Building more value into the world we build.

Throughout history, great civilizations have left powerful imprints on the human habitat. From Angkor Wat to Yucatan, beauty and grandeur in the design of temples, palaces, memorials--even whole precincts or cities--have resulted. During the half century that Modern Age has been in print, however, the United States has emerged as the first preeminent power in the history of the world that has signally failed in these monumental endeavors. After World War II, our civic and religious buildings became test tubes for one forlorn architectural theory or other, our civic monuments became unmonumental or even anti-monumental--think of the pathetic, sprawling FDR Memorial in Washington, DC--and our community planning eschewed qualitative visions in three dimensions for essentially quantitative, two-dimensional blueprints.

World War II marks not just a point of transition but a veritable chasm in the annals of American civic art because we were doing quite well on the whole during the first decades of the twentieth century. Just check out a survey like The American Architecture of Today, published in 1927 and written by the Harvard scholar G. H. Edgell, and you'll see what I mean.

There is no question that our civic art's fall and modernism's rise are joined at the hip. It is also significant that modernism was mainly impelled not by aesthetic motives but by developments outside the province of the visual arts such as Enlightenment rationalism and skepticism, the triumphs of modern science, the Industrial Revolution, and Hegelian and romantic divinations concerning the Zeitgeist. Functionalist planning pegged to the automobile's advent was one byproduct of this cultural upheaval. Such planning lay at the heart of modernist visions ranging from Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse to Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City. But it also found fertile soil in the utilitarianism that runs deep in the American character and, mutatis mutandis, blossomed into "sprawl"--the leapfrogging, low-density urban tissue that by now accounts for the vast majority of the nation's built environment.

For those of us who dislike sprawl basically because it doesn't look good, modernism's inartistic roots should serve as a reminder that focusing on aesthetics only gets you so far. Sprawl is part of the fabric of American life, and increasingly tied to upwardly-mobile lifestyles the world over. It is going to be with us as long as there is a plentiful supply of cheap land.

Indeed, those who care about beauty and grandeur in the world we build must acknowledge our currently countercultural status. In a country as wealthy and culturally diverse as the United States, however, countercultural movements can create important roles for themselves, particularly when they are grounded in enduring human aspirations. At a very deep level, human beings have always sought, and always will seek, a world built on humanist terms--a world that makes the human body at home, while enriching the life of the spirit. In the modern age, that yearning must compete with other, supposedly more practical, desires. But it will always be with us.

The emerging counterculture is composed of various trends and movements in the various arts based on drawings that are by no means as well coordinated and interactive as they might be. Within particular arts, moreover, traditionalists' aims are lacking in aesthetic and intellectual rigor. In addition to thinking about this counterculture more holistically, we need to think of it as a means of adding more value, economic as well as cultural, to our communities. And it is essential that thinking people of a culturally conservative bent reflect on the higher ends beauty and grandeur serve--including, as I will argue at the conclusion of this essay, the preservation of a vital dimension of man's historic identity.

Certainly, "value" in both senses just mentioned applies to the most hopeful symptom of civic art's recovery. This is the New Urbanism--the renewal of three-dimensional, qualitative civic design that forsakes the bubble diagrams and atomized spaces of postwar automobile-scale planning for mixed uses, higher densities, and the pedestrian scale. A quarter century after its emergence at Seaside, the Florida Panhandle community designed by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (whose firm is known as DPZ), the New Urbanism remains a niche phenomenon in real estate development, but one with a promising future.

The "walkable," "neotraditional" neighborhood is the most familiar New Urbanist leitmotif. And the pedestrian-scale neighborhood is the historic module of urban communities, from the hamlet to the big city. A less well-known but immensely significant template, developed by Duany and Plater-Zyberk, is the Transect, which represents the spectrum of human and natural habitats from city center to wilderness. The Transect is imbued with the classical principle of decor, or appropriateness. It prescribes a range of building densities, types, and degrees of articulation (or decoration), as well as more or less artificial road-and street-scapes, in accordance with specific habitats.

