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In recent years, much work has been done to restore the traditional principles of church design; one principle, however, is still often overlooked: siting. St. Germanus is brief and clear on the subject, as always. In the final section of Ecclesiastical History and Mystical Contemplation, which deals directly with architectural matters, he says: Praying toward […]

The calles and avenidas of Madrid are decorated with some of the most elegant apartment house entry halls in the world. What a delight to take a stroll just after sunrise when doors are flung open, floors are swept, brass is polished—the city’s portales are made ready to welcome and to bid goodbye in style. […]

We’ve discussed how the church building is an earthly heaven, in particular how all the structural elements seem to be alive. The column capitals are like floral bouquets, the beams sprout leaves and eggs, the heads of animals and men form bosses, etc. There is no death in the Garden of Eden, after all, so […]

The Maine Monument at Columbus Circle is one of the most beautiful in Manhattan. Architect Harold Van Buren Magonigle, and sculptor Attilio Piccirilli, there provided us with an object lesson in memorial design that is more important and more relevant now than ever. What it does, and what all monuments should do, is very simple: […]

The Byzantine style, like Gothic, Georgian, and Art Deco, is another wonderful experiment in that great laboratory called the Greco-Roman tradition. Constantine planted the seed when he moved the capital of his empire from Rome to Byzantium. At that time, owing to its history, the tradition in Byzantium would likely have been Greco-Roman with a […]

Returning to our series on the parts of the church building, with St. Germanus, Patriarch of Constantinople as our guide, he continues: 10. The ambo manifests the shape of the stone at the Holy Sepulchre [on which the angel sat after he rolled it away from the doors of the tomb,] proclaiming the resurrection of the Lord […]

Nicolai Ouroussoff teams up with Dutch architect and uber-gobbledegook-meister Rem Koolhaas to sow more confusion regarding principles that are fairly obvious to most people. For example, it is obvious to most that it is good to preserve things which are worth preserving. Likewise, only get rid of something when you can replace it with something better. […]

The formidable Roger Scruton, writer and philosopher, is always worth reading on the subject of architecture. He’s written several commendable books and occasionally produces a good, pithy article. This latest one, an opinion piece published in the Times of London, is quite trenchant, and even provoked an angry response from Jonathan Glancey, architecture critic of The Guardian. The […]

If you are looking for an ideal model of a church building, then look no further than the Minor Basilica of San Clemente in Rome. It has all the traditional symbolical elements expressed almost entirely without abbreviation, from the spatial sequence to the liturgical furnishings. And its perennial relevance is attested to by its age–it […]

This in my opinion is the most beautiful facade in all of Rome. It is the church of Saints Luke and Martina, by the great Pietro da Cortona, and it will make your heart skip a beat. It positively oozes Roman gravitas and austere grandeur. So muscular without being flamboyant, so robust it borders on forceful, […]

By the term “massing” we mean the general shape or shapes of a building. It is analogous to the composition of a painting, its broadest strokes, but in three dimensions. And like a painting’s fundamental composition, if a building’s massing is not right, no amount of excellence in the details will compensate. Look at the […]

Continuing our series on the parts of the church building, St. Germanus goes on to say: 8. The entablature is the legal and holy decoration, representing a depiction of the crucified Christ by means of a decorated cross. 9. The chancel barriers indicate the place of prayer: the outside is for the people, and the […]

In 1929 the Belgian painter Rene Magritte unveiled his iconoclastic work “The Treason of Images.” Below the image of the pipe is the statement “This is not a pipe.” The man apparently was scrupulous enough not to want to lie to his audience, yet not so scrupulous as to have minded boring the audience with […]

A quincunx (pronounced kwin-kunks) is simply a cluster of five points arranged as on a die. One finds the pattern everywhere, from the common arrangement of trees in an orchard, to the exalted arrangement of domes on a church. There is much more to the pattern than it might at first seem. In fact, in […]

