Rod Dreher on architecture's role in shaping our sense of beauty, community, connection with the past, and connection with the future:

"We have been trained to think that beauty is a luxury; consequently, most Americans now live in places that they find hard to love, and that make ordinary human community difficult. I'm thinking of a story my friend David, who lives in Washington, D.C., once told me about a conversation he overheard one day at work, between two older African-American women who were surprised to run into each other. The women had been neighbors in a supposedly run-down neighborhood in the District, one that had been marked in the 1960s for expensive 'urban renewal.' The government bought the residents out, bulldozed their houses, and built -- ta-daah!-- housing projects. You can imagine how well that turned out.

"David said that listening to those women talk about what they had known in their old neighborhood,  for all its faults, was to understand what spiritual violence had been done to those people in the name of progress. A complex web of human relations had been spun by generations of neighbors was brushed away by the benevolent hand of the state. Those folks who remained were warehoused in giant concrete boxes that they did not care for because, well, who in their right mind would care for something so dehumanizing? The community collapsed.

. . . 

"[Writer] James Howard Kunstler . . . contended that since about 1945, we've been building neighborhoods not to suit authentic needs for beauty and community, but to move product as cheaply and quickly as possible. For reasons of expedience and efficiency, Kunstler argued, Americans cut themselves off from architectural tradition. . . . We began to build houses and neighborhoods and cities that have no connection to the past or the future, and that ultimately are not worth caring about. Our built landscape, Kunstler has written, 'ends up diminishing us spiritually, impoverishing us socially, and degrading the aggregate set of cultural patterns that we call civilization.'"

. . . 

Dreher makes the same point about churches, and I think he is right. We can build church buildings that look like movie theaters, boxes, or gymnasiums, or we can build church structures that reflect, in some small way, the glory of God. Which of these buildings is more likely to shape feelings of reverent awe and wonder at the grandeur of God? "Your typical conservative will scoff at [such questions], but he can only dismiss these questions if he is determined to ignore human nature, and the way built environment both expresses humanity's deepest longings and aspirations, and the way it shapes them."

From Crunchy Cons