Decor, in turn, reflects the awareness that nature has been framed with a legibly hierarchical intent that renders it meaningful. At a time when intellectual discourse is to a remarkable degree shaped not merely by environmental activists but by explicitly anti-human "deep ecologists"--who surely account in part for the widespread, unquestioning belief that climate change is a wholly anthropogenic phenomenon--decor is a profoundly countercultural concept. It establishes as natural the primacy of the most artificial, most intensely humanized, urban environment: the historic city, the city monumental. And the New Urbanists, or at least the more lucid among them, have adopted this principle, among other things, for the sake of a more environmentally responsible ethos of community-building.

Though it has been codified (under a Yuppie trademark, the SmartCode) as a substitute or overlay for conventional postwar zoning ordinances, it will be a long time before the Transect shapes the human habitat on the broad scale in this country. In the near term, it will continue to apply to the spectrum of habitats within historic urban communities, and to the layout of new "neotraditional" towns, villages, and neighborhoods.

It will also be some time before we know to what extent the New Urbanism is taking hold in the lengthy reconstruction campaigns in Mississippi and Louisiana in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath. But it's worth noting that only the New Urbanists have produced compelling visions at the regional scale for reconstruction of the coastal communities devastated by the storm, as well as practical and attractive design solutions for affordable housing in the form of Katrina Cottage home-building kits and the like. The irrelevance of an increasingly provincial and reactionary modernist establishment is obvious. It has little to offer Katrina's victims, so sprawl is the only real alternative out there. The problem is that sprawl is not about vision. It is just the utilitarian default setting.

II

While the Transect is essential to understanding the New Urbanism, the cornerstone of any resurgence of traditional design is the human body. Its centrality is both formal and symbolic, for the implication of the Biblical teaching that man was made in God's image is surely that he is both the most beautiful of created beings and the most cosmically significant, marking as he does the point of intersection between the realms of spirit and matter. In the West, the human body has served as the foundation of design to a degree unparalleled in any other part of the world.

The composition of the human figure--its organic complexity, harmonious proportions, and scale--plays out in different ways in different realms of humanist design, more vividly in painting and sculpture, more abstractly but still anthropomorphically in architectural composition, and more abstractly still in the design of traditional streetscapes and public squares, which typically provide a sense of enclosure and a bodily sense of welcome. The historic city or town's spatial integration of different human activities at a humane scale--everything from walking and driving to dwelling, shopping, working, playing, and worshiping--also relates to the way our bodies integrate an almost inconceivably complex array of functions.

What we have witnessed in our civic art over the last half century or so is the inexorable loss of organic complexity grounded in the human form. Because no convincing alternative to that model has emerged under the modernist dispensation, the dehumanization of art has resulted in a serious degradation of American civilization.

Sprawl, along with the public housing towers and other megaprojects erected by postwar "urban renewers" under Le Corbusier's spell, has involved the disaggregation of urban functions, which are relegated not to complex, more or less continuous streetscapes with extroverted frontages, but rather to more or less isolated, introverted precincts. It is true these precincts can be very complex in their own right. Regional shopping centers can include everything from public library branches and county government offices to amusement parks and medical clinics.

But the fact remains that functionalist postwar planning has sacrificed the spatial integration of human activities for their dispersion amidst vast expanses of asphalt--expressways, arterials, parking lots--in the name of easy automobile access. As a result, "space values" have indeed morphed into "time values," meaning the time you spend in your car getting from one place to another, just as Frank Lloyd Wright observed late in life (emphasis Wright's). The more or less inept renditions of traditional architectural motifs and styles one often encounters in exurban developments--gables multiplying like loaves and fishes, Palladian windows on steroids--lamely compensate for spatially amorphous settings, while camouflaging the radical transformation of the human habitat. This lack of explicit stylistic iconoclasm largely accounts for modernism's refusal to recognize its bastard offspring.

