Philip Bess | University of Notre Dame (original) (raw)
Papers by Philip Bess
Religion and Innovation : Antagonists or Partners?
When the New York Times announced in 2004 that its long-time neo-modernist architecture critic He... more When the New York Times announced in 2004 that its long-time neo-modernist architecture critic Herbert Muschamp would be succeeded by the then Los Angeles Times neo-modernist architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, it instantly prompted this dry witty bit of architecture critic criticism from the Los Angeles New Urbanist architect Stefanos Polyzoides: “New York’s loss will be Los Angeles’s gain.”
The Journal of Markets and Morality, 2006
The city has historically been regarded as the place most conducive to the good life for human be... more The city has historically been regarded as the place most conducive to the good life for human beings and is also a central metaphor and theme of historic Christianity. However, the Industrial Revolution unleashed a social and cultural revolution that has led to a devaluation of the city as a reality and a corresponding ascendance of suburbia as a cultural ideal. The consumption of the landscape by post-World War II suburban sprawl, the corresponding ecological and aesthetic degradation of the natural environment, a growing sense that civility itself is in decline, and a conviction that these problems are related intrinsically to the physical form of suburbia, has led to a movement to revive the physical forms of traditional cities known as New Urbanism. This essay argues that a conscientious effort to make churches a part of new, traditional, urban, formal settings will both better promote the church's evangelical mission on behalf of the City of God and contribute to the civil...
Although it is largely unnoticed in the outside world, a multi-factional theory war has been ragi... more Although it is largely unnoticed in the outside world, a multi-factional theory war has been raging for some time within the architectural community over the very nature, purpose, and meaning of architecture and the city. The context of these battles is, of course, late modernity. Our globally expanding media and advertising saturated culture, with its increasingly specialized division of labor, immoderate habits of litigation, and explosion of technological gadgetry, poses significant challenges to the historically generalist and slow-to-change practice of architecture. It is hard for architects to make themselves heard these days, and for many years now architects have had to compete not only for jobs, but to justify architecture itself. This surely accounts not only for the recent explosion of architectural theory, but also for the ferocity of the factions in the theory wars. For well more than thirty years now partisans of architectural modernism, functionalism, structural expressionism, sustainability, neo-rationalism, post-modernism, contextualism, Manhattanism, neo-traditionalism, New Urbanism, critical theory, and deconstructivism all have been vying to stake out architecture's turf in a culture increasingly indifferent to architecture conceived as anything other than commercial advertisement, and the city as anything other than an entertainment zone.
Journal of Markets Morality, Mar 22, 2012
Bulletin of Science, Technology, & Society, 2000
Although it is largely unnoticed in the outside world, a multi-factional theory war has been ragi... more Although it is largely unnoticed in the outside world, a multi-factional theory war has been raging for some time within the architectural community over the very nature, purpose, and meaning of architecture and the city. The context of these battles is, of course, late modernity. Our globally expanding media and advertising saturated culture, with its increasingly specialized division of labor, immoderate habits of litigation, and explosion of technological gadgetry, poses significant challenges to the historically generalist and slow-to-change practice of architecture. It is hard for architects to make themselves heard these days, and for many years now architects have had to compete not only for jobs, but to justify architecture itself. This surely accounts not only for the recent explosion of architectural theory, but also for the ferocity of the factions in the theory wars. For well more than thirty years now partisans of architectural modernism, functionalism, structural expressionism, sustainability, neo-rationalism, post-modernism, contextualism, Manhattanism, neo-traditionalism, New Urbanism, critical theory, and deconstructivism all have been vying to stake out architecture's turf in a culture increasingly indifferent to architecture conceived as anything other than commercial advertisement, and the city as anything other than an entertainment zone.
The Classicist, Volume 3, 1996
New Urbanists provide a helpful but incomplete argument for the traditional city, one that pertai... more New Urbanists provide a helpful but incomplete argument for the traditional city, one that pertains primarily to the social and ecological parsimony of certain traditional urban forms. Most architects who become traditional urbanists do so primarily for aesthetic reasons, but although there are certain shared formal sympathies among traditional urbanists, there may or may not be agreement among them---among us---with respect to the cultural implications of the argument that follows. However, since it is ostensibly over its allegedly sinister cultural implications that modernists, environmentalists, libertarians
and contemporary critical theorists take the New Urbanism and its apologists to task, it is upon just these implications that I wish to focus. For if my cultural thesis with respect to traditional architecture and urbanism is correct, the genuine renewal of these traditions is going to be a long term endeavor for which the master plans and urban codes central to New Urbanist promotion of traditional urban forms will be necessary but not at all sufficient measures.
