Building for the Ages.

Penn Station did not make you feel comfortable; it made you feel important.

Hilary Ballon, art historian

Though it’s difficult to imagine in today’s world of throwaway buildings in parking wastelands, Americans once did a spectacular job of honoring their own public life by endowing public space with beauty and grace. This was especially true at the turn of the previous century, during the period known as the Beaux Arts era, when the vibrant young nation and its “strenuous” young president, Theodore Roosevelt, stepped onto center stage in the theater of geopolitics. The recognition that we had suddenly become the world’s leading industrial power prompted a “City Beautiful” movement to make America’s urban centers worthy of our new status.

So begins James Howard Kunstler in his essay in Orion Magazine about beauty in public spaces.

Any serious consideration of the American landscape reveals a near-total absence of respect and concern for our public and common lives. We live our lives in disposable clutter, buildings that look ok until we begin inhabiting the spaces. Wood frame construction, derived from mass-produced military housing so necessary in World War II, is defined by its temporary nature. We simply forgot that it was always intended to be replaced by something more substantial.

"We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us," Winston Churchill was quoted as saying. So in our public presentations of ourselves, we slouch around in dirty and torn denim trousers, baseball caps, t-shirts advertising god-knows-what. In an earlier age such apparel would have been reserved for the day we choose to clean out the basement; today it shows up in fine restaurants, theaters, graduation ceremonies.

Churches? No longer are they considered sacred spaces. We fashion them for convenience, for quick access, for being a place we can drop in on our way to somewhere else. A person showing up in what in another age was termed Sunday Best will certainly discover that they are over-dressed for the occasion.

At another online journal I've shown images of cathedrals and landscapes that evoke a larger vision of the world and of ourselves. I've highlighted the cathedrals we build today in sports arenas.

Today I mourn the loss of our sense of pride and dignity as reflected in the spaces we create for ourselves.

Behold, the passing glory of one such building, Penn Station in New York City.