Within cities historically calibrated to the human scale, similarly radical transformations--generally shorn of the "traditional" stylistic window-dressing--have been disastrous, which is why "urban renewal" is now pretty much a thing of the past in this country. (Of course, some people never learn, as recent dystopian schemes for flood-ravaged New Orleans remind us. (1)) Downtown Boston, with the pleasing organic curves and fine-grained intricacy of its old streets and blocks, is a good example. Under a 1960's master plan by I. M. Pei's longtime partner Henry I. Cobb, the city swept away much of this downtown fabric, demolishing over 1,000 buildings in the down-at-heel area around Scollay Square and displacing 20,000 residents in order to implant the inhumanly scaled, utterly alienating Government Center precinct, whose main feature is a brutalist, widely detested City Hall (1968, designed by Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles).

Urban renewal projects like Government Center and the contemporaneous demolition of Charles Follen McKim's great Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, in order to make way for the execrable Madison Square Garden complex, not only galvanized the historic preservation movement, but convinced many Americans that any change in the historic architectural fabric could only be for the worse. Not a very encouraging cultural indicator.

Similarly, sprawl has generated complaints that it is an unworthy successor to the natural or rural habitats it displaces--that nature gets the short end of the stick because the subdivisions or office parks that take its place don't qualify as culture. Even residents of new subdivisions can get pretty agitated when a developer threatens to ruin their view of the cornfield next door (while increasing their traffic woes to boot).

Witold Ribczynski has written two highly informative and enjoyable books on urbanism--City Life (1995) and now Last Harvest, a superb account of the vicissitudes of New Daleville, a New Urbanist-inspired, mainstream-market project outside Philadelphia. Together they provide many clues to the future of sprawl and the American urban environment generally. It is likely to be a hybrid and indeed fragmented future. Sprawl will predominate, but it will increasingly include New Urbanist elements such as pedestrian-scale "town centers." Bona fide New Urbanism will also spread at an increasing pace, and it will be accompanied by fairly close approximations like New Daleville--and by plenty of cruder imitations. (Marketed as a "village," New Daleville is really a subdivision, but with smaller lots, better public spaces, and houses stylistically less contrived than in the typical exurb.)

In this light, my occasional visits to Kentlands--DPZ's second major project, laid out on the site of a 356-acre farm in Montgomery County, Maryland, in 1988--have been encouraging. Kentlands got off to a rocky start because of the major real estate downturn in the early 1990's, and because of the building industry's unfamiliarity with the fine-grained urbanism DPZ practices. But it has steadily improved over time. Though not incorporated as such, it is closely akin to a traditional town.

DPZ's work is geared to generating a diversity of housing types in close proximity to one another, as is often the case in traditional neighborhoods. Building lots at Kentlands are compact. A house design, moreover, is not considered on its own terms, but in terms of its contribution to the quality of the streetscape. On Kentlands' Main Street, one of the most recent parcels to be completed, one encounters shops and offices with apartments overhead such as one sees in Georgetown or Old Town Alexandria. Such domestically-scaled "live/work" buildings were almost universally banished by what Duany calls the "artificial simplicity" of postwar planning. But there happens to be a market for them.

Greater complexity is evident too in the layout of Kentlands' streets and public spaces. In many subdivisions, parks and playgrounds are simply leftover space--awkward, undesigned parcels left over after the building lots have been demarcated. How different is the little park-cum-playground in Kentlands' Hill District, with houses enclosing it on three sides. It is a welcoming space.

III

Let us move now to the opposite end of the design spectrum, from humanist community planning to the interpretation of the human figure itself in sculpture and painting. The figure is the supreme decorative as well as symbolic element in Western art. Institutional buildings in core cities should be enriched with it, whether in relief or in the round, and it should have a cardinal role in the design of our memorials. The figure is the well-spring of monumentality and grandeur, the foundation of a sound civic art. And the complexity issues in humanist art are nowhere more challenging than in the modeling--the classical modeling--of the human figure.