Presuming therefore a certain basic agreement among New Urbanists about the formal qualities and characteristics of good towns and cities, this paper pursues two potentially more controversial topics: first, why good urbanism both tends to and should be characterized by the architectural monumentalization of civilizing institutions; and second, whether in late twentieth century societies such institutions are sufficiently strong to make good urbanism possible. On the first topic there may already be substantial agreement among New Urbanists, but also too much assumed and not enough specified about what it means to be "civilized," and about the necessary relationship of virtues and institutions to that state of being. The argument that follows therefore devotes considerable space to just such a description. With regard to the second topic I am of two minds, and wish therefore to propose two alternative scenarios for the future of traditional urbanism. The first and more optimistic of these I call the Tocqueville scenario; the second, less optimistic and more radical, I call the Benedict scenario. Their differences notwithstanding, an essentially Aristotelian notion of virtue and civility is central to each; and each therefore justifies a re-evaluation of the culture-building and culture-sustaining role of communal and ascetic disciplines, practices,
and institutions.
Denver Post, 1995
April is the cruelest month lamented T.S. Eliot, and only partly because he couldn't hit the curv... more April is the cruelest month lamented T.S. Eliot, and only partly because he couldn't hit the curve ball.
espn.go.com, 1999
Granting their deficiencies in public restrooms and handicapped accessibility, American baseball ... more Granting their deficiencies in public restrooms and handicapped accessibility, American baseball parks built between 1909 and 1923 were superior to today's new downtown stadiums because they were located in city neighborhoods. They manifested an urban culture, in which cities were first and foremost places to live, where even persons who were not rich could live well. Thus cities included within close proximity residences and businesses, schools and churches, recreations and entertainments; and ballparks were buildings designed in and for traditional urban neighborhoods.
America since 1945 has become a suburban culture. Suburbs (a cultural conspiracy catering to the illusion that unpleasantness in life can be avoided) have drained cities of middle class residents, and cities now are trying--foolishly, desperately, mistakenly--to remake themselves into entertainment zones. New urban stadiums are prominent in this strategy, but less as places for baseball than as expensive city-sponsored architectural devices that help teams separate suburbanites from their money.
Here are 50 reasons why the old ballparks were better than today’s new stadiums:
The Humanist Art Review, 2001
Historically, one purpose of architecture is pragmatic, and concerns the interests of particular ... more Historically, one purpose of architecture is pragmatic, and concerns the interests of
particular communities that are patrons of architecture. A second purpose is formal, and concerns standards of excellence within the architectural community. And a third purpose---civic purpose---is similar to the others in that it too refers architectural ends to a community; but it differs in that the community with which it is concerned, the city, is rarely if ever the direct patron of architecture. This difference therefore requires some further consideration of just what kind of community the city is, and the nature of the city's purposes.
Civitas, 1997
The historic relationship of religious sensibility to artistic sensibility is both self evident a... more The historic relationship of religious sensibility to artistic sensibility is both self evident and complex. But this relationship has become problematic in a post-modern world on the one hand no longer confident in the social and intellectual adequacy of secular materialism, in which on the other hand both religious and artistic sensibilities have become themselves to a remarkable and unprecedented degree secularized and / or individualized.
Inland Architect, 1993
Critical theory has been for the last several years the ascendant philosophical force in architec... more Critical theory has been for the last several years the ascendant philosophical force in architectural education, and not least in Chicago. To the extent that critical theory has provided a theme for architectural investigation, that theme has been suspicion, the relentless questioning of all authority-a general challenge to prevailing opinion of whatever substantive content. Interestingly however, critical theorists appear willfully uncritical when it comes to the idea of authority itself.
Elysian Fields Quarterly, 1992
in a brief essay on the practicality of theory, noted that a defense of theoretical thinking expo... more in a brief essay on the practicality of theory, noted that a defense of theoretical thinking exposes one to the cheap charge of fiddling while Rome is burning....There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist....It is wrong to fiddle while Rome burns; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning.
