Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred (Religion and Contemporary Culture) (Hardcover)

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Product Description

“The city comes into existence . . . for the sake of the good life.” So wrote Aristotle nearly 2,400 years ago, articulating an idea that prevailed throughout most of Western culture and the world until the environmental consequences of the Industrial Revolution called into question the goodness of traditional urban life. Urban history ever since—from England’s early-nineteenth-century hygiene laws to mid-twentieth-century modernist architecture and planning to today’s New Urbanism—has consisted of efforts to ameliorate the consequences of the industrial city by either embracing or challenging the idealization of nature that has followed it.

Architect Philip Bess’s Till We Have Built Jerusalem puts forth fresh arguments for traditional architecture and urbanism, their relationship to human flourishing, and the kind of culture required to create and sustain traditional towns and city neighborhoods. Bess not only dissects the questionable intellectual assumptions of contemporary architecture, he also shows how the individualist ethos of modern societies finds physical expression in contemporary suburban sprawl, making traditional urbanism difficult to sustain. He concludes by considering the role of both the natural law tradition and communal religion in providing intellectual and spiritual depth to contemporary attempts to build new—and revive existing—traditional towns and cities, attempts that, at their best, help fulfill our natural human desires for order, beauty, and community.

About the Author

Philip Bess is a Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, and the principal of Thursday Associates in Chicago, a research and consulting office committed to rethinking American architecture and urbanism. The author of two previous books, his essays have appeared in Civitas, First Things, the ChristianCentury, the Classicist, and the Humanist Art Review, among many other periodicals.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 325 pages
• Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute (December 20, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932236961
• ISBN-13: 978-1932236965
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #994,544 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a marvellous vision of how the world should build, April 14, 2007

By	Elias F. Crim (Chicago IL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If the following paraphrase is not too crude a summary of Philip Bess' brilliant synthesis in this book, the author believes that we all carry a kind of moral DNA within us which not only urges us not to murder but not to allow urban sprawl to devour our landscape and kill our authentic civic life. How ironic that we Americans hunger for the beauty of European small towns, for example, but don't realize that their "human scale" is related to ancient notions of what cities are for -- to make people good (i.e., excellent). This is not a political nor a polemical tract: Bess takes the reader into serious philosophical waters and his emphasis on virtues-based theories of human behavior mirrors the current work of leading philosophers and psychologists like Alasdair MacIntyre and Martin Seligman.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars trying to link New Urbanism and cultural conservatism , May 27, 2007

By	Michael Lewyn (Jacksonville, FL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In this interesting but highly abstract collection of essays, Bess tries to teach cultural and religious conservatives (and indeed, religious people of all political leanings) about the virtues of traditional urbanism and its 21st-century heir, the New Urbanist movement. Bess argues that traditional neighborhoods where churches and other civic institutions are the highest buildings ennoble us by teaching us what we should cherish; by contrast, in 20th-century suburban sprawl churches look no different from Wal-Marts.

One of the best things about this book is its use of quotes. Some of my favorites:

*"To value anything simply because it occurs, is in fact to worship success, like Quislings or men of Vichy." (quoting C.S. Lewis).

*"If a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once upon this downward path, you never know when to stop. Many a man has dated his own ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time." (qutoing Thomas de Quincey)

*"the gratification in climbing consists of the conquering of one's own inert heaviness for the purpose of attaining a high goal- an experience inevitably endowed with symbolic connotations. Climbing is a heroic, liberating act; and height spontaneously symbolizes things of high value." (quoting psychologist Rudolf Arnheim to explain why height and beauty often go together)

*"It is not only insufferable arrogance to think that one can begin theologizing in sovereign disregard of history; it is also extremely uneconomical. It seems rather a waste of time to spend, say, five years working out a position, only to find that it has already been done by a Syrian monk in the fifth century. The very least that a knowledge of religious traditions has to offer is a catalogue of heresies for possible home use." (quoting Peter Berger)

*"The utter failure to create any meaningful pedestrian environment (that is, a rewarding public realm} defines the heart of Atlanta today. Every bad idea in the service of contemporary urban design [has come] together [in Atlanta] with a public attitude that can be summed up as the outside doesn't matter." (quoting James Howard Kunstler)

*And once from William Penn that he (wisely) criticizes: "The country life is to be preferred, for there we see the works of God, but in cities little else but the works of men." As Bess points out, human endeavor, like the natural world, is infused with divine presence.

One possible weakness: Because this is a collection of essays rather than a freestanding book, Bess doesn't engage defenders of the sprawl status quo as thoroughly as I would like.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Profound and Brilliant Book, August 8, 2008

By	Joel Russell (Northampton, MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred (Paperback)

This book makes the case for both traditional urbanism and new urbanism by laying the solid philosophical foundation that has been lacking up to now in writings in the field. Philip Bess takes the Aristotelian tradition running from Aristotle to the brilliant contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre and links this tradition to the practical necessities of building sustainable communities that create the optimal setting for human fulfillment. He establishes an objective and convincing basis to show how traditional urbanism and its "new urbanist" adaptations promote the common good in an age when that concept has almost vanished. Bess, in calm and measured tones, establishes a balanced and fulfilling world view as an alternative to a world currently fixated on private greed running amok in unfettered markets distorted by subsidies granted by governments commandeered by special interests. Bess not only shows us how to make places that we can love, he shows us that this art, almost lost in the modern world, is the way to an environmentally sustainable future that creates meaning and purpose in life. He reaches back to timeless traditions to show how we can transform our current world, complete with modern conveniences and cars, into a better place. This book is both practical and philosphical, and will appeal to thinking people, but not to those who just are looking for a "quick fix." This book, if read and understood by enough people, can transform the world.