The leaked draft executive order “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” is not perfect, and it could easily be amended for the better. Still, a careful reading should not bring to mind visions of gulags. It has also given traditional and classical architects an unforeseen and unasked opportunity to promote their cause in a public forum.
Whole blocks in densely populated cities like New York are designed primarily for the movement and storage of vehicles. These massive amounts of land would be better used as community parks.
The cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris is not simply an illustration in an architectural history textbook whose value is limited to documenting a style that was popular between 1190 and 1425. Rather, it is evidence of a way of conceiving and making buildings embedded in a culture and a religious faith that retains a hold on our imaginations and affections.
The New Urbanist movement attempts to address the problem of urban sprawl by promoting mixed-use, mixed population, walkable urban and town centers that draw people together. But how are these ideas related to Christian life?
Conservatives who reject modern architecture have reasons to do so. Traditional architecture is predicated on the ideal of beauty as an objective reality, while modernism exalts subjective preferences.
The enduring values in which conservatives believe—beauty among them—are more multifaceted and surprising than we sometimes give them credit for. Beauty does not always follow rules, and it is often found in unexpected places and patterns.
The proposed design for the Eisenhower Memorial should be rejected for one that accords with our capital’s classical tradition of architecture and with the nature of monuments themselves—to make a simple, clear statement easily accessible to the public. Adapted from testimony given before the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands of the House Committee on Natural Resources.
The plan of our nation’s capital and the architecture of its core buildings and monuments must carry on the classical vision the Founders intended as the physical manifestation of America’s form of government and political ideals.
What makes September 11th worthy of public memorializing is that it was not only an event in the lives of these individuals and their families; it was an event in the life of the American nation, an attack aimed at the American nation.
Arguments for traditional urbanism are de facto truth claims about nature and human nature, and point to and are supported by the natural law. Why we can and should think normatively about our building patterns. Part two of two.
Arguments for traditional urbanism are de facto truth claims about nature and human nature, and point to and are supported by the natural law. Why we can and should think normatively about our building patterns. Part one of two.
Zoning codes used to favor settlement patterns scaled for human beings. No longer.
Virtue can only be lived out in communities. But which communities are best suited to promoting virtue?
An exhibition by contemporary artist Enrique Martínez Celaya at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (on view through November 23rd) is a unique chance to contrast the uncertainty of our own age with the New Medievalism of the great American architect, Ralph Adams Cram.
The public spaces where we live and work and relax have a real, if subtle, impact on how each of us experiences and reflects on our world.