This is a seriously problematic issue, because the figure is now routinely misinterpreted, even by our traditionally-inclined artists, as Brad Parker, an unusually gifted and erudite sculptor based in Bethesda, Maryland, convincingly argues. The root cause of this unfortunate situation, Parker maintains, is the limited understanding of the truly exemplary Greek achievement in sculpture even among Renaissance schools, which tended to be secretive about their knowledge and methods. Michelangelo's knowledge of Greek sculpture, for example, was transmitted to only a small number of followers in succeeding generations. This Greek achievement, by the way, reminds us that the modern idea of a linear evolution in human affairs is useless to an understanding of the history of Western art.

Through an extremely complex and demanding array of formal techniques, Parker observes, classical sculpture strives for the distillation and clarification of the geometry that is unique to each human being, in the sense that a cut diamond has its own unique faceted geometry. This orchestration of complexity--which lends itself either to more idealized or more particularized and realistic representations--imbues the figure with a deeper, more complete reality than the fragmented sense impressions experienced in nature. As a result, the incomparably monumental female figures from the east pediment of the Parthenon in the British Museum, modeled by Phidias in the fifth century B.C., seem to have erupted from some mysterious inner nucleus; they radiate an erotic energy purified of baser elements. They seem to incarnate another nature, a higher nature.

This energy might be dismissed as pagan or even demonic, but it is in fact rooted in beauty. Neoplatonists like Michelangelo who saw the achievement of unparalleled beauty in Greek art as eminently compatible with Christian belief were correct, for such beauty is a token of heavenly things, just as the Renaissance master said in one of his sonnets. The memory of that beauty and its other-worldliness stays with you. And while the power of those Parthenon figures may be unsurpassed, it is not only ancient art that provides experiences of this kind. The perfection of proportions of the East Front of the Louvre or the dome of the United States Capitol has a similarly transporting, otherworldly effect that is likewise essentially physiological. And when we enter the Capitol rotunda, within the dome, our emotions soar in response to its lofty vault just as our lungs expand when we breathe. (2) That physiological response is enhanced by a celestial spectacle, Constantino Brumidi's immense mural painting, The Apotheosis of Washington, crowning the rotunda.

Great civic art involves, even if it is not limited to, the distillation of our elementary experiences of nature--of form, mass, space, movement, color--into complex yet readily legible, aesthetically resonant archetypes. These archetypes can range from a beautiful landscape to an imposing urban vista, from a general view of a magnificent church or courthouse to a particular, stirring allegory on canvas or in stone. These archetypes are intimations of an ideal realm that informs and enriches our brief earthly sojourns. When we encounter them for the first time--even without having seen them in photographs--we sometimes have the uncanny sense of encountering something we'd always been carrying within us. We experience not the shock of the new, but the shock of recognition.

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Unfortunately, over the last 150 years an increasingly simplistic and oppressive naturalism has compromised the labors of our avowedly traditional artists, including celebrated figures like Sargent, who have tended to focus on the more or less literal, superficial transcription of natural appearances with the aim of producing finished optical records. Photography has had a big hand in this trend, which involves a fatal narrowing of the gap between art and nature. Many a "traditional" artist--Eakins for one--has come to rely on the camera.

The upshot is that reality is no longer latent in the model, and no longer essentially a function of form. Reality lies rather in the act of perception, and it is a function, increasingly, of light and shade. Impressionism takes the fallacy to a further extreme, simply dissolving form in light, while its high-pitched tonal chromaticism deprives color of its deeper harmonies and symbolic resonance. Historically, these were the first major steps towards modernism's sundry solipsisms, for the artist's notion of perception, deprived of objective grounding in classical principles of form--however superficially those principles might have been grasped--inevitably became increasingly subjective. The chaos that rules our "art world" was the inevitable result.

A preoccupation with surface effects inculcated in Parisian ateliers weakened but by no means wholly vitiated the output of illustrious American sculptors like Daniel Chester French and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, both of them gifted designers. Preferable, however, is the more classically informed public sculpture produced by the prolific J. Q. A. Ward (1830-1910), whose Ether Monument in Boston's Public Garden, with its two intricately interwoven allegorical figures-in-the-round, is a marvel. Ward's work might not rank with the greatest Western sculpture, but because his formal grounding was sound the yield on his creative efforts was impressive. The good is not the enemy of the great. And the decorative work of lesser lights like the prolific Frederick MacMonnies (1863-1937) is partially redeemed by its at least superficial appropriateness to structures designed by able architects. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, French training changed the course of American architecture, channeling it towards a more assured, classically-oriented monumentality, and here the influence of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was altogether more salutary than in the fine arts.

