What Happened to Beautiful Architecture? | Nic Charbonneau

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Nic Charbonneau, a principal classical architect at Harrison Design, a classical architecture firm. The two discuss how classical philosophy was manifest through the period's architecture and what this says about the modern worldview. Nic dives into what happened to the beautiful architecture of the past and predicts the future of architecture in light of the growing classical education renewal movement. They also discuss why classical schools should take place in buildings that reflect their purposes and values. 

Transcript

Jeremy Tate (00:02.283)
Welcome back to the Anchor Podcast. I'm here with Nick Charbonneau, who's a principal classical architect at a classical architecture firm, Harrison Design. Nick, welcome. Thank you, Jeremy. It's great to be here. So Nick, I've been, as just a layman, very interested in what happened to beautiful classical architecture. When I was in college, my parents moved to Lyon, France, and I think it just got in my blood of the way beautiful spaces

Kind of shape who we are how we think about the world the feeling you get in a a cramped ugly modern space compared to a Beautiful classical space is so different. It's kind of all -consuming in some way So I'm gonna pick your brain about a lot excited to dig in Nick if we could start off though Tell us a little bit about kind of your educational journey all the way to the classical architecture school at Notre Dame Sure. Yeah, happy to do it. So we I grew up in Massachusetts

product of public school, went to a Catholic high school. And I admittedly hated school when I was growing up. By the time I was in high school, I didn't wanna be there. I actually very nearly didn't graduate from high school. my parents had to have a meeting with the headmaster to figure out how Nick was gonna graduate. So yeah, so not an ideal student by any stretch. And it's unfortunate because my mom was actually a public school teacher.

So, yeah. But anyway, yeah, I was just super bored. Didn't know why I was there. And so I went to Anna Maria College, which is a very small liberal arts school in Massachusetts. And I ended up taking my first philosophy class. And I absolutely just loved it. I had no idea. Like, I remember thinking, I said, I remember thinking to myself, this is what I wanted my education to be like.

I didn't know how to critically read. I mean, I could read obviously, but I remember we had a class almost entirely devoted to Plato's Republic. And it took me, I mean, it took me literally hours to read 30 pages. I had to like reread sections and it was just, but it was just so enrich it. Like I had no idea that this stuff existed and that's what I wanted it to be. You'd been craving that kind of your whole educational journey hadn't tasted of it yet. Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (02:28.161)
Yeah, it was philosophy. And it's funny because at the time I think it was a psychology major. And I just ended up taking more more philosophy classes and it built into a major. So there hadn't been a philosophy graduate in my school for 17 years. So it was the first one. Wow. Okay. And so what had happened was I had a couple of

professors kind of took me in a wing and guide me in the philosophy department. And so I took classes at Assumption College through the consortium. And then had a, be to God, I had a semester in Rome with the University of Dallas. So there was some connections there with my school. I just went to the Rome UD campus. It's fantastic. yeah, it's really ideal. I mean, it's out in a villa. It's actually

both the Kasa Gundalfa, the Pope's summer home. I mean, my life really substantially changed at that point. OK. So I would say like, you know, just had a reversion to my faith there. And, yeah, so that that was where I fell in love with philosophy. OK. I'm sorry, with architecture, excuse me. yeah, that was my question. You're as you're falling in love with philosophy, you're reading more and more. Do you have a moment?

where you first made the connection to architecture? Yeah, yeah, that was, and I actually know the moment. mean, like the very second actually. So I had a political philosophy professor, Dustin Gish, and I think he's at University of Houston now, teaches classics. So brilliant, brilliant man. And he would always talk about the connection of the polis, or the politics of the city, and then the way that that would made manifest in the architecture.

And so he just had this love of architecture, you know, what better place to be talking and thinking about architecture. And we had a trip to Venice, which is part of the University of Rome program. We go to Assisi in Venice. And he got us up really early. We're in St. Mark's Square. And there's that iconic church, which is across the water, San Giorgio Maggiore by Andrea Palladio. And we had this Vaporetto.

Jeremy Tate (04:52.659)
right, was basically like a, you know, the Venice bus. So we had the ride over, just on Georgia Majority. And he took that those few minutes as an opportunity to talk about how the proportion that we find in beautiful classical music are the same proportions that were used in the designs of classical buildings. And I mean, was at that time, I was like, I was totally hooked.