Journal of Markets and Morality, 2003
The city has historically been regarded as the place most conducive to the good life for human be... more The city has historically been regarded as the place most conducive to the good life for human beings and is also a central metaphor and theme of historic Christianity. However, the Industrial Revolution unleashed a social and cultural revolution that has led to a devaluation of the city as a reality and a corresponding ascendance of suburbia as a cultural ideal. The consumption of the landscape by post-World War II suburban sprawl, the corresponding ecological and aesthetic degradation of the natural environment, a growing sense that civility itself is in decline, and a conviction that these problems are related intrinsically to the physical form of suburbia, has led to a movement to revive the physical forms of traditional cities known as New Urbanism. This essay argues that a conscientious effort to make churches a part of new, traditional, urban, formal settings will both better promote the church's evangelical mission on behalf of the City of God and contribute to the civilizing function of the City of Man, and proposes several practical strategies for churches to promote traditional urbanism.
Society, 2008
When the New York Times announced in 2004 that its long-time neo-modernist architecture critic He... more When the New York Times announced in 2004 that its long-time neo-modernist architecture critic Herbert Muschamp would be succeeded by the then Los Angeles Times neo-modernist architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, it instantly prompted this dry witty bit of architecture critic criticism from the Los Angeles New Urbanist architect Stefanos Polyzoides: “New York’s loss will be Los Angeles’s gain.”
Religion and Innovation : Antagonists or Partners?
When the New York Times announced in 2004 that its long-time neo-modernist architecture critic He... more When the New York Times announced in 2004 that its long-time neo-modernist architecture critic Herbert Muschamp would be succeeded by the then Los Angeles Times neo-modernist architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, it instantly prompted this dry witty bit of architecture critic criticism from the Los Angeles New Urbanist architect Stefanos Polyzoides: “New York’s loss will be Los Angeles’s gain.”
The Journal of Markets and Morality, 2006
The city has historically been regarded as the place most conducive to the good life for human be... more The city has historically been regarded as the place most conducive to the good life for human beings and is also a central metaphor and theme of historic Christianity. However, the Industrial Revolution unleashed a social and cultural revolution that has led to a devaluation of the city as a reality and a corresponding ascendance of suburbia as a cultural ideal. The consumption of the landscape by post-World War II suburban sprawl, the corresponding ecological and aesthetic degradation of the natural environment, a growing sense that civility itself is in decline, and a conviction that these problems are related intrinsically to the physical form of suburbia, has led to a movement to revive the physical forms of traditional cities known as New Urbanism. This essay argues that a conscientious effort to make churches a part of new, traditional, urban, formal settings will both better promote the church's evangelical mission on behalf of the City of God and contribute to the civil...
Although it is largely unnoticed in the outside world, a multi-factional theory war has been ragi... more Although it is largely unnoticed in the outside world, a multi-factional theory war has been raging for some time within the architectural community over the very nature, purpose, and meaning of architecture and the city. The context of these battles is, of course, late modernity. Our globally expanding media and advertising saturated culture, with its increasingly specialized division of labor, immoderate habits of litigation, and explosion of technological gadgetry, poses significant challenges to the historically generalist and slow-to-change practice of architecture. It is hard for architects to make themselves heard these days, and for many years now architects have had to compete not only for jobs, but to justify architecture itself. This surely accounts not only for the recent explosion of architectural theory, but also for the ferocity of the factions in the theory wars. For well more than thirty years now partisans of architectural modernism, functionalism, structural expressionism, sustainability, neo-rationalism, post-modernism, contextualism, Manhattanism, neo-traditionalism, New Urbanism, critical theory, and deconstructivism all have been vying to stake out architecture's turf in a culture increasingly indifferent to architecture conceived as anything other than commercial advertisement, and the city as anything other than an entertainment zone.
