American ideals and values. . .

I do not keep up on such things so when I read an article about and viewed a video showing the more recent US embassies abroad, I was shocked.  They are not merely modernistic but ugly.  Instead of visually portraying the values of America, they are less than successful implementations of bad architectural ideas designed more to offend the eye than stimulate the mind.  If this is the best way we can spend our money, we are in bad shape.  For all the fuss about Trump's addition to the White House, where were these voices when our tax dollars were being wasted on ugly, banal, trite, and soon to be dated facades behind the workers doing our business around the world?

But, of course, this is not simply about embassies.  Government buildings around the nation have suffered the same problem.  They do not manifest the values of strength, stability, and a connection to our American past but make odd and icky statements about the architect.  It is positively embarrassing.   I wish it applied only to government buildings but it can be said of art galleries, music halls, schools, universities, and, yes, to churches.  We seem immune to taste when it comes to the buildings we construct.  There is no sense of what happens inside or there is the admission that to be functional it must also be ugly.  Beauty is an American ideal (O beautiful for spacious skies...) and one that should not be inconsistent with the public face of government and other institutions in our cities and in the cities of the world where Americans do our bidding.

BTW if you want to see a presidential library that epitomizes the brutal, harsh forms of bad taste, go to Chicago.  The Barack Obama Presidential Center opens to the public on June 19 but it has already been surrounded by controversy for its appearance and for its cost.  If you Google it, controversy will be the first thing to come up.  It is more than stark but a modern version of the harsh concrete forms of the past one would have thought discredited.  It has been called everything from a tomb to a tower of doom but it is the kind of look you might expect the publisher of George Orwell to have put on 1984.  The ordinarily friendly The New York Times called it “The Obamalisk.”  Clad in gray limestone, at a distance the tower is a textbook example of the bare concrete typical of the Brutalist style of architecture once thought passe.  It is an eight-story, windowless structure prison for the eye.

In the Church such lack of attention to beauty, proportion, and a space that befits the sacred ground of God's presence is unforgivable.  We build houses of God for the people of God rather seldom in the life of a congregation or a community of faith.  We ought to be it right when we do.  Why must we signal our disconnect with our past or display our ignorance of what happens within House of God when we do put up a new building?  I wish it were simply aesthetics but it is much more.  We define our buildings when we build them and then they define us for as long as they stand.  Churchill said it but it is obvious wisdom.  If we are going to be judged by our buildings, let us at least be judged by their eloquence and not by their ugliness.  Really?