And it must be acknowledged that our finest classical figures are the work of Frenchmen who understood what the Greeks were about. Bartholdi's titanic Statue of Liberty is our greatest monument, period, while Houdon's George Washington statue in the state Capitol in Richmond is the definitive image of the man: a superb particularized likeness.

The aim for sculpture and painting--specifically monumental sculpture and mural painting for institutional buildings--must be to recover truly classical principles of organic complexity. However, a burgeoning crop of traditionally-oriented American art schools has basically picked up where the French academy left off, lumping impressionism into the pedagogical menu. This is natural, but also regrettable. Very few traditionally-oriented painters and sculptors at work these days have eschewed the optical record for deeper principles of formal content. Artists trained along these academic lines do not think in terms of deep structure, which is to say that they do not think in truly monumental terms. This is the upshot of a fundamentally unclassical method of instruction, even though current exponents of this method often call themselves "classical realists."

Organic complexity in the design of the human habitat is hard to achieve, right across the board. In sculpture and painting the task is currently particularly difficult not only because it takes so much time to model such complexity into the composition--though this is synonymous with adding value to the same--but also because neither civic art patrons nor the art market grasp the formal issues. So the value the most competent sculptors or painters add easily goes unrewarded. In sum, where monumental sculpture or painting is concerned, we have both a supply problem and a demand problem.

The classical figure's recovery, or rediscovery, is the most formidable task facing the traditional counter-culture because its achievement requires the attraction to sculpture and painting of minds that, in our day and age, are normally drawn to complexity issues in fields like information technology, physics, and mathematics. But without that rediscovery, our traditionally-oriented art will be aesthetically and symbolically shortchanged, lacking in power to transfigure the human body, to endow it with a reality exalted above the experiential reality of everyday life, to render it an intimation of our spiritual destiny.

The picture is brighter at the other end of the design spectrum. With traditional urbanism, the main problem is supply--the supply of designers, planners, traffic engineers, and developers who grasp the complexity issues. For the record, designing a town like Kentlands is not a matter of just plopping a grid down on a given site. It takes great skill, involving exploitation of the natural topography to create inviting settings for a range of building types as well as the canting of street layouts to create compelling vistas. In other words--and contrary to the familiar New Urbanist complaint--the biggest drag on high-quality New Urbanism's propagation, in the near term at least, is not a sprawl-oriented regulatory regime for land use, which is slowly changing in any event. It is the shortage of know-how. On the demand side, the market has recognized the value of organic complexity. Real estate prices at Seaside are in the stratosphere, and have long since converted it into a posh resort. Homes at Kentlands and other New Urbanist communities also enjoy a premium relative to those in neighboring subdivisions due to the quality of their urban setting.

Achieving a more monumental architecture for the most formal, artificial urban settings--especially for institutional buildings--is another major challenge. Modernist architecture is based on the use of structural frames of steel or steel-reinforced concrete. Thin "skins" or "curtain walls" consisting of panelized cladding are hung on these frames. The guiding theoretical principle here has been the "dematerialization" of the wall, along with the negation of the classical principle of monumental mass. But the real estate market is mainly interested in what this means for the bottom line. Frame constructon with panelized cladding is a cheap way to build. It sees you through an investment cycle. The cladding, however, tends to deteriorate fairly rapidly, and it isn't uncommon to see modernist office buildings being "reskinned" twenty or twenty-five years after they were built.