I just, couldn't get enough. Like I, you know, I read about architecture, I kind of made my own education of sorts, but at that point I had no idea that architecture could embody so much, you know, and here I am a philosophy undergrad and I just, I just see, I guess I just saw all the connections between, you know, kind of this worldview that, you know, things are ordered.

The world is ordered, we can perceive that order. That perceived order should conduct the way that we operate. And then that would be manifest in buildings. was just absolutely amazing. So, Nigga, want you to see if you can kind of tell the story in a super condensed, concise version, of course, of kind of what happened. so centuries and centuries of beautiful architecture and cathedrals and castles

And you know in a very short time we get to you know skyscrapers made of you know concrete and glass and Yeah, I'm wondering if you can give some kind of a bridge story for how in the world did this happen? Yeah, sure I'm no expert at this mind you I'm no architectural historian anything, but I do know that you know several things You know we of course had the Industrial Revolution so we had the you know

the moving away from the crafts and the guilds. now we've got steel beams and plate glass and we could just do that times a thousand or whatever. like that changed the way that things were made or fabricated. Yeah, cheap and well, and also very repetitive. there's just there's so many, like even you look at the Victorian period, the revival that we had here.

Jeremy Tate (07:15.529)
of the Gothic, was just like, you know, they produced a lot of the same ornaments over and over and over again, right? And you just find them in buildings, you know, it was just kind of ubiquitous in that period of time. Then you have the World Wars that essentially destroyed, you know, lot of the beautiful buildings in Europe and we had to rebuild them. And but then also you have the philosophical underpinnings, which had been, you know, brewing for some time. And certainly, you know, in the early nineteen hundreds.

that was very well formulated. Like Adaph Loos wrote, ornament is a crime. So there was this idea that we have all these modern things in our day, cars, telephones, and how do we decorate them? What is the proper ornament for that? I think there was certainly the...

There are a of architects that were essentially philosophers and said that there's no business having Corinthian columns decorate like a telephone or whatever. And that certainly made its way into architecture. And there was also the, let's call it the calcification of the, they called it the Beaux -Arts in France and they had just, classical architecture had become so rote that it had lost

I guess it's hard. And so, so it was kind of a confluence a lot of things, you know, it's hard to point to like, this was the one thing I think our modern minds like to think that there's one one thing that happened, right. And then now it's all changed. But was, you know, kind of a period of time. And then it just made sense. And the other the other dirty secret of modern architecture is that it's, you know, it's cheap. You don't have the investment in stone carving, etc.

Well, we connected, you know, ran into you at the Society for Classical Learning and, you know, I loved our conversations and I think about this renewal movement, the classical renewal movement and, you know, 1980s, maybe three or four classical schools in the whole country. 1970s, there's 13 ,000 homeschoolers. Today, there's five million homeschoolers plus. There are at least 1200 classical schools out there.

Jeremy Tate (09:34.721)
So, but we're still kind of in the beginning of this Renaissance. And I wonder if architecture is gonna be kind of the 2 .0 or the 3 .0 iteration of this movement where it kind of gives some more teeth, know, and especially as all of these schools are now, they're moving out of church basements and they're starting to think about getting space or building space. I'm wondering the work that you're doing at Harrison

I mean, if you could connect this to the classical renewal movement, and in some ways, I think of St. Benedict's in Massachusetts, in some ways, you've already done that, made that connection. Do you anticipate more of that in the future? Yeah, well, I certainly hope so, absolutely. But I think our argument for having a building reflect the classical curriculum that's happening inside, think that there's

Well, let's start on that kind of the negative side first. It's like, you know, when you go into a modern school building, you know, 1970s on those are influenced by the architecture, let's say embodies ideals that I think are antithetical to a classical program. So I like to point, you know, we I've given plenty of talks on architecture and you look at the Vitruvian man by, you

By Vitruvius gave a written description and then in the Renaissance, it was made in graphic form by Leonardo da Vinci. And it shows that the human body is governed by, or it's beautiful in its proportion. Now, you know Le Corbusier, the architect theoretician in the 1940s did the modular man and that looked at the human person as, well,

He made the Modular Man to basically take the imperial and the metric system and find a way that we can have industrial production with a common form of measurement. But it also looked at the human person as basically like material, just raw or just physical material. so you look at his drawings and they show a person sitting, person standing. It was all for the sake of

