Like all genuine eccentrics, John Cyril Hawes was a blend of genius and madness. His fantastical, eclectic architecture captures the contradictions of the man: traditional, but modern; romantic but gritty and down-to-earth; artistic but tough; cantankerous but compassionate to the poor. He was a solitary hermit who became famous. Author Peter Anson—himself a convert to [...]
The modern, brutalist church architects were really driven not by a desire for authenticity, but by a modernist, iconoclastic ideology. The old world with its fancy churches, lacy vestments, precious art, and Mozartian masses was out. This was a modern world of factories, public housing—a world of steel and concrete, concrete and steel. Notre-Dame [...]
Faith must have its physical and visual expression. The return of the altar rail is a refreshing and sublime response to a distorted vision of the Church. It reintroduces the traditional teachings of the Church with awe and wonder, delighting the worshiper and resurrecting fervor for Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. In churches across [...]
Classical music comes to us from a very long and very human tradition. The concert hall thus should be the embodiment of classical music’s character: It should above all feel human, feel familiar, feel knowable, and feel intimate as often as it feels exalted. Hot on the heels of what was surely disappointing news for Maris [...]
Constantino Brumidi’s fresco is less a deification of George Washington than it is a creative recording of his achievements and his legacy for our nation’s politicians. That the U.S. possesses its own rich history in art and boasts a series of internationally acclaimed painters is no surprise. Indeed, a walk through the Art Institute of [...]
Architecture, just like sacred music or art, must fulfill its highest calling, aiding the participant in seeing the glory of God. An architecture that is ordered to fulfill only its human, or even liturgical use, fails its higher purpose. The theological work of twentieth-century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar has only recently begun to take [...]
By building a chapel, the owner is inviting God into the home. By making it the most beautiful room in the house, the person recognizes God's primary place in one's life. The chapel builders represent one of those paradoxes where people feel the emptiness of the postmodern world that promises everything and wishes to fill [...]
We are lesser people for the disappearance of our architectural heritage. If Edmund Burke was correct that “to make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely,” then historical preservation takes on the same importance as land conservation. Both are inheritances to be held against the bulldozers of economic development. Salem Depot [...]
Architecture, even in the case of airports, should uplift and inspire the soul to consider higher and wider panoramas. By their logic and beauty, buildings should speak to us of God, the source of all beauty. I lament that so many new buildings seem designed to limit horizons to the purely material, functional, and superficial. [...]
It would be wrong to compare the Mass too closely to a stage production, but in a traditional celebration of Mass there is what I call a “compendium of culture”: a combination of art, architecture, literature, logic, rhetoric, drama, poetry, metalwork, textile art, and woodwork. Why does this matter? It matters because matter matters. The [...]
When the modern city enshrines the temporariness of facelessness as a permanently utilitarian way of life, then something has gone dreadfully wrong. The Aesthetics of Architecture by Roger Scruton (320 pages, Princeton University Press, 2013) One of the principal observations of Sir Roger Scruton about the modern city is an architectural observation. Modern architecture expresses [...]
“Beauty will save the world.” That remains to be seen. But beauty has saved me, and continues to do so. My experience is that I need saving; it is not a luxury. Just when I am about to succumb to the sadness and living death of nihilism, some piercing ray of beauty breaks open my [...]
Architecture exists all around us all the time. The consequence of bad architecture, therefore, is to make us feel less at home, as if the buildings glare at us as we go about our business, making an urban space into a place where no one feels welcome. So, what are the guiding principles of ‘good’ [...]
There are some valuable lessons to be learned from the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment and the various neo-medievalist movements which were its fruits. The most important is that society is not progressing inexorably in one “progressive” rationalist direction. The eighteenth century was a time of religious skepticism which seemed to foreshadow the eclipse of [...]