Beautiful > Architecture > Intro

Burke believed that curving lines were more naturally beautiful than straight lines, but when architects adapted his ideas, they modified this definition, because as Uvedale Price noted in his 1786 Essays on the Picturesque, “straight lines belong to [architecture’s] very essence.” The qualities of smallness, smoothness, and delicacy, which Burke identified with the beautiful, were adapted by architects who wished to achieve beauty in their designs.