From Jonathan Hale's The Old Way of Seeing:

"Everywhere in the buildings of the past is relationship among parts: contrast, tension, balance. Compare the buildings of today and we see no such patterns. We see fragmentation, mismatched systems, uncertainty. This disintegration tends to produce not ugliness so much as dullness, and an impression of unreality.

"The principles that underlie harmonious design are found everywhere and in every time before our own; they are the historical norm. They are the same in the eighteenth century houses of Newburyport, Massachusetts, in the buildings of old Japan, in Italian villages, in the cathedrals of France, in the ruins of the Yucatan. The same kinds of patterns organize Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House and Michelangelo's Capitol.

"If a building makes us light up, it is not because we see order; any row of file cabinets is ordered. What we recognize and love is the same kind of pattern we see in every face, the patterns of our own life form. The same principles apply to buildings that apply to mollusks, birds, or trees. Architecture is the play of patterns derived from nature and ourselves."

(Qtd. in Dreher, Crunchy Cons)