An Immodest Proposal

By |2020-08-23T08:49:35-05:00August 17th, 2019|Categories: Architecture, Civilization, Culture, History|

By a providence that nervous chroniclers call “luck,” the fire in Paris did not ruin the cathedral of Notre Dame. Most of its major parts remain, however fragile. Since so many have offered unsolicited opinions about the future of the cathedral, I would like to make an immodest proposal. A fad for picturesque ruins grew [...]

Beauty Ever Ancient, Ever New: Restoring Beauty to a Parish Church

By |2019-08-10T22:35:32-05:00August 10th, 2019|Categories: Architecture, Art, Beauty, Christianity, Culture, Michael De Sapio, Senior Contributors|

A thought occurs to me as I contemplate the architectural updating of our parish church, which will paradoxically make our church appear older and timeless: Although God doesn’t need beautiful things, he is infinitely deserving of them, and we need to make them—for the good of our souls. My parish church is undergoing an aesthetic [...]

Brutalist Architecture: The Disappearance of Beauty

By |2022-08-18T14:37:18-05:00July 24th, 2019|Categories: Architecture, Beauty, Civilization, Culture|

Even if we dismiss brutalism as a fad perpetrated by blinkered technocrats and egotistical architects, ugly buildings seem to impose an unconscious psychic tax on the great mass of people. So why have we lost the ability to construct beautiful buildings? Few are immune to the architectural charms of Eastern Europe. Prague’s winding streets and [...]

A Candid Conversation With Architect Allan Greenberg

By |2023-05-08T11:40:12-05:00September 28th, 2018|Categories: Architecture, Liberal Arts, Music|

I have always felt a kinship with architecture because in architecture you have form, which grows in your brain, and then the function—250-square-foot kitchen, three bedrooms of 80-square-footage or whatever—and it is very clinical. Relationships between these elements are pretty straightforward, and you can write them all down, but how do you make a great [...]

Greetings From Asbury Park: The Revival of a City on the Shore

By |2018-09-13T10:10:28-05:00September 13th, 2018|Categories: Architecture, Bruce Springsteen, Culture|

Asbury Park postcard, sometime between 1930-1945. When I was a teenager, in the late 1990s, Asbury Park, New Jersey had fallen on hard times. The kinetic energy of the small shore city—Ferris wheels and carousels, breezy counters with young people selling waffle cones and hamburgers to beachgoers in the salty air—was largely gone. [...]

Anthropological Architecture

By |2019-05-25T14:34:38-05:00August 21st, 2018|Categories: Architecture, Beauty, Culture|

We don’t often stop and consider the elements, material and otherwise, that makeup architecture and urban spaces. Often, we think of them as simply the background against which we live, the setting for the drama of our human existence... “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” —Winston Churchill People love good streets. Americans who [...]

Saving Architectural Treasures of the Old South

By |2019-03-05T14:31:27-06:00July 27th, 2018|Categories: Architecture, Civilization, History, South|

The South’s combination of architectural preservation with genealogy and with the documentation of human toil has often resulted in a much richer testament of the past and a more balanced view of the region’s history… In the film version of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, after Atlanta has been burned and Scarlett O’Hara is fleeing [...]

A Long & Living Tradition: Architecture, Ancient and Modern

By |2021-02-11T16:00:29-06:00June 22nd, 2018|Categories: Architecture, Civilization, Culture, Europe, Rome|

Leon Battista Alberti’s work remains a guidebook for those who value the traditions of both classical and post-Renaissance European architecture. To read Alberti today is to discover an essential link in that long and living tradition. Like a signal from the past, Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria—On the Art of Building, completed in 1452—transmitted [...]

Site & Sound, Size & Scale: How to Build Humane Concert Halls

By |2023-05-04T23:01:51-05:00June 21st, 2018|Categories: Architecture, Books, Culture, Music|

We spend so much time in these giant buildings—shopping malls, monstrous office complexes, big box stores. Classical music should bring people together in a more social, intimate way. We’re hoping to design the whole concert experience from the beginning to be smaller. It’s about shrinking the scale, bringing classical music into the human scale. There [...]

The Architecture of Servitude and Boredom

By |2020-04-20T10:47:19-05:00April 1st, 2018|Categories: Architecture, Beauty, Civil Society, Community, RAK, Russell Kirk|Tags: |

Do we descend steadily, and now somewhat speedily, toward a colossal architecture of unparalleled dreariness, and a colossal state of unparalleled uniformity? Will all of us labor under a profound depression of spirits because of the boring and servile architecture about us? And will the society now taking form in America resign itself to a [...]

Liturgy and the Harmony of the Arts

By |2019-11-26T12:33:13-06:00October 7th, 2017|Categories: Architecture, Art, Beauty, Catholicism, Christianity, Culture, Dwight Longenecker|

The liturgy properly offered in a suitable building offers a harmonization of the arts and culture as no other human experience can do... On Advent Sunday last year, we dedicated the new church in our small parish in South Carolina. The impact of worshipping in a beautiful temple rather than a fan-shaped suburban auditorium is [...]

On the Meaning of the Classical Movement in Architecture

By |2022-03-31T18:07:31-05:00May 22nd, 2017|Categories: Architecture, Art, Christendom, History, Tradition|Tags: |

The beautiful sadness of the classical movement in architecture can be a message, urging all people of the third millennium to retrieve what was lost at the end of the second: the human need for transcendent meaning beyond history… What is the meaning of what we now generally refer to as the “New Classicism” or [...]

Roger Scruton on Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism

By |2017-05-19T09:20:45-05:00May 18th, 2017|Categories: Architecture, Art, Beauty, Books, Christopher Morrissey, Culture, Modernity, Roger Scruton|

Without defending the citadel of the mind, how can we build a beautiful city? Without the conviction of true propositions, whence do we think beauty will come?… In Conversations with Roger Scruton (2016), Mark Dooley engages in a fascinating book-length interview with the famous English philosopher. While best known academically for unfashionable arguments on behalf [...]

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