Architectures of Heaven
Photo by riccardo oliva on Unsplash
Frequent readers of the blog would know that among the abiding concerns for the blog is our relationship with the built environment. You may have heard me say before (and I lay this out in detail in my book Redeeming Flesh) that cities are not mere infrastructure, but are foretastes of heaven, and so comport us towards particular visions of heaven, often without our knowledge. I have had occasion to engage it yet again with a revisit of the work of Eric Jacobsen, whose work on the built environment I highly recommend.
If you have not done so, I also recommend that you download The Mars Hill Audio Journal app, which has weekly freebies like the Friday Features, one of which is a highly engaging revisitation of Jacobsen’s early work Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism & the Christian Faith. In it, Jacobsen reflected on the role that the car played in transforming urban landscapes by replacing the pedestrian as the point of reference for urban planning. In the course of this replacement, factoring in sidewalks and squares became secondary to the factoring in of highways, thereby increasing the seeming transience of cities.
In related news, the latest episode of The Episcopal Podcast, run by Bishop Richard Umbers and Silvana Scarfe, features an interview with Kamila Soh, who teaches in the Faculty of Built Environment at the University of New South Wales. The interview looks at the question on why Catholics should care about architecture, and in what ways they should care about architecture.
Two things come out strongly in this episode. The first is that architecture differs from other art forms because it is one where function is tightly bound up with form. To lose the former in the name of the latter (usually done in the name of some abstract “beauty”) would render architecture nonsensical.
The second point that comes out is that architecture comes with a symbolic freight. Relaying that freight over to the public is not a simple given. On the contrary, the public must also have a cultural capacity to receive and interpret that freight. To insist upon the former in the absence of the latter renders the enterprise of “building beautiful buildings” into an impotent exercise at best, or a power play of private tastes at worst. In short, the specifically public function of architecture gets lost.
That episode of the episcopal podcast can be listened to in full here. Readers of the blog might also remember that Soh has contributed to the blog as part of the “Lonely City” series which kicked off 2019.
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