alberti
081 Immanuel Kant
093 Edmund Burke
115 Conrad Fiedler
137 Friedrich Nietzsche
149 Oscar Wilde
153 Henri Bergson
161 Clive Bell
179 Geoffrey Scott
197 Walter Benjamin
211 Georges Bataille
225 Susan Sontag
249 Frederic Jameson
265 Elaine Scarry
279 Alexander Nehamas
291 Nick Zangwill
301 David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese
325 Index