It’s the birthday of Fr. Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio (1793–1862), the man who coined the phrase “social justice.” Here’s a nice little piece by Ryan Messmore in First Things which summarizes his contribution. Give it a quick read and consider the implications for architecture. He taught: … that human beings naturally join together in groups. “The […]

My review of Steven Semes’ book The Future of the Past is up at the American Arts Quarterly website. Here it is in its entirety below.   ‘The Future of the Past,’ by Steven W. Semes The Future of the Past is not merely about architectural preservation, as the title might at first glance suggest, […]

The Gothic style is a favorite for many, particularly when it comes to ecclesiastical structures. Indeed, who is not impressed with the majesty of the ordered cosmos arrayed on the facade of Reims cathedral, the other-worldly luminosity of the Saint Chapelle (below), or the virtuosic vaulting of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge? It can rightly be […]

The term Bema has several different meanings. The word is most commonly a synonym for the Sanctuary, especially in the East. However, it can also refer to: 1. The raised, gated area which projects from the Sanctuary into the nave called the schola cantorum 2. A separate raised platform for clergy which, in antiquity–particularly in […]

What is traditional architecture? Traditional architecture is that way of building which makes serious use of the familiar symbolic forms of a particular culture of a particular people in a particular place. 2. What is classical architecture? Classical architecture is that segment of the body of traditional architecture of a people which has achieved the […]

The Palladio exhibit at the Morgan Libraryis sadly coming to a close. August 1st is the last day of the exhibit which moves on to the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. It is well worth a visit by both laymen and professionals alike. Curators have put together an impressive range of works by the […]

You have to hand it to the apologists of Modernism for their steadfastness. They’ve been trying for a century now to gain general public acceptance for their wares, and though they are nowhere closer to that goal than they were when they first started, they continue to chase the mirage with all the fervor they […]

In the eastern tradition, the term “altar” is a synonym for “sanctuary.” Substitute the word as you read the following passage from St. Germanus, and it will make more sense: The altar corresponds to the holy tomb of Christ. On it Christ brought Himself as a sacrifice to [His] God and Father through the offering […]

The Whitney Museum, designed by Marcel Breuer, is truly one of the most hope-depleting contributions to the Upper East Side. The same year it was completed, 1966, public hearings were held to discuss protecting the neighborhood from future assaults with landmarks preservation legislation. It was a thoroughly rational response in this architect’s opinion. And fifteen […]

Here is a quick proposal for a small, single story vernacular house in Waco, Texas. This part of the Lone Star State definitely falls in the Anglo tradition, so we looked to precedents like the Sam Rayburn House, and Fort McKavett, rather than the Spanish Governor’s Palace, for details, massing, and general character. The scale […]

Two friends and I recently visited the excellent Palladio exhibit at the Morgan Library. It provoked an interesting follow-up discussion regarding the shortcomings of modern architectural education and practice, my friends suggesting that there is something to appreciate in modernist work. Wrote Finbar [all names have been changed to protect the innocent]: Didn’t the modernists […]

St. Germanus states regarding the ciborium: The ciborium represents here the place where Christ was crucified; for the place where he was buried was nearby and raised on a base. It is placed in the church in order to represent concisely the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Christ. It similarly corresponds to the ark of […]

A student recently reminded me of the architectural hubbub of a few years ago at our alma mater, the University of Virginia. In September 2005, to kick off the semester, a large majority of the faculty members of the school of architecture signed “An Open Letter to the Board of Visitors, the University Administration, and […]

Architectural styles are like languages. If you want to be understood, you have to speak using the language of the people. If I am to give a lecture to a German audience, I would be a fool to speak in Chinese. And it would add insult to injury to grunt unintelligibly. This, in brief, is […]

If you’re in the mood for a strong brew of architectural hucksterism–a marketing effort disguised as deep theory–read this hilarious piece by Patrik Schumacher, partner of Uber-starchitect Zaha Hadid. In it, he heralds the advent of a new architectural style, important enough to succeed Gothic, Baroque, and neo-Classical. He calls it: Parametricism. What is Parametricism? […]