Traditional architects swiftly adopted the new frame construction systems (which made tall buildings possible) when they appeared late in the nineteenth century, but they combined these systems with self-supporting masonry walls that conveyed a sense of mass while providing generous insulation. This construction method is typically more expensive than curtain wall systems, so the achievement of depth of relief and a vigorous interplay of light and shade--key features of monumental architecture--has become something of a rarity. Nevertheless, Philadelphia classicist John Blatteau achieved precisely these qualities, without resort to self-supporting walls, on the strikingly handsome limestone facade of his Riggs (now PNC) Bank branch (1990) in downtown Bethesda, Maryland. The facade's design includes an array of engaged Roman Doric columns, and skillfully incorporates the large glazed expanses frame construction encourages. And while we're on the subject of cost, let us be mindful that a Frank Gehry building's contorted metal forms, which amount to a viral reaction against the curtain-walled modernist box, come at a very steep price.

It so happens that Princeton University has recently undertaken construction of a new science library designed by Gehry and a residential college in the Collegiate Gothic style (for which Princeton's campus is well known). The latter was designed by Demetri Porphyrios, a member of Prince Charles's circle. Just completed, Whitman College is a large, impressive assemblage of 10 buildings, arranged around two courtyards and housing 500 students. It is built with load-bearing masonry walls, meaning there is no steel or concrete frame to support the floors. The walls boast outer envelopes of fieldstone or limestone. The science library's design, on the other hand, is at least contextual in that it plays off the sharply contrasting scales of the adjacent buildings. It features the familiar twisting metal panels. It is an exercise in inorganic complexity.

Whitman is going to age gracefully as the patina of time enriches the stone. It will also perform very well from a structural standpoint. As a matter of fact, barring some catastrophe, it will be around for hundreds of years. Whitman, in other words, is likely to increase in cultural value over the long term as an asset that enriches Princeton's architectural patrimony. It will be loved. Were it not for the inadequacy of its figurative detail, it would be loved even more.

As for the science library, one can only hope it does not leak. Over the longer term, it will not age. It will corrode. Moreover, it will probably peak in cultural value within a relatively narrow time frame. It is, after all, essentially an architectural fashion statement--a manifestation of an architectural theory or sensibility fundamentally conceived in terms of the negation of other theories and sensibilities. It has no normative architectural significance whatsoever: idiosyncracy is the whole point. In sum, it would be surprising if Gehry's library were still standing a century from now, both because of its structural character and because it probably will not be loved in any meaningful sense of the word. Buildings that are loved are much more likely to bear the humanist imprint, regardless of style.

As for environmental concerns, forget the notion that the most "sustainable" buildings are those boasting plethoras of photovoltaic cells or systems for channeling rainwater into tree planters and urinals. On the contrary, as New Urbanist architect Steve Mouzon notes, they are simply the buildings that are not torn down and replaced--an extremely energy-intensive process. They are the buildings that endure because they are well designed and well built. And because they are loved.

Yet you could argue that the generation of beauty and grandeur in the public realm is expensive, and that we really do not have the creative infrastructure to do the job at this stage of the game. And, of course, we unprecedentedly prosperous Americans can always hop on an airliner and see all the beauty and grandeur we want in Paris or Rome or Washington, DC. Why fork out a bundle for it at home? So far as their immediate surroundings are concerned, many American conservatives, not to speak of libertarians, are no doubt happy to settle for a big home on a spacious exurban lot that affords plenty of privacy, with the SUV in the driveway an emblem of freedom, mobility, and, as Wright put it, "democratic individuality."

Those who do not share this outlook, from High Modernists to New Urbanists, tend to be snobbish about it. The fact remains that sprawl cannot be dissociated from the steadily increasing prosperity Americans have enjoyed since World War II. And its origins are not wholly utilitarian. It also grew out of the romantic nineteenth-century yearning for more salubrious family life in greener settings, at a safe remove from the cluttered, dirty, immoral industrial city. One must remember, too, that the well-to-do who inhabited the early railway suburbs (which were very well designed) established the migration pattern. Americans tend to want to live the way rich people do--unless the rich are living in unmetaphorically glass houses. Many a humble exurban dwelling has been built in the plantation manor's image.

