9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a marvellous vision of how the world should build, April 14, 2007
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.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
trying to link New Urbanism and cultural conservatism, May 27, 2007
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.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
After Sprawl, May 26, 2009
This review is from: Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred (Paperback)
(A version of this review first appeared in the March 2009 issue of The Christian Century.)
This book is an encouraging indication of what a renewal of traditional architecture and urban planning might involve. Philip Bess is the head of the graduate school of architecture at the University of Notre Dame, which is spearheading a countercultural focus on traditional design.
Bess offers an array of explorations - from a meditation on the Ghent altarpiece to a dissection of Nietzsche's aesthetics. But he also offers a blueprint for academic engagement of a fiercely secular field. Despite theology's impressive track record for inspiring beautiful architecture, there is almost an ironclad indifference toward traditional belief among architectural theorists today. Bess counters this indifference bluntly: "I am obviously not uninterested in comprehensive narratives, most especially true ones." Rather than cutting a deal with the architectural establishment, Bess repeatedly cuts to the chase. "Modernist social fantasies," he explains, "underestimated the pervasiveness of what theologians call sin, while overestimating the redemptive power of steel, glass and electricity."
Till We Have Built Jerusalem is therefore not the place to go for a Christianized version of critical theory. Bess knows a rival when he sees one. "Critical theory ... by its own logic - e.g., its views of the primacy of the will-to-power, and of the 'constructedness' of nature--is notoriously poor soil for a theory of sustainability or, for that matter, of a just social pluralism, each of which is arguably better grounded in traditional Western religious views of the created character of man and nature and their relationship to each other and to God."
Bess lays his Catholic cards on the table as he marshals biblical religion, Aristotelian philosophy and natural law theory in his effort to reinvigorate traditional architecture and urbanism. He is suspicious both of contemporary architects who use religious language that is disconnected from religious communities and of religious leaders who build synagogues and churches that owe more to architectural fashion than professed beliefs. But the possibility for a revival of traditional architecture is a real one for Bess because "human beings generally can only stand so much ugliness in their built environments." Bess does not call for one particular style, but he does provide solid, historically informed proposals for what successful church and synagogue building today involves.
Unsurprisingly, his proposals are not modern. Bess concedes that some modern buildings, and even some modern churches, are successful, but he also points out the irony that "the best of them typically were created by architects educated as traditionalists." Bess suggests that premodern buildings admirably serve people who worship because often their architects were themselves worshipers. Art produced by living worship traditions should therefore be resumed.
While critical of the theorists he calls the "heirs of Nietzsche," Bess pulls some architectural critics, such as Colin Rowe, into the orbit of his more religiously informed vision. He does the same for the New Urbanism, a movement that seeks humane alternatives to suburban sprawl. Bess understands that if New Urbanists are to succeed, they will need to draw on more than nostalgia for a brownstone past. For urbanist projects to keep from becoming Projects, they require more than a retro aesthetic--they require a "belief in sacred order."
Till We Have Built Jerusalem contains an informed discussion on the nature of beauty: "Completeness is precisely what the natural order lacks, and this is exactly why aesthetic experience has religious implications, because it seems to reveal to us a glimpse of some other order outside of nature." And while the book may take theological and philosophical detours, it does not lose its practical edge: "The way to make traditional urbanism less expensive is to make it less rare." One of Bess's more radical proposals is that churches should partner with developers to form a city around themselves. "Though we cannot avoid being modems," says Bess, "we can certainly avoid being Modernists."
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