Grandeur and beauty in interior decoration helps to give a sense of institutional authority and self-confidence in the face of demands from activist students intoxicated by What’s Happening Right Now. Continue Reading »
Russell A. Berman’s essay (“State of Emergency,” June/July) about our nation’s instability in various areas of public life is an insightful and valuable analysis of the fraying of the social bonds that hold together our multi-racial, multi-ethnic nation. There is one sentence, however, that . . . . Continue Reading »
Although Christopher Alexander, who died this year on March 17, was officially an architect, the significance of his life lay in the challenge he posed to architecture. In a sense, he did not believe that -architects were necessary. Put a small group of people on a building site, give them materials . . . . Continue Reading »
Going to a concert, like going to church or a nice restaurant or traveling on a plane or an overnight train, once meant dressing up and looking your best. We had been taught that dressing up showed respect—and classical music evoked special respect. This had little to do with how much one . . . . Continue Reading »
Modern people, despite being drawn to medieval aesthetics and artificats, cannot seem to bear to examine what those artifacts are modeled on: the intelligible order glimpsed by the eye of faith. Continue Reading »
The planned redesign of Notre-Dame de Paris’s interior is an atrocity that will turn the cathedral into little more than a Catholic Disneyland. Continue Reading »