Bess on Building

The "urbanist" work of my friend and colleague Philip Bess is well known, I suspect, to most longtime MOJ readers.  Here, thanks to Public Discourse, is an adaptation of his recent speech, "Toward a Renewed Culture of Building":

[E]ven modern human beings fare better in good places. Indeed, persons best able to successfully navigate the changes and uncertainties of the modern world and of life itself are most often those persons most deeply rooted in stable families in good places. And this suggests a true rationale for traditional building even in the context of the modern world: A durable and beautiful built environment provides the best physical and spatial context for human life, and thereby supports the different kinds of inventiveness and daring that modern life demands. If one grows up in a loving family in a good home in a good town or city, one is likely to carry within oneself a foundational sense of home throughout one’s entire life, whatever other uncertainties, dangers and adventures life presents. Making places in which we are able to be at home in the world—even if we can never be entirely comfortable in the world—is therefore a primary task of traditional building properly understood. . . .

[T]here are spiritual goods that follow from building traditionally. Notwithstanding the mundane purposes that good buildings satisfy, the highest purpose of the building arts is beauty. What can one say objectively about beauty in a culture where it is widely taken for granted that beauty is subjective? Whether painting or photography or music or sculpture or buildings, our encounter with something beautiful pleases us almost instantly. We have an intuitive understanding that beautiful things are well made; were they not, we would not understand them to be beautiful. Beautiful things somehow both embody clearly and reveal the essence of the thing they are. Beautiful things appear to us complete; we would never think of changing them, and they could not be altered but for the worse. Beautiful things not only attract us, they make us grateful. Beautiful things judge us; they change us, and make us want to be better than we are. Beautiful things elevate us. . . .

Read the whole thing!