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“In Bruges” in Bruges

Tue, 04 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Rome is the foundation of the University of Notre Dame architecture and urban design curriculum, and properly so. Nevertheless, every year for the past ten years I have traveled from Notre Dame to meet a new class of graduate urban design students (themselves up from Rome on spring break) for a week in the small historic city of Bruges. Where is Bruges? It’s in Belgium.

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“Even Mother Nature Has An Agent”

Thu, 23 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Over the last fifteen years or so I have seen (and been moved by) many of the aspirational/inspirational billboards sponsored by The Foundation for a Better Life, an organization that promotes common-ground character virtues while trying at the same time to avoid being a partisan in our contemporary wars of culture and religion. But even peacemaking is unavoidably a partisan activity, especially these days around environmental issues. As an example I offer this photograph I took of a poster that arrested my attention several years ago as I passed through the airport in the wilderness gateway of Anchorage, Alaska. The poster features a photograph of ethologist Jane Goodall and one of the many chimpanzees in whose company she has spent much of her adult life (and who have inspired her passion for environmental care), accompanied by the caption “Even Mother Nature has an agent. Stewardship: Pass It On.” This caption I aver is true and striking, but hardly uncontroversial.

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Building on Truth

Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0500

Building is a willful act of symbolic import, sometimes intended and sometimes not, and all architecture expresses the power of its makers and their aspiration to legitimate authority. This is true of individual buildings, public spaces, and all human settlements. Temple, forum, cathedral, city hall, town square, primitive hut, urban townhouse, suburban ranch burger, LEED-platinum office building, interstate highway interchange, urban landscape installation, medieval town, hypermodern metropolis—all require and represent the ability to bring them into being and sustain them over time. Their very existence requires power in the most elemental sense of the word. More than this, we attach moral significance to buildings and landscapes. Legitimate authority is that moral “more than” mere power, more than the human capacity to will something and make it so. Legitimate authority is power wed to moral virtue in service to a shared ideal. In the realms of architecture and urbanism, aspiration to legitimate authority entails an ambition to unite beauty with goodness and truth. The act of building has metaphysical implications.

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The Rich You Will Always Have With You

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 00:01:00 -0500

Most cities built before 1945 were founded at the scale of what today we might call a town or even a village. Some rose around some sacred site or along some pre-existing sacred path; some for purposes of protection or territorial conquest; others primarily to facilitate the production, distribution, and exchange of material goods; and others simply for human pleasure in extraordinary natural conditions. Regardless of origins, over time and of necessity most cities will come to have each of these dimensions”sacred, political, commercial, recreational. Pre-modern cities typically did all these things simultaneously; but, for complicated historical reasons, modern human beings forgot how to do this after about 1950.

The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) is an organization that seeks to recover this lost knowledge. Its first poster-child in this recovery is Seaside, Florida. In its thirty years of existence, Seaside’s foremost successes have been environmental, formal, and economic. That is to say: Seaside is a good place by virtue of how it occupies its landscape, the beauty and quality of construction of its public spaces and buildings, and its mix of uses within pedestrian proximity of each other. All these together in turn have created Seaside’s spectacular economic value. These successes are clear.

Less clear is Seaside’s moral order and its relationship to sacred order. Seaside’s makers appear mindful of sacred order, acknowledged explicitly in two ways. Scott Merrill’s neo-American-Carpenter-Gothic Seaside Chapel (“non-denominational”) and bell tower”a finely crafted Protestant-cum-Modernist sacred building, abstract but true to type”terminates Seaside’s main north-south axis and fronts a public green; and there are plans for a cemetery just east of the Chapel, which when realized will do much to make Seaside’s grounding in sacred order more visible. But Seaside still is not a day-to-day town, rather a resort town populated by a handful of permanent residents and many tourists. It remains at best a project that aspires to the fullness of urban culture and place.

Nevertheless, understood rightly, Seaside is a work of love that”because God is love”partakes of and participates in sacred order. Seaside is a work of love by its founders, by the architects of its town plan and buildings, by the craftsmen and women who built it, by the residents who live there, by the tourists who visit, and (not least) by the absentee owners who love it as a financial investment”love it so much, in fact, that they now oppose Seaside’s original plan to connect its streets to adjacent settlements, for fear of lowering Seaside’s property values. And therein lies the story of Seaside and love’s declension.