Jeremy Tate (11:54.997)
How would you say, you know, for useful things. and so with the, with those, with that standardization, you have standardized production. you know, we're, we're, you know, you look at any school building that has acoustical ceiling tiles and, you know, vinyl floor tiles and lockers that are all exactly the same, that all kind of fits within a larger worldview, which is that, you know, we're all the same or certainly in that's the way that the education system that that is of today.

the conveyor belt education thing is something that's called. And the goal of that is to produce the same thing over and over and over again. And you're surrounded, you're within a world that has the same things over and over and over. All the floor towels are the same, all the ceiling towels are the same, all the lockers are the same. And the lockers represent students, right? So you're all the same. And so if you look at a classical curriculum that has, in my opinion, no business being in a school that...

is designed principles that have really nothing to do with the classical education. you know, and I know that, you know, the church basements, right, you we find a lot of, you know, a lot of the programs there, but, you know, I, encourage them to do what they can. know, you know, we've helped out a school, Hotheran school in New York, Opus Dei school, you know, they had a room and, know, was St. Patrick's, it was a failed, it was a failed,

parochial school and you walk in, you've got the requisite trophy case and the trash bin right next to the front doors, et cetera, the fluorescent lights. And so we took that and we dressed it up. So just covered over the floor tile, put in ceiling beams. there's some rhythm to it and kind of ordered the interior. And incorporated some stained wood.

Yeah, think using, know, when possible, we always advocate for natural materials. Yeah. You know, and that's and to show the uniqueness of God's created world, right? It's like that wood grain happened one time or, you know, if you can, you know, the stone floor, etc. you know, our own kiddos, they're at Divine Mercy Academy, great, great private, you know, classical school in the Catholic tradition. And, you

Jeremy Tate (14:16.551)
dreaming big dreams about recovering this kind of education, but facing all the problems of new schools as well. And I've had these conversations with heads of school over the years, the idea of building a new beautiful building, it just seems so idealistic. But we chatted about this over lunch.

I think it's some of the things that have been built recently, the new building President Minnis is building over at Benedictine College or the new chapel at Hillsdale College. It seems to me, you would have insight here, that donors get excited about a concrete physical structure that they can invest into. Have you seen that? Oh, absolutely. that's ... Whenever we're approached by school

That's usually what they want is an image. that's, know, watercolor rendering or computer rendering, what have you. But what they want is some image that embodies their ideals. And that's the thing. And I think that that, you know, the picture is worth a thousand words. We know that old adage, but I think that that's true, especially with architecture, right? You know, when you build something, any time the human person does anything, it

It reflects the metaphysics or the philosophy of the institution or the person because of all the decisions that have to be made and how that gets formed. yeah, when we have those, people understand what the institution is trying to achieve with that image. And that's something that people can get behind. And if there's an accurate cost estimation that goes along with that, this is going to cost $5 million or $10 million or whatever. Now there's a monetary

Amount that's associated with with achieving that and and that's yeah, that's what we find donors That's that's what they'll warm up to that, know It's when it's nebulous and they don't know what they're necessarily donating towards that's really challenging and when it's you know Something described in words that will ultimately have a physical manifestation, know, such as a building that's a tough pitch, right? Because you know, everybody thinks about what it might be or could be you just you just don't know. Yeah, but yeah, I think

Jeremy Tate (16:36.265)
That image helps to solidify what it's all about. On the church side, and Harrison designs your work, you've done a lot on the parish side. saw a beautiful, beautiful picture of a parish in Kansas that you're building. Just absolutely stunning. What are you seeing there in terms of, have we hit rock bottom and are now going up in terms of new parishes being built and people thoughtfully thinking through, I mean, some of this stuff.

from the 70s and 80s and 60s is so weird. And at the time it was edgy and cool, but now it's just like, what were they thinking? Yeah, that's what you get when you don't participate in the timeless principles. It's of its time and it will look certainly of its time. You don't even have to say anything beyond it was built in the 60s or 70s. I know what it looks like right out of the gate. And that's the funny thing is when you look

architecture that participates within a tradition, you know, people that don't know, can't really place the date. Yeah. And, know, cause it is, timeless, right? There was a philosophical timeless principles that were informing it. yeah, so talking about, John Paul two parish in Kansas, it's actually an entire campus that we're designing. So it's not just the church. Okay. It is also a classical school and all.

