Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred

By Philip Bess

ISI Books, 2006, 325 pp., hardcover, $28

Philip Bess is a familiar and respected voice in the new urbanist community. The principal of Thursday Architects in Chicago, he is also an urban baseball park guru and an accomplished educator, having taught architecture at Andrews University and now heading Notre Dame’s graduate program. It is less well known — or perhaps less understood — that as much as any of these influences, it is Bess’s Catholicism that motivates his advocacy of and contribution to traditional urbanism.

Over the years, Bess has provided reasoned and carefully crafted articulations of his unique perspective through a variety of articles and speeches. In Till We Have Built Jerusalem, Bess organizes many of these pieces into a coherent narrative sequence. It provides a helpful overview of Bess’s larger vision. He has an easy confidence in both his faith and his urbanism; his readers benefit that he came by both later in life, ultimately rejecting his upbringing as both a Baptist and a Modernist. If nothing else, this little snippet of Bess’s biography signals to the reader that Bess thinks ideas do matter and that they should influence our decisions, the way that we live our lives, and ultimately how we build our cities.

Disconnect motivates author
It is, in fact, a perceived disconnect between ideas and practice among Bess’s two primary communities of identity that ultimately motivates his work. He writes:
“I observe on the one hand that many neo-traditional urbanists seem to act largely out of modernist assumptions about history and human nature; and on the other hand that many observant and practicing American Jews and Christians seem to act with (or at least acquiesce in) modernist assumptions about the built environment. I find such assumptions problematic insofar as they seem to undermine the professed beliefs and purposes of both neo-traditional urbanists and communities of biblically based faith.”

Bess anchors his own approach to urbanism in two loci: a biblically-based anthropology of human flourishing accomplished through virtuous living in community, and an understanding of the city as overlapping ecological, economic, moral, and formal orders. If you find that last sentence a bit confusing — fear not, Bess is a gracious guide through the intricacies of Aristotelian logic.
While Bess presents a well-argued and rather attractive case for a sacred approach to urbanism, his intention is not to convert all urbanists to the Christian faith or even all Christian urbanists to the Catholic faith. Nor does his project depend in any way on this rather unlikely possibility. As a Protestant Christian, I take a slightly different approach from Bess to both sacred and secular space. However, with every fresh interaction, I find that I learn much from seeing the world as he does. I am grateful for an ally — a keen and irreplaceable one — in the struggle against both the banality of suburban sprawl and the nihilism of the knee-jerk Modernist response.
    This gets at a deeper level of my appreciation for Bess’s project. I do heartily agree with him that ideas really do matter and we cannot ultimately rely on market forces alone to correct the aesthetic tailspin of America’s built environment. Bess has never advocated giving Christian witness a preferred place at the new urbanist table; he simply wants sound ideas to be given their due regardless of the convictions from which they emerge. Till We Have Built Jerusalem is brimming with ideas and insights that are well worth the attention of the entire community of new urbanists.

Eric O. Jacobsen is author of Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith (Brazos Press, 2003).