I didn't find the pictures of "bad" houses to be particularly less attractive or off-putting compared to the "good" houses, both before and after reading the justification for why one was supposedly bad. As a result, the evidence presented left me with the impression that the rules being given were just arbitrary declarations made to justify the author's taste. I suspect Houshalter's reaction was similar.
Maybe you [and everyone who thinks like you] lacks taste...
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You like one better than the other, I like the other better than the one. There is no right or wrong. God is not going to send lightening down on you for the wrong home design. (no matter which god you pick)
An engineering I can look at a design and construction method and objectively state that one is better than the other - but there is no reason the "ugly house" cannot come out better.
Looking at a math equation or a bit of software code and being able to identify it as elegant and beautiful is having and expressing taste. Given that you can look at two implementations that are functionally equivalent. But see that one is (more) elegant than the other. It's nothing objective. It's a sense of aesthetic, aka taste.
There are certain shapes, proportions, arrangements, etc. that most (not all) humans find pleasing. The majority have declared this to be "taste". It's not fair. But it exists and you can't wipe it away by reciting a trite aphorism.
>The survey of mathematicians conducted by Wells (1990) provides a more empirically-based challenge to the intrinsic view of the mathematical aesthetic. Wells obtained responses from over 80 mathematicians, who were asked to identify the most beautiful theorem from a given set of 24 theorems. (These theorems were chosen because they were ‘famous’, in the sense that Wells judged them to be well-known by most mathematicians, and of interest to the discipline in general, rather than to a particular subfield.) Wells finds that the mathematicians varied widely in their judgments. More interestingly, in explaining their choices, the mathematicians revealed a wide range of personal responses affecting their aesthetic responses to the theorems. Wells effectively puts to rest the belief that mathematicians have some kind of secret agreement on what counts as beautiful in mathematics…