Yet the New Urbanist critique that sprawl does not constitute culture is a serious one, if somewhat off-target. True, the postwar subdivision tends to be a seriously degraded rendition of its pre-World War II antecedents. But sprawl nevertheless accommodates a fairly specific way of life, which is a reasonable definition of culture. To oversimplify, that way of life revolves around the automobile, the tract house with its formidable array of modern conveniences, the shopping mall (for commerce, socializing, entertainment, etc.), the office park, the megachurch, television, and now, the Internet. It is also obvious by now that this overarching urban culture can accommodate a variety of ethnic cultures. But how many of us would argue that sprawl represents high culture, or American civilization at its best?

To turn the tables, does a New Urbanist "neotraditional" streetscape ipso facto constitute culture? It is a question worth pondering. The New Urbanists talk a lot about community, but their idea of community often boils down to folks dwelling blissfully in their "walkable," "livable," "sustainable" neighborhoods, where they get to sit on the porch after dinner and chat with passersby. It is a shallow idea, one to which the New Urbanists have unquestionably contributed salutary principles of design. It is doubtful, however, that the culture of a New Urbanist community is necessarily more profound, let alone more conducive to the flourishing of civic virtue, than that of a subdivision. This matters, because not only is "community" a highly effective marketing buzzword these days, but New Urbanism, like the railway suburbs of yore, is a hit with wealthy Americans, which is one big reason we should expect its impact on the American landscape to increase over time.

Three cheers, then, for the New Urbanist developers who have donated lots for churches. It is a start on achieving real community. Culture is most likely to flourish when the arts of form are wedded to a rich spiritual as well as civic life--and to a sense of community not just among the living, but between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. The origins of both culture and community--as Joseph Bottum reminds us (3)--are traceable to the commemoration of the dead. (In this sense, the monument has been a fundamental expression of culture from prehistoric times.) Culture and community thus bear fruit in beautiful churches, synagogues, and cemeteries, and in imposing memorials to the patriotism, courage, and self-sacrifice on which communities ultimately rely for their survival. They inspire dignified civic, religious, and domestic structures that idealize the various realms of human endeavor, providing a timeless backdrop to our daily lives.

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Obviously, "neotraditional" streetscapes are far better calibrated to such a cultural dispensation than sprawl, but their long-term economic performance, which will almost certainly be far superior as well, might just be further enhanced to the degree they harbor communities in this richer, historic sense. Let us reiterate that in and of themselves, those streetscapes, like the conventional New Urbanist idea of community, amount to a decidedly incomplete manifestation of culture. They are no more than an armature, a framework, for cultural regeneration.

That is where conservatism enters, or should enter, the picture--to complete it by fleshing out the construction of communities in the deeper sense of the word. It would thereby foster an American culture better attuned to the spiritual ramifications of beauty (as Michelangelo understood them), and better attuned to the breadth of man's spiritual and emotional horizons--in sum, a culture that, through the arts of form, would incarnate a more complete understanding of what it means to be a human being and a citizen. Absent an informed cultural conservatism, however, our currently fragmented artistic counterculture could turn out to be a pudding without a theme.

The problem is that since modernism's triumph American conservatism has become almost completely disengaged from civic art. Note that I did not say "art," period. It is a fair bet that the thriving market for "cowboy art" depicting scenes from the Old West--which typically reflects nineteenth-century French academic and impressionistic influences, transmitted through commercial art schools as well as fine art ateliers--is dominated by people of a conservative, traditionalist bent. But like the conceptualist junk littering many a Manhattan gallery, cowboy art is the product--the admittedly far more skillful product--of a subculture, not a civilization.

Such disengagement might have something to do with a widespread conservative assumption that public art and architecture have become the province of maniacs. But the principal cause is the utilitarian, individualist ethos that has come to dominate the conservative mind, while nurturing the sprawl phenomenon. This modernistic (if not modernist) ethos, in turn, has deep historical roots in the frontier settlement and evangelical Christianity, whereas the communitarian and incarnational impulses in civic art come to us mainly through the Anglican and Roman Catholic traditions, and ultimately originate in the Greco-Roman culture of the latter. The Angelic Doctor would have no trouble grasping the Transect's roots in natural law.

