“How lovely your dwelling,
    O Lord of hosts!
My soul yearns and pines
    for the courts of the Lord” (Ps 84:1-2).

There are many things an architect must do to have a successful building, including keeping out the elements, meeting the budget and serving the client’s needs. But if the architect does all of those things well, yet the building has no beauty, I contend that he or she has failed. This is because it is in our nature to beautify places that we hold dear. And thus it is not surprising that, until recently, the highest form of architecture has always been employed for the sake of worship.

When I talk about creating beauty, I mean a man-made beauty that is crucial to human flourishing but still a dim reflection of the natural beauty of the lakes, hills and seashore. Historically, people have sought to create man-made beauty for their important buildings and often succeeded. Experience confirms this in the kinds of buildings and cities that people flock to in order to imbibe art, history and, most of all, beauty. It also helps explain why there was such a great outcry when the cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris burned in 2019. In the aftermath of the fire, elites wanted to add a disruptive new roof to the 800-year-old masterpiece, but most people wanted to rebuild it the way it was — not because the old roof served its function so well, but due to its poignant beauty.

Even though it is natural to love and promote beauty, it is also possible to educate someone to prefer ugliness, which typically occurs over four years in art or architecture school. Ugliness results when schools ignore beauty or even belittle it as a bourgeois value not appropriate for elites. It was in an academic environment like this that I had a revelation. I was designing a library based on Thomas Jefferson’s Rotunda at the University of Virginia, and a visiting architect gave me this advice: “You are clearly interested in beauty — get close to it.” This was a shocking comment; architecture faculty didn’t even use the “B-word” in those days. At that moment, I realized he had hit on something important.

Rejecting the Modernists

I decided to consciously pursue beauty in architecture, and that led me to embrace the architectural tradition. The modernists taught me to reject tradition as slavish. But the architects of the past had done a superior job of creating beauty, so I decided to ignore the modernists. I also realized that, if I rejected learning from tradition, I would be doing something that no great architect in history had done. Architects of the past understood that their role was to create art, which was always built upon the work of other artists.

On my journey to recover beauty, I have tried to immerse myself in two things. First, I have tried to learn what the principles common to all great architecture are. Starting with Vitruvius, who wrote the first known book on architecture, and going straight through to the early 20th century, we find agreement among the great thinkers about the principles of architecture.

Second, I have sought exemplars of architecture that I could measure myself against. It is an unsophisticated theory, but one which past centuries relied on, that if an architect looks at temples of great beauty and tries to emulate them, he or she might also create beautiful works of art. In my humble career, I have sought to learn from all the periods of sacred architecture, including early Christian, medieval, Baroque, neoclassical and Gothic Revival. They all created beauty, though in different ways. I have found it particularly helpful for me to follow in the footsteps of the high Renaissance in Italy and learn from Brunelleschi, Bramante, Leonardo and Michelangelo — men who created some of the greatest artistic and architectural productions in history. The Renaissance also laid the foundation for the artistic response to the Reformation and became a touchstone for architects around the world.

Embracing Tradition

Today we are in a new time of renaissance in sacred architecture, and we need to be countercultural in response to our iconoclastic age.

Compared to the past 60 years, many new Catholic churches seem beautiful, but that is an easy comparison — easy because architects and their patrons during the past half century were not thinking about beauty. They were trained in iconoclasm and animated by other goals than beauty. But the true test of art is not whether a building looks new or is different from the past; the true test is to compare the modern work with great things that came before, especially those which have stood the test of time. Doing this will keep us humble and prevent us from saying with the modernist, “I have created something totally new in architecture because it is not influenced by the past.” When architects do not compare their work to the past, they are easily fooled into thinking they are brilliant. Yet lay people are not fooled.

So how do we create beauty? The only way for an architect to create beauty is to be a student of works that have attained beauty and have popular approbation, what we call “masterpieces.” In other words, if you want to create something beautiful, you need to be part of a tradition, and learn how the architects of that tradition produced beauty. This is because while there are universal principles of beauty, there are also unique ways to create beauty that reinforce the whole. The Byzantine, English Gothic, German Romanesque, Italian Renaissance, French baroque, American Renaissance and Gothic Revival all have masterpieces that teach different lessons to the architect.

Once you see yourself as part of a tradition, you do not mind doing things that have been done before, including ways of composing a façade, proportioning an arcade, combining moldings or incorporating artwork in an apse. While you are following examples from the German Romanesque or the French Baroque, there is still plenty of room to innovate and even to express personal ideas. Innovations are welcome as long as they are good and are subservient to the ancient goals, outlined by Vitruvius, of “Firmitas, Utilitas and Venustas.” In fact, this triumvirate of permanence, convenience and beauty is so crucial to the success of a building that I would say they outweigh the many other goals of the architect and client, including personal expression.

Adorning the Bride of Christ

The greatest form of beauty should be employed for a church building, because it is the structure that most embodies salvation history. It should have the elements that other buildings strive for; it should be the one that civic and commercial structures imitate. “Almost as beautiful as a church” used to be an encomium. While it is true that in the modern age other buildings have surpassed churches in size, height, technology and complexity, they have not surpassed churches in beauty. This is because beauty does not lend itself to progress in the way that material and functional concerns do. Great churches from the past beautifully reflect the Godhead, and their art gives true honor and worship to Christ and his Church.

A church should be beautiful — clothed in fine materials, ornamented ingeniously and decorated with symbols and stories — so as to reflect the beauty of creation, the beauty of the Bride of Christ, which the building represents, and the beauty of the Bridegroom whom she serves. In addition, the pursuit of beauty in sacred architecture is an excellent way to promote beauty in worship, which the church building is designed to ennoble. This may seem harder to do today than in previous times because our gaze has been diverted toward more seductive aspects, and architects have been taught to design buildings which are anything but beautiful.

If a church is to be the most beautiful of our works, it must be beautiful not only on the exterior, where many people see it from afar, but also inside, where the faithful gather, and even up close. Altar cloths and vestments, candlesticks and pews — these are part of the whole. Leon Battista Alberti, a Renaissance priest who wrote the first treatise on architecture since Vitruvius, defined beauty as “that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse.”

When we talk about creating beautiful churches with all the parts in harmony with one another, it may be beneficial to think about three different sizes, or scales, of things. The small scale includes candlesticks, altar crosses and moldings; the middle scale is the bay that is repeated along the nave; and the large scale is the shape of the overall church. I would echo Alberti and argue that they are all important. A series of arches and nicely proportioned moldings might be compromised by a misshapen plan, a poor relationship to the narthex or a lack of hierarchy in the sanctuary. Likewise, a cruciform plan and a well-proportioned interior, with repeating Corinthian bays and attractive side altars, can be undermined by mediocre altar linens, a too-small crucifix or a wooden altar that looks like a work table. The harmony of all things means that the small-, middle- and large-scale elements should all be in harmony, and this includes the use of consistent materials, quality craftsmanship, color and lighting.

In other words, it is not an easy task to create a beautiful church today. Yet that is what we are called to, and there are few better ways to reflect the beauty of the Lord than in the beauty of his house:

“One thing I ask of the Lord;
    this I seek:
To dwell in the Lord’s house
    all the days of my life,
To gaze on the Lord’s beauty,
    to visit his temple” (Ps 27:4).

DUNCAN STROIK is a practicing architect and professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame. A frequent lecturer on sacred architecture and the classical tradition, he is the founding editor of Sacred Architecture Journal and the author of “The Church Building as a Sacred Place: Beauty, Transcendence, and the Eternal.”