Our Western culture is on fire and not in a good way. In the midst of a pandemic, economic chaos, and continuous social deconstruction, the burning of Notre Dame paints a startlingly fitting image of the West. The Memory of the Ideal Architecture is the structured form of the Ideal; it is the culmination of [...]
There are dark corners to be explored in a great church. Instead of vast seating space, bright with electric light, huge speakers hanging from the beams, and padded pews, give me the darkened chapel where ancient monks recited their daily prayers. Give me the dark corner of a crumbling cloister, the dark corner of a [...]
The highlight of a pilgrimage to Rome is to join Liz Lev for one of her increasingly famous tours of the Vatican Museums. Her high-energy presentation, vast knowledge, and enthusiasm are matched by her warm welcome, sense of humor, and genuine faith. […]
The Thoroughgood House (c. 1636) Southeast Virginia is a region rich in history, from the earliest colonial times to today’s modern military. Cape Henry welcomes visitors today, just as it did the Virginia Company colonists in 1607, just before they settled at Jamestown. First Landing State Park commemorates where the colonists first entered [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
A voice from a distant past, the Roman Vitruvius offers many of the same assets to urban planners and cultural historians that he does to architects. His book offers a glimpse into the urban world of a decisive moment in classical antiquity—and into the mind of a man who quite literally helped to shape it. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]