Reader TTS

For this beauty issue, we rounded up stories that come at the subject from a number of different angles. There’s a portfolio of individualistic fashion models whose faces we find

idiosyncratic and alluring. And then there are the stories that challenge the superficialities of such a complex term. Physical beauty is only a small part of what makes the otherworldly

dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones so compelling. He’s harnessed that, along with his deep well of anger and sadness, to make his confrontational and often discomfiting work for over 40

years. Wyatt Mason writes an appreciation of Jones, and what it means to be a late-career artist whose undimmed artistic impulse is now joined with the mind and body of an aging man. Often

we think of natural beauty as God given, but gardens, whose beauty has long been rendered in painting, poetry and prose, represent a tussle between the will of nature and that of man or

woman. For 18 years, the Italian writer Umberto Pasti has been involved in a passionate love affair with the rocky, inhospitable, but mythically beautiful countryside south of Tangier,

coaxing it into a sublime, subtle and botanically rich paradise. A garden like this one is not a vanity project — it’s sweet surrender. On the other side of the world, Michael Kimmelman

introduces us to the moving work of Alejandro Aravena, the Chilean architect who recently won the Pritzker prize, and is currently the curator of the Architecture Biennale in Venice.

Aravena’s buildings are not flashy manifestations of outsize ego and ambition, but rather address the basic desires of his clients, many of whom are low-income families and the displaced.

Social architecture can seem less elevating than swooping torques of glass and titanium, but who would deny the beauty inherent in an intellectually and aesthetically rigorous solution to an

urban or social issue? I keep thinking about a story that Kimmelman was told, about a woman who lives in one of Aravena’s housing developments. Her new home fits a bathtub; her bedroom, a

queen-size bed — “like in the movies,” the woman said to Aravena. “What she meant,” he elaborated, “was that now she can have a life of the imagination. Needs are not desires.”