© Philip Bess Professor, Andrews University, Michigan - Notes

I. Introduction

II. The Nature of the City

III. Sources of Renewal

IV. Theology, Nature, & Architectural Education

July 2001

SOURCES OF RENEWAL

think we do not lack these resources entirely, however; but it might surprise you to hear where I think they may reside. These resources do not reside, I suspect, in what we tend to consider our elite institutions of higher learning (and I will try shortly to explain why). They may reside as ongoing good habits in architectural programs in universities historically grounded in a regional mission and sensibility. But these good habits may or may not be supported by coherent intellectual articulations of the nature and ends of architecture and architecture's relationship to human communities; and where these good habits are not supported intellectually, I suspect and fear their future is tenuous. Where these intellectual and cultural resources do reside is in those architecture programs located in academic institutions sponsored by religious communities, of which there are currently four in the United States that have accredited professional degree programs: Catholic University, Detroit Mercy, Notre Dame, and Andrews University (where I teach).

          Now, I can hardly maintain that any of these institutions are or have ever been widely regarded as leaders in American architectural education; or that it is necessarily the case that they ever will be. I simply maintain that, whether they know it or not, such institutions are unusually well situated and equipped, both culturally and intellectually, to promote coherent theories of architecture and urban design that understand these activities in terms of communal purposes--including the purposes of communities as patrons, the purposes of the community of architects, and the purposes of that larger community which is the city.

          One reason an architecture program located in this kind of academic institution should be able to do this is because, if it is healthy, such an institution is already an example of the kind of community that historically has supported and been supported by architecture made with reference to communal purposes. If I can put this another way: although I am not for an instant suggesting either that the theological substance at the heart of such religious communities is unimportant or that its status as believed truth is unchallengeable, regardless of the theological substance at the heart of any such community its communal form is Aristotelian--and is therefore existentially supportive of traditional Aristotelian views of the nature and purpose of community generally, and of the city in particular.

          But there's a second reason why architecture programs located in religious universities seem better suited than their secular counterparts to promote community. On the one hand, religious communities tend to regard it as a truth of the human condition that individual human well-being is necessarily related to communal membership and obligation. Perhaps even more importantly however, such communities have believed and continue to believe that discovering, understanding, and serving the truth is the primary purpose of liberal education. And this last point has, I think, larger implications for architectural education than we tend at first glance to recognize.^[4]

          This idea that truth is the proper end of a liberal education may seem simply to confirm both the National Architecture Accreditation Board's (NAAB) and the Associated Collegiate Schools of Architecture's (ACSA) own professed regard for the importance of a liberal education for the practice of architecture. But there is in fact a problem here because in many institutions of both higher learning and architectural education the very idea of truth, let alone its pursuit, increasingly is regarded as illusory. The professed ambition instead is to create and propound useful and aesthetically pleasing "fictions;" and to the extent that this is the direction in which the intellectual leadership of architecture and the academy are determined to go, it poses significant intellectual and practical challenges to architects and educators sympathetic to the Boyer Report's call for architectural education and practice to be redirected toward "building community." For while the ambition to create pleasing fictions will always engage the interests of some of the people some of the time, it is a singularly unhelpful approach to the necessarily long term projects of building and sustaining communities. And this is simply because in order for human beings to succeed in achieving long term objectives such as these, we generally need to believe in what we are doing.

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