Journal of Markets Morality, Mar 22, 2012
Bulletin of Science, Technology, & Society, 2000
Although it is largely unnoticed in the outside world, a multi-factional theory war has been ragi... more Although it is largely unnoticed in the outside world, a multi-factional theory war has been raging for some time within the architectural community over the very nature, purpose, and meaning of architecture and the city. The context of these battles is, of course, late modernity. Our globally expanding media and advertising saturated culture, with its increasingly specialized division of labor, immoderate habits of litigation, and explosion of technological gadgetry, poses significant challenges to the historically generalist and slow-to-change practice of architecture. It is hard for architects to make themselves heard these days, and for many years now architects have had to compete not only for jobs, but to justify architecture itself. This surely accounts not only for the recent explosion of architectural theory, but also for the ferocity of the factions in the theory wars. For well more than thirty years now partisans of architectural modernism, functionalism, structural expressionism, sustainability, neo-rationalism, post-modernism, contextualism, Manhattanism, neo-traditionalism, New Urbanism, critical theory, and deconstructivism all have been vying to stake out architecture's turf in a culture increasingly indifferent to architecture conceived as anything other than commercial advertisement, and the city as anything other than an entertainment zone.
The Classicist, Volume 3, 1996
New Urbanists provide a helpful but incomplete argument for the traditional city, one that pertai... more New Urbanists provide a helpful but incomplete argument for the traditional city, one that pertains primarily to the social and ecological parsimony of certain traditional urban forms. Most architects who become traditional urbanists do so primarily for aesthetic reasons, but although there are certain shared formal sympathies among traditional urbanists, there may or may not be agreement among them---among us---with respect to the cultural implications of the argument that follows. However, since it is ostensibly over its allegedly sinister cultural implications that modernists, environmentalists, libertarians
and contemporary critical theorists take the New Urbanism and its apologists to task, it is upon just these implications that I wish to focus. For if my cultural thesis with respect to traditional architecture and urbanism is correct, the genuine renewal of these traditions is going to be a long term endeavor for which the master plans and urban codes central to New Urbanist promotion of traditional urban forms will be necessary but not at all sufficient measures.
Presuming therefore a certain basic agreement among New Urbanists about the formal qualities and characteristics of good towns and cities, this paper pursues two potentially more controversial topics: first, why good urbanism both tends to and should be characterized by the architectural monumentalization of civilizing institutions; and second, whether in late twentieth century societies such institutions are sufficiently strong to make good urbanism possible. On the first topic there may already be substantial agreement among New Urbanists, but also too much assumed and not enough specified about what it means to be "civilized," and about the necessary relationship of virtues and institutions to that state of being. The argument that follows therefore devotes considerable space to just such a description. With regard to the second topic I am of two minds, and wish therefore to propose two alternative scenarios for the future of traditional urbanism. The first and more optimistic of these I call the Tocqueville scenario; the second, less optimistic and more radical, I call the Benedict scenario. Their differences notwithstanding, an essentially Aristotelian notion of virtue and civility is central to each; and each therefore justifies a re-evaluation of the culture-building and culture-sustaining role of communal and ascetic disciplines, practices,
and institutions.
Denver Post, 1995
April is the cruelest month lamented T.S. Eliot, and only partly because he couldn't hit the curv... more April is the cruelest month lamented T.S. Eliot, and only partly because he couldn't hit the curve ball.
espn.go.com, 1999
Granting their deficiencies in public restrooms and handicapped accessibility, American baseball ... more Granting their deficiencies in public restrooms and handicapped accessibility, American baseball parks built between 1909 and 1923 were superior to today's new downtown stadiums because they were located in city neighborhoods. They manifested an urban culture, in which cities were first and foremost places to live, where even persons who were not rich could live well. Thus cities included within close proximity residences and businesses, schools and churches, recreations and entertainments; and ballparks were buildings designed in and for traditional urban neighborhoods.
America since 1945 has become a suburban culture. Suburbs (a cultural conspiracy catering to the illusion that unpleasantness in life can be avoided) have drained cities of middle class residents, and cities now are trying--foolishly, desperately, mistakenly--to remake themselves into entertainment zones. New urban stadiums are prominent in this strategy, but less as places for baseball than as expensive city-sponsored architectural devices that help teams separate suburbanites from their money.