We can smile at the idea of the present-day Episcopal Church--which can't even find its way to completing Ralph Adams Cram's magisterial design for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine--fostering a classically-oriented artistic counterculture in this country. But the Roman Catholic Church is a different story. More and more Catholics have been asking themselves a question that really needs asking: Even if the Catholic faith can survive under the modernist/post-Vatican II dispensation of disaggregated urbanism, ugly churches, and liturgical desecration, how can Catholic culture possibly survive under that dispensation? And if Catholic culture withers on the vine, will not the faith inevitably mutate into the likeness of an evangelical sect?

As a result, there is a significant and growing reaction against modernism in Catholic ranks. We can hope that this awareness will in due course have a major impact on the design of Catholic churches, and maybe even their neighboring communities. (4) Such developments have a way of intensifying compatible trends in the secular culture. After the Civil War, the essentially religious fervor (noted by the late painter and critic Pierce Rice) for the commemoration of the heroic dead played a major role in fostering a broad, classically-oriented movement in institutional architecture, memorial design, and urbanism: the City Beautiful movement. And at a time when we're worrying about the deteriorating condition of our under-funded roads and, especially, bridges, it's worth remembering that the City Beautiful was very attentive to critical infrastructure issues, starting with public sanitation.

Culture is not static. Sooner or later the pendulum is bound to swing from the individualist towards the communitarian model of urbanism. It is, in fact, already moving, as we have seen. Change will likely be gradual, and I am not claiming for one instant that functionalist and modernist paradigms will disappear.

To those conservatives who would say capitalizing on this swing--by improving our civic art across the board--does not qualify as a cardinal priority, one could very reasonably reply that not only is it the key to enhancing the value, both cultural and economic, of our communities and landscapes, it is the key to putting American civilization back on an appropriate footing. It may not be indispensable to the nation's survival to construct habitats better calibrated to our beliefs, our ideals, and our innate desire for beauty and monumentality--not to mention our embodied state--but the failure to do so reflects a seriously impoverished sense of life. This failure obliterates, so far as the public realm is concerned, one of the noblest dimensions of our humanity as understood in the West from time immemorial: that of homo faber, who fashions his world in the human likeness.

To reiterate, the monumental impulse--which is historically inextricable from the communitarian and incarnational impulses--is part of our DNA. If you do not believe me, look at the military memorials that continue to be erected around the country. They are wholly unworthy of their purpose, according to norms that emerged many centuries ago, because our society is not nurturing a community of patrons, designers, and craftsmen capable of doing our heroes justice. These memorials are typically schlock--simulacra of tradition rather than the real item. It is a cultural spectacle which the founders of this republic, who strongly identified with the classical tradition in civic art, would behold in utter disbelief.

And while the Whitman College project shows that fine workmanship can still be found in this country, everyone knows how drastically the building trades have deteriorated under the modernist/utilitarian regime--amidst the prevailing myth that the only life worth living comes with a college degree and a white-collar job. Is this really the conservative way? Is it the conservative way to accede to the amputation of a major component of our humanity?

Over the last half century, America has been a great defender of freedom, at home and abroad. In other respects, it has been far from great. It has failed, and failed miserably, to add to its increasingly marginal stock of beautiful buildings and monuments, while low-grade urbanism, crummy architecture, and stillborn memorials have spread like kudzu. Our nation has failed to project its guiding beliefs and ideals into monumental form. It is past time for conservatives to think about strengthening the nation's artistic counterculture--about weaving the arts of form back into the fabric of American greatness.

1. See Nicolai Ouroussoff, "Two Infusions of Vision to Bolster New Orleans," in the New York Times (August 28, 2007), B1. 2. See Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism (London, 1924), 210-239. 3. "Death and Politics," First Things (June/July, 2007). 4. For further thoughts along these lines, see Philip Bess's essay "A Dutch Master and the Good Life," in his Til We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred (Wilmington, DE, 2006), 95-105.

CATESBY LEIGH is an art and architecture critic who lives in Washington, D.C.