The ambivalence in this relationship between love, beauty, and the economic value that love creates inheres in the relationship itself. Moreover, this ambivalence is rooted in the sacred, and can only be resolved by the sacred. Biblical religion is the wellspring of the modern Western idea that a good society tends to the needs of the poor, widowed, and orphaned, but a tension between wealth and blessedness is a recurring theme of biblical religion. The story of the rich young man in Matthew’s Gospel is a paradigmatic characterization of this tension.

Promoting and balancing justice and generosity, and discouraging greed and envy, is a task for every generation, emanating outward from families to free associations to various levels of religious and political authority; but it’s essential to good urbanism. So here’s an idea for Seaside founder Robert Davis, or for anyone at Seaside who would have the town be exemplary not only for its formal order, beauty, and wealth, but also for its justice and generosity: Designate a parcel of land for a community of Benedictine monks to establish a monastery in Seaside.

What would bringing Benedictines to Seaside accomplish? The main achievement would be a permanent worshipping community in Seaside, the effect of which would be to animate Seaside’s currently understated acknowledgement of the sacred order within which Seaside exists. This is because the most appropriate human acknowledgement of and response to the sacred is to worship, especially to offer as gifts things in and by which we ask the sacred to be present among us: prayers, song, bread and wine, acts of justice and charity, church buildings, cities”and sometimes, consecrated religious life. But why Benedictines? After all, there are many disciplined worshipping communities besides these Catholic Christian ones, and holy men and women of many historic religious traditions can no doubt be recognized as such.

Benedictines suggest themselves for Seaside by virtue of their history, i.e., how they testify to the love of God for all and how they draw others closer to God by the example of their lives. Moreover, they do this in a disciplined way with deep resonance even for moderns, according to their ancient Rule that in ordering their lives in imitation of Christ simultaneously reaches back to embrace living Judaism, and forward to embrace not only the reforming ambitions of Protestant Christians but the yearnings for peace and justice of all men and women of good will.

How are the lives of Benedictines ordered? And what makes them particularly suited both to participate in the civilizing mission and to address the spiritual poverty of wealthy Seaside?

• Benedictines seek holiness by disciplined attention to prayer and work ( ora et labora ). Dedication to the divine office and its seven daily periods of prayer is their most powerful witness to the reality of sacred order. Manual labor is engaged both as a spiritual discipline and to ensure that their community will be economically self-sufficient.

• Benedictines are productive, but at the same time embrace voluntary poverty. This has several happy consequences. It means that Benedictines create wealth. It means that their monastery doesn’t beg, rather gives. It means that they model for rich and poor alike that (and how) one can live a life of dignified and generous poverty.

• Life in the monastery is ordered around a church, a cloister garden, a refectory, a library, the monks’ cells, and ancillary buildings related to their manual labor. Historically, Benedictines make good buildings: beautiful for the glory of God, durable because Benedictines intend to be around for the duration. Benedictines thus model the virtues of a good built environment, both for its own sake and for the purposes that good buildings and spaces serve.

• Benedictines have two historic charisms or vocational duties, both of potential long-term benefit to Seaside. One is educational . Benedictines have always embraced the life of the mind in service to their religious vocation; and if Seaside seeks educators for its children, teaching is a role Benedictines have always undertaken. The second is hospitality . Benedict’s Rule requires monks to welcome strangers as if welcoming Christ, and monasteries have always provided simple and inexpensive lodging. Seaside is already a pilgrimage destination of sorts, an expensive one. Benedictines might make Seaside even more of a pilgrimage destination, albeit for different reasons; and would provide Seaside with more of that elusive “diversity” of clean and comfortable overnight accommodations.

• Finally, Benedictines vow poverty, obedience to their abbot, and stability of life ”which means, practically, that a monk will live the rest of his life in the monastery unless moved by his abbot. The pedagogical value of stability of life should not be underestimated by persons seeking to recover good urban culture. Postmodern nomadic culture can consume good urbanism but shows only the faintest evidence of ability to produce good urbanism. The Benedictine embrace of life in a place cuts against the grain of modern life, but is yet another important lesson for would-be urbanists.

