Religion and
Innovation in Human Affairs
Grant Recipients
Religion,
Progress, and
Innovation in the
Contemporary World After Burnham:
Modernity, Religion,
Tradition, Innovation,
and the Future of
Humanist Urbanism
Award
Amount: $200,000 PI:
Philip Bess Sponsoring
Institution:
University of Notre
Dame
The Project proposes
that architecture and
urbanism in Chicago and
elsewhere—following the
logic first of modernist
and now of
hyper-modernist
premises—has largely
gone astray since the
mid-20th century. Taking
the Daniel Burnham’s
1909 Plan of Chicago as
an authoritative
starting point, the
Project proposes that
Baroque urbanism and
Catholic social teaching
can help locate the
modern metropolis in
both nature and sacred
order in ways both
symbolically legible and
humane. After Burnham,
situating itself within
the western tradition of
humanist urbanism (and eo ipso
humanist architecture),
is here proposed in part
as an exercise to
demonstrate how that
tradition can inform a
present-day project that
is future-oriented
toward a telos;
and further, is proposed
in the expectation that
the result of this
tradition-grounded/future-oriented
exercise will result in
something recognizable
simultaneously as both part
of the tradition and
“new and unexpected.”
The chief outcomes of
the Project will be 1) a
speculative design
proposal for the
metropolitan Chicago
region projected a
century forward and 2) a
book, tentatively titled
After
Burnham: Our Lady’s
Plan of Chicago 2109,
which will use the
design work as the
occasion for an
intellectual critique of
hyper-modernist
architecture and
urbanism, a
philosophical defense of
humanist architecture
and urbanism, and a
consideration of the
necessary social
conditions and prospects
for the latter in an
unpredictable future.
Philip Bess
is professor of
architecture at the
University of Notre
Dame. He was the
director and principal
designer of the Urban
Baseball Park Design
Project of the Society
for American Baseball
Research. And he
directed and coordinated
the “Save Fenway Park!”
charrette in 2000, which
resulted in the adoption
of many ideas now
visible in the renovated
Red Sox ballpark
(including the seats
atop the Green Monster).
He has led numerous
professional and
academic urban design
charrettes, mostly for
small towns, city
neighborhoods, or
college campuses,
including the 2010
Skaneateles, NY project,
which won the Congress
for the New Urbanism
Charter Award Grand
Prize in 2011. He has
written a number of
books, including Till We Have
Built Jerusalem:
Architecture, Urbanism
and the Sacred
(ISI Books, 2006); Inland
Architecture:
Subterranean Essays on
Moral Order and Formal
Order in Chicago
(Interalia Design Books,
2000); and City Baseball
Magic (Wm. C.
Brown Publishing Co.,
1991).
