released 9/8/2025

Architect Philip Bess sees our modern-day confusion and moral illiteracy worked out visibly in the cities and buildings our architects create. From this standpoint, he discusses the secular roots and pragmatic tendencies of some New Urbanists, whose assumptions are based — however much some of them might protest — in natural law. He also talks about how Christians used to assume that cities were places to live out the good life, whereas today, we have mostly abandoned them for the suburbs, leaving cities emptied of true community and no more than economically-driven entertainment zones. Bess points out a common contradiction in thinking among architects, who on the one hand wish for community and meaning, and on the other insist on artistic freedom at the expense of human flourishing. He also explains the effects of the Industrial Revolution on people’s experience of and imaginations about urban life versus rural life. Bess is the author of Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred (Regnery, 2006). A portion of this interview was originally published on Volume 87 of the Journal.

57 minutes

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