The altar is the central focus of the Christian religion. So, naturally, it is the central focus of every church building. St. Germanus is marvelously succinct about it: The holy table corresponds to the spot in the tomb where Christ was placed. On it lies the true and heavenly bread, the mystical and unbloody sacrifice. […]

Henry Clay Frick was a college dropout and a hated industrialist, but he built perhaps the most magnificent of all residences on the rocky isle of Manhattan. Designed by Thomas Hastings to hold Frick’s expanding art collection, he willed that the house should become a public gallery on the death of his wife. And thus […]

Look back at the sweeping canvas that is the whole history of art and architecture and focus on the broadest strokes. You will see Victorian, Neo-classical, Baroque, Renaissance, Gothic, Romanesque, Byzantine, Roman, Greek, Egyptian… You can see as far back as about 5,000 years. Each generation has added a broad panel to the historical canvas, […]

Let’s spend a little time talking about the orders, the names of the parts, and how they are put together. It’s much easier to talk about architecture when you have names for things. Once you develop a vocabulary, you will notice subtleties that you had not seen before. And while there is much to traditional […]

St. Germanus of Constantinople writes: The apse corresponds to the cave in Bethlehem where Christ was born*, as well as the cave in which he was buried, as the evangelist Mark says: “There was a cave hewn out of the rock; there they placed Jesus” (cf Mark 15:46) Knowing now as we do that the […]

The latest sensation in the architectural press is the new Maxxi Museum, designed by Zaha Hadid. Even Francis X. Rocca, Vatican correspondent for the Religion News Service dolloped praise upon it in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Why is a mystery to me. It’s got all the warmth of a pillbox bunker, the timelessness […]

Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for the New Yorker and long-time Notre Dame Driehaus Prize juror, gives a positive review of the Burj Khalifa, the insanely tall tower in Dubai. He says it should be an easy building to loathe, and the embarrassing way that its completion coincided with the near-meltdown of Dubai’s economy makes it easy […]

It is not uncommon to see good people getting brow-beaten into accepting ugly architecture on the grounds that the alternative, an intervention which is complementary to its situation and unabashedly traditional, is dishonest pastiche. Modern architecture, in contrast, is honest and authentic. Traditional architecture is nostalgic Disney World, while modernist architecture is for the present and […]

The ever-supercilious Nicolai Ouroussoff opens his favorable review of Renzo Piano’s addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with a couple of put-downs to his presumed critics. “The cultural watchdogs of Boston don’t take well to change.” “Preservationists Should Put Away their Torches and Pitchforks” Well, you don’t have to be a redneck to have legitimate […]

Here’s a humorous passage from Evelyn Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall, published in 1928. The rich and glamorous socialite Margot Beste-Chetwynde has decided to demolish her centuries-old house, “King’s Thursday,” and commission a young Modernist to replace it with “Something clean and square.” Professor Silenus – for that was the title by which this […]

A building which is classical… 1. Serves man, whose nature is not infinitely perfectible or subject to reinvention, but rather is stable and fundamentally social. Society is by nature hierarchical, from the institution of the family, to the village or tribal community, to confederations of villages (i.e., a commonwealth), to institutions with a claim to […]

It is often said that the different architectural styles–Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, etc.–are like different literary styles. Here are a few comparisons:   St. Thomas Aquinas Word-made-Flesh, the bread of nature by His word to Flesh He turns; wine into His Blood He changes; what though sense no change discerns? Only be the heart in earnest, […]

First Law: Living Structure Before there is architecture there is mere building: posts, beams, roofs–no symbolic content whatsoever. The moment you need a monument, however, a merely functional building will not do. So you take those basic structural elements, the post, the beam, and the roof, and you transform them into something beyond the functional. […]