“In his holy flirtation with the world,” wrote Presbyterian author Frederick Buechner, “God occasionally drops a handkerchief. Those handkerchiefs are called saints.” Most Benedictines are not saints, though they aspire to be and to bear witness to sacred presence. The many virtues Benedictines cultivate and model, not least piety, are urban virtues”of which Seaside remains in need if it is to be the exemplary urban place it aspires to be.

Philip Bess is a professor and the director of graduate studies at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. This essay is adapted from a chapter in the forthcoming book Visions of Seaside , edited by Dhiru Thadani.

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Timeless Cities: An Architect’s Reflections on Renaissance Italy

Mon, 01 Mar 2004 00:00:00 -0500

In the moderately memorable 1997 movie The Edge , Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin portray characters marooned in the Alaskan wilderness. In their dramatic struggle to survive both the elements and some formidable predators, the Hopkins character takes to repeating, mantra-like, the phrase: “What has been done, can be done.” Apart from the merits of this phrase as self-encouragement, as an assertion it is self-evidently true. Nevertheless, as Peter Berger once observed, ideas do not succeed in history according to their truth but rather according to their relationship to specific kinds of social structures and processes.

Timeless Cities: An Architect’s Reflections on Renaissance Italy calls to mind Berger’s caution because the governing ambition of the book”though expressed sotto voce”is to challenge its readers to promote and build cities that aspire to equal if not surpass the most beautiful cities of the Western world”and because its author, David Mayernik, is as aware as anyone that the culture and institutions of modernity are not currently conducive to the creation of such cities. Mayernik is an American architect, painter, urban designer, educator, and webzine publisher who at the tender age (for an architect) of forty-three has already established a reputation as someone dedicated to the reintegration of the building, visual, and rhetorical arts through a series of architectural projects, frescoes, and campus plans executed mostly in Switzerland, Italy, and Great Britain. Timeless Cities is a polemic in the guise of a narrative history of five Italian cities and towns”Rome, Venice, Florence, Siena, and Pienza”and an exercise not unlike (if necessarily more visual and less prolix than) Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue in its combination of acute analysis with extraordinary portions of cultural retrieval.

The primary virtue of Timeless Cities is found in Mayernik’s loving histories of these five cities. He tells us not only how these urban formal orders were shaped by shared convictions about the relationship of cities to human well-being, but also how the physical and spatial forms of these cities shaped the lives of their citizens. Out of these shared convictions and the culture of building they nourished, the architects and patrons of these cities created urban environments and landscapes that were not only extraordinarily beautiful but that also acted as theaters of memory and hope, places that simultaneously referred to and grounded citizens in their origins, the common destiny for which they longed, and the virtues necessary for success in their individual and collective journeys through life.

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Democracy’s Private Places

Wed, 01 Oct 1997 00:00:00 -0400

For centuries the public square and the street have been the spatial media of public culture. But just how important is traditional public space––urban space––to a genuinely public culture? In an age of increasingly sophisticated electronic communications, does civil society require the traditional physical and spatial arrangements of the civitas ? I don’t know the answers to these questions. But to me the abandonment of traditional urban culture and traditional urban form seems symptomatic of a declining interest in public culture. Public space and civic buildings once received a high degree of aesthetic and financial attention, of a sort that indicated their public importance. That attention increasingly seems directed elsewhere.

I was struck by one small expression of this recently, in two separate conversations. One was with an acquaintance who had recently spent an evening with friends out in some middle-class suburb of New York: two parents, one child (who the parents had decided would be an only child), and a large house with three bathrooms. This struck my conversation partner as odd. What are they doing out there with all those bathrooms? The other conversation was with an architect friend in Chicago who mentioned to me that she had left her old job in the private sector for her current job in county government because she was “tired of doing $60,000 bathrooms for clients in the north-shore suburbs.”

Both comments touched a nerve, because I had recently (and frustratingly) finished third in a little local competition to design a vacation house––and noticed that the first and second place winners had both included three full bathrooms in their designs for a house of less than 1,800 square feet. Silly me; I had only thought to include one and a half baths! Feeling all of a sudden out of touch with America in my big city neighborhood and my small town academic environs, I began researching the real estate advertisements of my local papers. There I discovered how apparently important bathrooms and bedrooms have become to the definition of the good life in the suburbs.