Here are 50 reasons why the old ballparks were better than today’s new stadiums:
The Humanist Art Review, 2001
Historically, one purpose of architecture is pragmatic, and concerns the interests of particular ... more Historically, one purpose of architecture is pragmatic, and concerns the interests of
particular communities that are patrons of architecture. A second purpose is formal, and concerns standards of excellence within the architectural community. And a third purpose---civic purpose---is similar to the others in that it too refers architectural ends to a community; but it differs in that the community with which it is concerned, the city, is rarely if ever the direct patron of architecture. This difference therefore requires some further consideration of just what kind of community the city is, and the nature of the city's purposes.
Civitas, 1997
The historic relationship of religious sensibility to artistic sensibility is both self evident a... more The historic relationship of religious sensibility to artistic sensibility is both self evident and complex. But this relationship has become problematic in a post-modern world on the one hand no longer confident in the social and intellectual adequacy of secular materialism, in which on the other hand both religious and artistic sensibilities have become themselves to a remarkable and unprecedented degree secularized and / or individualized.
Inland Architect, 1993
Critical theory has been for the last several years the ascendant philosophical force in architec... more Critical theory has been for the last several years the ascendant philosophical force in architectural education, and not least in Chicago. To the extent that critical theory has provided a theme for architectural investigation, that theme has been suspicion, the relentless questioning of all authority-a general challenge to prevailing opinion of whatever substantive content. Interestingly however, critical theorists appear willfully uncritical when it comes to the idea of authority itself.
Elysian Fields Quarterly, 1992
in a brief essay on the practicality of theory, noted that a defense of theoretical thinking expo... more in a brief essay on the practicality of theory, noted that a defense of theoretical thinking exposes one to the cheap charge of fiddling while Rome is burning....There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist....It is wrong to fiddle while Rome burns; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning.
Journal of Markets and Morality, 2003
The city has historically been regarded as the place most conducive to the good life for human be... more The city has historically been regarded as the place most conducive to the good life for human beings and is also a central metaphor and theme of historic Christianity. However, the Industrial Revolution unleashed a social and cultural revolution that has led to a devaluation of the city as a reality and a corresponding ascendance of suburbia as a cultural ideal. The consumption of the landscape by post-World War II suburban sprawl, the corresponding ecological and aesthetic degradation of the natural environment, a growing sense that civility itself is in decline, and a conviction that these problems are related intrinsically to the physical form of suburbia, has led to a movement to revive the physical forms of traditional cities known as New Urbanism. This essay argues that a conscientious effort to make churches a part of new, traditional, urban, formal settings will both better promote the church's evangelical mission on behalf of the City of God and contribute to the civilizing function of the City of Man, and proposes several practical strategies for churches to promote traditional urbanism.
Society, 2008
When the New York Times announced in 2004 that its long-time neo-modernist architecture critic He... more When the New York Times announced in 2004 that its long-time neo-modernist architecture critic Herbert Muschamp would be succeeded by the then Los Angeles Times neo-modernist architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, it instantly prompted this dry witty bit of architecture critic criticism from the Los Angeles New Urbanist architect Stefanos Polyzoides: “New York’s loss will be Los Angeles’s gain.”
Socializing Land and Incentivizing Development as Common Good Practical Politics in Kane County, ... more Socializing Land and Incentivizing Development as Common Good Practical Politics in Kane County, Illinois (with a draft effort to answer the John Q. Public question "How much would I pay?")
LaFox, Illinois owes its origins to a spirited 19th century French expatriate, the youngest son o... more LaFox, Illinois owes its origins to a spirited 19th century French expatriate, the youngest son of minor nobility who had lost their vestigial family privileges in the Revolution of 1848. A chance encounter with Democracy in America had prompted him, with impeccably bad timing, to quit his ancestral estate in the rural Parisian district of Clichy-Gennevilliers and sail for Philadelphia less than two decades prior to the former’s Second Empire ascendance as France’s premiere urban wastewater-enriched farmland. (“Pas merde?” he had smiled to himself on reading the news from home.) Wending westward toward Illinois, in 1852 he charmed the stolid young widow of one of Chicago’s earliest successful real estate speculators -- “Nancy? Ah, cher: May I tell you of Le Place Stanislaus?” -- into giving him money to purchase 1200 acres of frontier prairie about four miles west of the present-day Kane County Fox River town of Geneva. He drily dubbed its (not very) high-point “Mt. Reynard” and shortly thereafter adopted the nom agraire of Louis Francis Xavier LaFox.