Relationship between the Basics of Visual Arts and Beauty in Architecture (Case Study: Boroujerdi House)

The discussion of architectural beauty has always been a concern of artists, architects and even philosophers, so there are different views on this subject, which sometimes do not have much in common with each other. In the early 20th century, in order to overcome these disputes, many artists tried to find principles for beauty in the visual arts such as painting, sculpture, architecture and other visual arts that were sometimes newly created. The culmination of the study of professional visual communication in the first half of 20th century was by artists such as Vasili Kandinsky, Paul Kelly, Mowholney, George Caps, Joseph Albers and their followers. Some of them were Bauhaus artists and theorists. By studying the characteristics of the visual elements, these people categorized and analyzed this aspect of visual arts. Almost simultaneously with the studies on the basics of visual art, some European psychologists found a way to discover the visual perceptions of mankind called Gestalt. The goal of all these efforts was to define a benchmark for recognizing the beauty that was needed due to the creation of new artistic disciplines, some of which were baseless and absent from beauty. Today we know result of these efforts, as the basics of visual arts. In this article we have considered Charles Johnson's nine principles for visual beauty, which include: 1- the fit, 2- the contrast, 3- the balance, 4- the harmony (composition),5- the variety, 6- the rhythm, 7- the variation in rhythm, 8- the movement and 9- the dominance of the focus point. From the view point of aesthetically, for the vast majority of people, the traditional architecture is in a position of superiority to the modern examples. This research by analysing the Boroujerdi house (which presented by UNESCO as a superior example) based on principles of knowledge of the basics of visual arts, tries to address the reasons for the visual superiority of traditional Iranian architecture. We work in descriptive-analytic method and used mathematical software PhiMatrix, for detect golden ratio in facades. The general process of work is that after proving the possibility of analyzing two dimensional images instead of three dimensional spaces and presenting the principles of visual enhancement. A number of images related to the main views have been analyzed to prove these principles. Based on analyzes obtained from the case study, these nine principles are extremely well observed in this house. It seems that the full observance of these visual rules, which all human beings unconsciously recognize, are the criterion of aesthetic perception; is the reason for choosing this home by tourists as a superior example. We see that such interdisciplinary research in the future could lead to a proper definition of beauty in architecture.