The growth and proliferation of the automobile suburb is due largely to post-World War II federal transportation and housing programs that clearly appealed to some deeply ingrained American tendancies and desires, but suburbs are actually a nineteenth-century invention. Proximate creations of the passenger railroads, pre-Depression suburbs always had at least a few architect-designed, quasi-palatial dwellings for their wealthiest residents. In the arriviste postwar suburbs of today the democratization of luxury proceeds, but this time promoted less by architects than by professional builders in the speculative housing market. One manifestation of this appears to be the increasing prominence of master bedroom “suites,” and the increasing number of bathrooms, found in houses targeted at the middle and upper-middle classes.

Evidence for this trend is certainly ample in the “home guide” section of any American newspaper. In a recent edition of the Chicago Tribune I found a feature article about a thirteen “custom home” development at the outer edges of suburban Chicago. The different three-and four-bedroom residences range from 2,800 to 3,800 square feet. All feature master suites segregated from secondary bedrooms. One suite has a walk-in closet that “looks like it could accommodate the Mormon Tabernacle Choir,” and two-person showers sans doors (“bigger than some cars”). Each house has multiple bathrooms, several have four, and one has six.

We can hope if not presume that most of these houses are well built. It seems noteworthy however that none of them are either architect designed or (from the photographic evidence) aesthetically distinguished. Moreover, if the prominence of their bedroom suites and bathrooms is not necessarily typical of most new housing construction, neither is it particularly unusual or confined to automobile suburbs. In the same paper there are numerous advertisements for new “luxury townhomes” in older Chicago railroad suburbs, many featuring two bedrooms and two and a half baths. Increasingly, the market assumption appears to be that every bedroom in new residential construction requires its own bath. This has been common in luxury residential construction for most of this century, but it appears now to have trickled down to suburban middle-class housing as well.

What, if anything, should one make of this? At one level, I think the appropriate answer is “not much.” Within the requirements of justice, people with money are and should be free to spend it pretty much however they want, and I have no interest in or passion for denigrating the virtues of private home ownership, personal hygiene, and modern plumbing. At another level, however, a residential ideal of one bathroom per bedroom can have the insidious effect of becoming the standard by which housing comes to be deemed acceptable . And were this ratio to become normative, embodied in building codes and other institutional regulations, it would make it much more difficult to create affordable housing for that sizable sector of society unable to buy in affluent suburbs.

But I think there are interesting cultural issues here as well. Architecture high and low expresses and embodies, intentionally or not, cultural ideals and aspirations; and in light of the residential building industry trends featured in the Tribune , it may be worth reflecting upon what some of these are. Journalist Karen Tensa, reviewing the recently published Bathrooms: Inspiring Ideas and Practical Solutions for Creating a Beautiful Bathroom , expresses the view that today’s opulent bathrooms and bedrooms represent a rejection by Americans of our “puritanical roots.” This is plausible enough, as far as it goes; but the implications of this may be larger than she realizes, and not entirely benign.

Bigger and more luxurious bedrooms and bathrooms seem to me just one small physical manifestation of that shrinkage of the public realm happening reciprocally and in tandem with America’s true growth industry, the care and tending of the autonomous self. Like the decline of the street and the square as active public spaces––and the demise of the alley, the ubiquity of the driveway, the transformation of the garage door into the front door, the demise of uninterrupted curbs on residential blocks, and the relocation of domestic life to yards and family rooms at the rear of the house––the growing number and importance of domestic bathrooms and bedroom suites is yet another way we materialize in our built environment our culture’s turn from the civic to the private.

This turn to the private would have dismayed but not surprised Alexis de Tocqueville. Indeed, Tocqueville recognized individualism as a peculiarly democratic proclivity. His 1840 characterization of individualism (“a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to... draw apart with his family and friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself”) goes far toward describing a social reality that subsequently has taken physical form in the American suburb.

But I have one more contemporary bathroom story to tell; and though it is not a story of suburban bathrooms, it too is a tale about architecture, public culture, and democratic ideals.

