Last winter Patrick Deneen delivered a lecture on how university architecture had gone “From Sacred Space to the Bunker and the Spaceship,” in which he detailed how the change in university purpose over the past century had been reflected in its buildings. When universities were first and foremost places of learning in which the accumulated wisdom of the ages was to be transmitted to a new generation, they followed classical forms. Gothic architecture pointed to heaven, the source of ultimate wisdom to Christians and Platonists alike. Libraries facilitated serendipitous encounter with books, students, and scholars alike, bringing the various sciences into dialogue with each other on the shelf and in the halls. 

 As John Dewey’s ideas took hold in the classroom (fittingly at the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School), and Le Corbusier’s in the architectural journals, the orientation turned away from learning as it had classically been understood and toward a fusion of personal development for students and research accumulation for professors. Libraries were built to store “publish or perish” books that would never be read, and classrooms to become plastic spaces of generic creativity. In time, classrooms would fade from focus altogether.

Jonathan Coppage, "When University Architecture Goes Nowhere"

In this amazing, ancient town, the very pattern of the place, of the houses and streets and of nature itself, the circling hills, the cliffs and trees, all focused my attention upon the one, important central fact of the church . . . Here, everywhere I went, I was forced, by the disposition of everything around me, to be always at least virtually conscious of the church. Every street pointed more or less inward to the center of the town, to the church. Every view of the town, from the exterior hills, centered upon the long grey building with its high spire. 

The church had been fitted into the landscape in such a way as to become the keystone of its intelligibility. Its presence imparted a special form, a particular significance to everything else that the eye beheld, to the hills, the forests, the fields, the white cliff of the Rocher d'Anglars and to the red bastion of the Roc Rogue, to the winding river, and the green balley of the Bonnette, the town and the bride, and even to the white stucco villas of the modern bourgeois that dotted the fields and orchards outside the precinct of the varnished ramparts: and the significance that was thus imparted was a supernatural one. 

The whole landscape, unified by the church and its heavenward spire, seemed to say: this is the meaning of all created things: we have been made for no other purpose than that men may use us in raising themselves to God, and in proclaiming the glory of God. We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonized together, that man's reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole. 

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain, 36-37

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

Today's architecture is, for the most part, meaningless, shallow, and impersonal. Just look at houses built in the last few decades. In Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher asks, "Why is that?" He says,

"For one, there are no front porches on those houses, and therefore nothing to encourage neighbors to open themselves to street life. Those houses turn their backs to their neighbors. For another, the utilitarian sameness in row after row speaks a pattern language of monotony. There are no parks, no playgrounds, no common areas. These stolid brick houses don't aspire to be more than shelter. There is no ornamentation, none of the human touches that endear us to older, traditional architecture, no matter what the style. To drive down our old street, or almost any residential street built in Dallas after the Second World War, is to encounter a monosyllabic pattern language that says the same word, over and over: efficiency.

"To understand why our modern residential landscape leaves so many of us with a vacant feeling, it's useful to see our houses and neighborhoods in the way I've come to think of as sacramental. What ideals do they convey in their physical reality? How do these habitats make those who live in them feel? What kind of life is possible here? What does living in such places teach its residents? How does it shape their character and outlook?

"These aren't silly questions, or the kinds of things that only the well-off can afford to think about. Your typical conservative will scoff at them defensively, but he can only dismiss these questions if he is determined to ignore human nature, and the way the built environment both expresses humanity's deepest longings and aspirations, and the way it shapes them."

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)