During the Sixties it was quite difficult for architects to talk about beauty, as the term was considered taboo. Articulated ambitions of giving form were were in some extreme cases even stigmatized as fascist, especially in post war Germany. When ideas of gestalt theory were introduced to the discourse, this opened up new ways to think about design. At the same time, architects found beauty in so-called complex systems, inspired by systems theory. Those complex geomentries that had been regarded as disorder before the invention of chaos theory. The relevance of gestalt theory and system theory as an inspiration for the discussion on beauty has not been very well studied so far. In the paper it is shown that esthetic issues were much more important in the debate on architecture and urban design than we normally think, even if they were sometimes smuggled in through the back door, so to speak.