The central campus of the University of Virginia is considered by many the most beautiful spatial and architectural ensemble in the United States. Designed by Thomas Jefferson as a model “academical village,” the University’s purpose was to help create and promote an educated citizenry, which Jefferson thought necessary for the success of an emerging American democracy. For an Enlightenment luminary such as Jefferson, reason rather than Church or Crown was to be the authoritative principle of America, and this dictated among other things that a library rather than a church or chapel would occupy the premier position at Mr. Jefferson’s University. The Library (or, as it is known by all, the Rotunda) therefore sits atop the highest point on the original campus. A secularized version of the Pantheon in Rome, the Rotunda terminates the north axis of a large green space––The Lawn––that itself is flanked on its east and west sides by a series of ten residential pavilions interspersed between some fifty-six cell-like rooms connected in front by Doric colonnades. The pavilions were designed originally for double duty as both faculty residences and classrooms, and the cell-like rooms were built to house the student population.

Today, Virginia’s student body numbers approximately seventeen thousand and the full-time faculty some twenty-four hundred, and the University’s physical facilities have grown accordingly. The Rotunda is no longer the University library but remains, with The Lawn and the rest of Jefferson’s original design, the symbolic center of campus life. Likewise, the pavilions are no longer used as classrooms, but are instead residences occupied by various deans and administrators as well as select general faculty members. The student rooms, however, continue to be occupied by an elite group of senior undergraduates, chosen on the basis of outstanding academic and extracurricular performance at the University. This is regarded as a singular honor; and student residence “on The Lawn” is highly coveted in spite of several inconveniences––including the fact that student rooms are equipped with neither toilets nor showers (which are located in out-buildings behind the student quarters).

At Virginia, therefore, even if only for an academic year, some students voluntarily forfeit personal comforts available in every other University residence facility, for the honor of living on The Lawn and the pleasure of its building and spatial arrangements. It seems worth noting as well that the design of this premier architectural icon, this intended microcosm of a fledgling democratic culture, is strikingly hierarchical. Jefferson physically and spatially subordinates the student rooms to the faculty pavilions, and both to the majesty of the Rotunda and The Lawn which is the University’s public square; and this hierarchical arrangement of buildings and spaces together embody and express the shared purposes of the academic community.

Both Jefferson and Tocqueville believed that democratic liberty depends upon cultural habits of self-restraint and concern for the common good. But Tocqueville recognized that the conflicting democratic ideals of freedom and equality tend themselves to undermine the self-restraint necessary for democracy to work by creating a restless and dynamic social milieu that fosters envy, individualism, and that unlimited desire for material pleasures that has become contemporary consumerism––which finds a small expression in the proliferation of the “post-puritan” domestic bathroom and a large expression in the decline of civic architecture, the street, and the public square. And although both Jefferson and Tocqueville were articulate advocates of democracy as the form of government best suited for a just society of free human beings, Tocqueville the French Catholic aristocrat had a decidedly stronger sense of original sin and the corruption of human nature than did Jefferson the Deist Virginia gentleman––and hence also a stronger sense of the fragility of democratic government, the corrosive agents to which it is vulnerable, and the kinds of character virtues necessary to sustain it.

Our dominant moral imperative today is expressive rather than renunciatory, and we pay an aesthetic, spiritual, and cultural price for this. That the rising status of the suburban bedroom and bathroom coincides with the decline of the public realm and the nadir of civic architecture is not, I think, by chance. The irony of Mr. Jefferson’s University is that the young democratic culture it celebrated in such enduringly transcendent beauty may have become, in its loss of individual self-restraint, a democratic culture almost wholly incapable of producing transcendent civic architecture.

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A Dutch Master and the Good Life

Wed, 01 Mar 1995 00:00:00 -0500

What follows is prompted not by a cigar, but rather a painting by the Dutch (strictly speaking, Flemish) master Jan Van Eyck. “The Mystic Adoration of the Lamb” is the central painting of twenty panels of various sizes completed in 1432 that together constitute the Ghent Altarpiece. Since the time of its completion Van Eyck’s painting has been regarded as a major masterpiece of the northern European renaissance, noteworthy for its advancements in the use of oils, for the quality of its color, and for the realism of its portrayal of the natural world. These are but some of the reasons for its continuing importance, however, and here I propose to consider another: Van Eyck’s portrayal of the relationship of architecture and of cities to the good life for human beings.

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