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The truth is that architecture teaches, even when no one notices. A citizen who approaches a courthouse framed by columns of the classical orders instinctively understands that justice is something noble and enduring. A veteran who stands before a magnificent memorial senses that sacrifice has meaning. Children who walk into a school filled with light and symmetry learn that they matter. Beauty in public life must not be treated as a niche academic interest, much less a privilege reserved for elites.
It probably seems strange for anyone other than an architect - let alone an elected official - to care this much about the aesthetics of buildings. I didn't grow up around artists or intellectuals. I grew up in a trailer park in Columbia City, Indiana, the kind where two boys shared a bunk bed and summer heat made the walls sweat. My father worked in a factory that made axles. My mother took pride in meals cooked slowly at the stove. Nobody spoke about Vitruvius or Palladio or theories of design.
Yet beauty was still present. I remember being awed by the Whitley County courthouse in the center of my hometown. Its Indiana limestone exterior, soaring clock tower and galvanized dome impressed something upon me long before I had language for it.
Not long after returning from military service in Afghanistan, I traveled to Italy with my wife and encountered truly supreme architecture for the first time. Standing in Rome, placing my hand on stone that had stood for some 2,000 years, I realized that when beauty and order come together, they elevate the human spirit. And before long, I also recognized that when they are discarded, something essential in us is diminished.
Perhaps nothing in the United States illustrates that type of loss more clearly than the destruction of the original Pennsylvania Station in New York. Designed by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1910, it was one of the greatest public buildings in the country. Art historian Vincent Scully captured the tragedy of its 1963 demolition, which left the station entirely underground for decades: "One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat."
This decline was not accidental. Beginning in the early 20th century and accelerating in the 1960s and 1970s, many architects rejected the idea of objective beauty, treating it as an outdated relic of Western civilization. Traditional civic architecture was dismissed as oppressive. In its place came blank concrete, barren plazas, and glass boxes stripped of memory and meaning. Americans were told this was progress.
But Americans know better. Nearly 3 out of 4 — regardless of political ideology, race, gender, geography or income — say they prefer traditional over modernist design in federal buildings. People don't need a degree in architecture to recognize dignity when they see it.
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