And so I love campus design because it you can build relationships with buildings. So then it's not just about the using the language to express something within within a building. But now the you the other buildings, you know, say like the school, the school has a relationship to the school, to the church rather. And the hall has a relationship to the church and that, you know, they should be lower. There's not as much decoration, etc, etc. Right. So

Yeah, the parish wanted, know, it's John Paul II parish, so they wanted it to reflect St. Peter's, the Vatican, Rome. And so we're, you know, but we had to translate that into an architecture that would make sense in Kansas. So we can't just, you know, have travertine marble imported and that doesn't work necessarily. But yeah, so that's a lot of fun. The past spring, I went to Budapest for the first time and

Jeremy Tate (18:57.867)
we were doing a tour of the fishermen's wharf area, they were telling this story of the communist takeover and just for the purpose of demoralizing people, they stripped the ornate finishings off of these buildings. And it was a tactic that had been used within communist countries, within the satellite countries around Russia for years to really strip people of their agency and morale.

Are we now, do you feel like, I mean, we love what Harrison Designs is doing, but are we potentially the beginning of a larger recovery of this tradition? Yeah, it's been happening. It's been happening for some time, and now I think it's really blossoming. Picking up speed. It's blossoming, for sure. Yeah, I think, you it's interesting, you know, there's certainly the studies of, I can't think of the, the pretty little come to me, but she's done.

These studies where it's visual eye tracking. You can look at, they put side by side a modernist building versus traditional. So in Washington DC, right? So we have the famous brutalist concrete, very similar to the common buildings that you're talking about versus say, the Lincoln Memorial. And just through our natural reactions, they can see that people want to look at the classical building. And it's not to use the populist argument, but.

I think that there's something that's just rooted in human nature that these buildings have kind of been, I guess what happened over centuries is we winnowed out all the bad ideas. Modernism is, it's interesting because it just changed things so drastically, so quickly. It didn't participate in the tradition. You're right, it stripped out all the detail because it was superfluous.

But yeah, I think that they're just rooted in things that, well, like proportion. We talked about the Vitruvian man, the same principles that God designed the human person in this way. And then we followed God's design and the design of the buildings. And that was all jettisoned out. It's interesting that you mentioned communism too, because talk about embodying ideals, right? We know a communist building when we see it. yeah. Which is so there's no mistaking it.

Jeremy Tate (21:22.569)
And you don't have to necessarily know what communism is all about to get an inkling of an idea by just looking at the buildings. There's no doubt that the builders did not believe humans have souls. It's the oppression of the human person by an all -controlling state. And yeah, the buildings are for people. when you strip necessarily those parts out of it, we have

We have faces, buildings have faces, but if you eliminate all the detail from that, it's almost like a faceless person. And isn't that a state, the state, right? It's like a faceless institution that's controlling you. Nick, I'm wondering, we talk a lot about books, a lot about authors. We love our author bank here at CLT. I think of the Churchill quote, we shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us. I'm wondering, some authors within the tradition.

some of the thinkers that we all already know who spoke about this, who spoke about architecture. Are there some that you'd recommend? Yeah, mean, there's certainly all the Renaissance architects for sure. So Vitruvius is the first one, right? And the only surviving text from antiquity. And that lays it all out in 10 books. And here's a man who's writing for the emperor, right, impress him. And Rome is an empire and they're looking at taking, they want to take it. So it was kind of the

almost like a manual of sorts. certainly Vitruvian man is in there as well. But yeah, how to design and build temples. And then that was essentially rediscovered in the Renaissance, very receptive audience in the Renaissance. So essentially lost for a very long time. And then you had Alberti, who wrote his treatise on architecture. And then there's Surlio.

