Carroll William Westfall

A building is more than a mere functional apparatus. Its form points to its role in the civil life, and when it belongs to the traditions that guide the pursuit of the common good it facilitatesthe individual’s pursuit of happiness.

Modernism has excluded traditional and classical architecture from it role of offering beauty to serve and express our civil order’s quest to guarantee liberty and justice to all. How might we restore it to that role?

The current history of architecture undermines architecture’s essential role in serving the common good and offering beauty. Here I will discuss this history’s deficiencies, and in my next opinion piece I will offer an alternative to it.

Ninety years ago European Modernism was introduced to America by a landmark exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. It challenged traditional architecture and soon replaced it with Modernism, an architecture that betrays architecture’s responsibility to contribute to the common good.

The pleasure and happiness we find in traditional and classical architecture and urbanism is the counterpart to the good and justice sought by the civil order it serves and expresses, a connection between justice and beauty that is alien to Modernism.

Words can help us appreciate and understand buildings. Some of the most useful and common words come in pairs, but they are often used carelessly.

Individuals flourish when they contribute to the civil order that seeks a common good, and traditional and classical architecture is necessary to make an urbanism that serves such a civil order. It is, however, being undermined by an architectural profession that has no interest in the common good or its counterpart, the beautiful.

Traditional architecture uses imitation and invention to provide beauty as a complement to the general, public welfare, but the current history of architecture undermines that service.

President Trump set out an Executive Order that calls for a Commission to suggest guidelines for restoring the beauty of traditional classicism in new federal buildings. A nonpartisan issue, President Biden should execute it immediately.

The role of traditional democratic government in our national life was emphasized in the recent presidential election. A poll of preferences in architecture produced a similar embrace of tradition.

The art of building that requires commodity, firmness, and delight provides the basis for the art of architecture, which requires beauty as a contribution to the common good.

The famous trilogy of commodity, firmness, and delight provides conditions we expect a building to satisfy. But are they enough?

The statues of Confederates that are targets of revised judgments about their subjects often occupy important places in our urbanism, which calls attention to the importance of urbanism in what we build.

Three memorable and familiar cities use their buildings and urbanism in ways that reveal their very different purposes, sacred, secular, and horrifically vile.

Opinion On Executive Order for the Classical Style in Federal Buildings

The most important buildings are built of masonry, stone if available, or brick often stuccoed to look like stone. Either way classical components suit the material best.

Ceilings do more than top off rooms. Some let us look into Heaven and others display technology at work.

Tradition carries the experience of the past into the present where innovations make it applicable to current circumstances. This reciprocity protects our liberty, and it guides the design of buildings that serve and protect that liberty.

Columns, piers, and walls traditionally have celebratory toppings. The capitals of the three canonic Greek and two Roman additions are the most familiar, but local variations abound, such as these in Chicago and in Richmond, Virginia.

Traditional architecture serves the public, common good by using a vestibule to make a clear connection between the public and private realms.

Tradition has always guided both vernacular and classical buildings, but now, with architects avoiding drawing on tradition, the present-day vernacular of the builders no longer benefits from innovations within the classical and architects ignore the vernacular’s innovations, with both suffering.

The classical is the indispensable contributor to the common good.

The architect as citizen seeks beauty as the counterpart to justice.