What I Learned at the 2026 Traditional Building Conference in Historic Cape May, New Jersey

Beauty was on display in Cape May last week, on June 16 and 17, with Victorian-era decorative houses on tree-lined streets and grand historic hotels overlooking the ocean. There were also the traditional buildings presented and discussed during the Traditional Building Conference, in seminars, architectural tours and at the annual Palladio Awards ceremony where 16 winning projects, both residential and institutional, were celebrated.

Conference attendees earned 10 AIA CEUs, most of them in Health, Safety, and Welfare (HSW) categories. “Beauty” for beauty’s sake does not qualify as a “Wellness” credit according to AIA. But beautiful architecture, as in the buildings we saw around town and in seminar slide-show presentations, demonstrated “Commodity, Firmness, and Delight.” The beauty was delightful.

Duncan Stroik, a practicing architect and professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame, delighted us by showing how the buildings he designs—mostly churches—are beautifully crafted of marble and stone. He explained the use of limestone for the design, fabrication, and erection of structural columns. He explored the structural capacity of domes made of brick and showed us pictures of structural elements such as arches, voussoirs, and keystones.

His new, traditional buildings are stunningly beautiful. One of them, the Basilica of the Sacred Heart Reliquary Chapel, won a 2026 Palladio Award.

In his Traditional Building Conference seminar, Mac White, a partner at Michael Imber Architects, showed us houses in coastal locations to demonstrate how to design and build for resiliency. These buildings aren’t just durable, they are beautiful. And they improve physical and emotional well-being through their use of natural materials and their indoor to outdoor connection.

Mac White and Michael Imber Architects picked up three Palladio Awards at the conference, for new residential design of the beautiful Chisholm Trail Ranch and Casa de las Joyas, and a new addition at the Linda L. Bean Conference Center.

In addition to being emotionally uplifted by the architecture I saw last week, I was intellectually stimulated by a New York Times column I read over the weekend. The piece was titled “Gilded Age Lessons for Philanthropy” by Ross Douthat. He cites the enormous wealth that will be created when major artificial intelligence companies go public, potentially amounting to tens of billions of dollars.

Douthat urges the new wave of philanthropists to spend their new money the way Carnegie and Rockefeller did in the Gilded Age, “by treating beauty as a central charitable pursuit. By building monuments, statues, museums, universities, cathedrals, public gardens, and even mansions for yourselves.”

I think I’ll send Douthat a copy of the TRADITIONAL BUILDING Palladio Awards issue when it comes out in July. He’ll be encouraged by what he sees.

He makes a valid point. “The AI transition will ask us what lies beyond, especially, in the shadow of increasingly capable machines, questions of flourishing, meaning, and what makes life good.”

Life was made good by the beauty that surrounded us in Cape May. On an afternoon architecture tour of the Emlen Physick Estate, a Frank Furness-designed Stick style mansion built for philanthropist Dr. Emlen Physick in 1880, we learned that he sparked the historic preservation movement that helped put Cape May on the National Register of Historic Places.

Referring back to the NYT’s philanthropy opinion piece, Dr. Emlen Physick, while not a Carnegie or a Rockefeller, would fit Douthat’s description: “rich people prove their value to society not just in business success, but when they create things that only surplus can generate and only cultivated taste can shape. Those creations can make the worlds of ordinary people feel more elevated, transcendent and meaningful—whether they’re attending a school, or experiencing a concert or wandering in a park or even visiting a tycoon’s home long after the original owner is dust.”

A third Traditional Building Conference speaker in Cape May was Carl Elefante, FAIA, principal emeritus of Quinn Evans and former president of the AIA. The title of his seminar was “Decarbonizing the Built Environment on a Path to our Urban Future.” Elefante’s presentation, which qualified for one AIA Health/Safety/Welfare credit, focused on the sustainable aspects of adaptive use “to meet energy and climate targets and yield collateral social, economic, and environmental benefits.”

He showed us examples of Quinn Evans’ work including the Ford Motor Company’s Michigan Central Station adaptive use project in Detroit, an iconic Gilded Age building. Now that it is back in use, this building’s beauty uplifts all who enter it and makes Detroit proud of its architectural history.

The Traditional Building Conference and the Palladio Awards ceremony in Cape May made me wonder if I should petition the AIA to change HSW’s emphasis from “wellness” to “beauty.”

The final Traditional Building Conference of the 2026 series takes place in Charleston, South Carolina on November 3 and 4. The first was in Salem, Massachusetts on March 24 and 25.