Palatio, know, these are all, you know, they're all kind of creating their own treatises around that time. So those are kind of the, know, that's all part of the revival, you know, because all that, all that tradition had been lost. So one thing, you know, one book that I always recommend to people just as a very good, you know, very basic introduction to architecture is John Summersons, the classical language of architecture, which is my first book that I read on architecture, which was actually, you know, from that political. a short read, is that right? Very short. Yeah, was actually,

Jeremy Tate (23:44.053)
It was actually originally a BBC broadcast. Okay. And what you did is you requested a little pamphlet that would come to your door before the, before the time, I think it was like given in four parts and it contained all these pictures of classic buildings that would go along with the talk. he referenced like, look at figure one figure, you know, and that was referencing the photographs. So it introduces architecture as a language and that it was designed, you know, it's a language to say

And that was enormously influential. That was part of my, I guess, new understanding of architecture was, you know, that. yeah, you can pick it up for a couple of dollars on Amazon. I don't necessarily agree with kind of the end of the book where he talks about Corbusier and his, you know, kind of particular. But at any rate, I think it's a great, great introduction, very easy read. And he's very witty as well. So and he goes into that, too, like what happened? You know, how do we get, you know, these new

designs in this new modernist architecture, like how did that come to pass? So, you know, just a kind of a nice succinct summary of that. So if you're listening to this podcast and you're ahead of school and you've got big dreams, but it's overwhelming to even think about the idea of trying to raise money for a beautiful building or something, what is kind of a first step that folks can do if they want to kind of explore their options? Yeah, yeah, that's so we would call that a concept design.

You know, the very, very first thing. it's, you know, what we do is we would meet, you know, depending on what is trying to be achieved here. Right. But we meet and try to understand, you know, what's, you know, how big is the school? How many students, you know, is it partaking of the of the, you know, architectural tradition in the area? You know, like we're doing something here in Annapolis. You know, we want to look at, you know, kind of the local architecture, you know, if building a new building and

and then we would come up with a conceptual design. So that would be that image that we were talking about earlier, which is typically a perspective rendering showing the basic size and shape of the building, the character of it. We can do a lot with that. We certainly have many clients that have raised lots of money with those particular renderings. And then we also use that to get an idea of how much the project's.

Jeremy Tate (26:07.009)
Okay, but we've asked been asked to do renovations too, you know, so sometimes we've got an ugly school They don't have you know, the whatever, you know 10 20 whatever million dollars to do a new school and we've got a work within what they've got and so then that might encompass like a an interior rendering so we're gonna take this this thing that has You know, cosical ceiling tiles and VCT and we're gonna show you what you can do with it Okay, come over the rendering that you know change transforms that you know, albeit, you know visually

Yeah, yeah. So we've done we've done those two of that in terms of education, you know, teachers, you know, thinking about their students. You went to the classical architecture school at Notre Dame. Benedictine has one. I understand. Classical architecture. Are there other options? What are the are the main ones that you would recommend? Yeah. So there's also the classical. I'm sorry. The Catholic University of America has a classical program. They have a larger program.

which does other forms, but they also have a class of the program. That's growing in popularity, growing in the faculty. It's interesting that you have all these classical schools that are in Catholic institutions. I don't know what's going on there. Well, I do actually. By the way, there's also UVU and I forget it's in Utah.

Okay. That's another another program that they've got some and Clemson had one and then also University of Miami has some practices there but I you Notre Dame was the I wanted you to visit the one in Charleston. What is that? the building arts. Yes, American College of the building. Yeah, they do classical architecture design as well. I'm not very familiar with their program. But I think it's mostly dedicated to the revival of the crafts.

So certainly, you know an allied field for sure or allied school but not not steep necessarily in design only Yeah, we certainly need those practitioners out there, you know, absolutely but yes Not the not the architectural program that you would find that say like Notre Dame or know, Catholic you Well, Nick, I love love love what you're doing. What y 'all done at st. Benedict's and John Paul

Jeremy Tate (28:31.049)
second in Kansas and it's really cool. think it kind of tells the world this story of the classical renewal movement that this is something's happening here that folks can be drawn to through the physical beauty of this space. So thank you for the work that you're doing and I'd love to get updates in the future. how can folks contact you if they're interested in learning more? Yeah, absolutely. Well, my email address is nic at harrisondesign .com.

And yeah, that's the best way we should be. Yeah, our website, obviously, HarrisonDesign .com. yeah. A lot of beautiful images on that website. thank you. Thank you. Yeah, we're pleased to do it. You know, as we think it's, you know, this is unbelievably important for the culture and education. And we want to just be part of building all that up. Amen. Classical Renewal 3 .0. Y 'all are leading the way. So thank you, Nick. Thanks for being with us today.