Philip Bess

Rome is the foundation of the University of Notre Dame architecture and urban design curriculum, and properly so. Nevertheless, every year for the past ten years I have traveled from Notre Dame to meet a new class of graduate urban design students (themselves up from Rome on spring break) for a week in the small historic city of Bruges. Where is Bruges? It’s in Belgium. Continue Reading »

Over the last fifteen years or so I have seen (and been moved by) many of the aspirational/inspirational billboards sponsored by The Foundation for a Better Life, an organization that promotes common-ground character virtues while trying at the same time to avoid being a partisan in our contemporary . . . . Continue Reading »

Building is a willful act of symbolic import, sometimes intended and sometimes not, and all architecture expresses the power of its makers and their aspiration to legitimate authority. This is true of individual buildings, public spaces, and all human settlements. Temple, forum, cathedral, city . . . . Continue Reading »

Most cities built before 1945 were founded at the scale of what today we might call a town or even a village. Some rose around some sacred site or along some pre-existing sacred path; some for purposes of protection or territorial conquest; others primarily to facilitate the production, distribution, and exchange of material goods; and others simply for human pleasure in extraordinary natural conditions… . Continue Reading »

In the moderately memorable 1997 movie The Edge , Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin portray characters marooned in the Alaskan wilderness. In their dramatic struggle to survive both the elements and some formidable predators, the Hopkins character takes to repeating, mantra-like, the phrase: . . . . Continue Reading »

For centuries the public square and the street have been the spatial media of public culture. But just how important is traditional public space––urban space––to a genuinely public culture? In an age of increasingly sophisticated electronic communications, does civil society require the . . . . Continue Reading »

What follows is prompted not by a cigar, but rather a painting by the Dutch (strictly speaking, Flemish) master Jan Van Eyck. “The Mystic Adoration of the Lamb” is the central painting of twenty panels of various sizes completed in 1432 that together constitute the Ghent Altarpiece. Since the . . . . Continue Reading »