The inevitable human need to build our hopes can be found in any construction — whether it’s a home or a cultural icon. But there is a uniquely problematic desire to build for the divine in the very human world of architecture. I am an architect who has built over a thousand things in the last 45 years, and I know that there is a clear difference between simple shelter and expressing faith.

The Roman philosopher Vitruvius defined architecture as manifesting “Firmness [structure], Commodity [use], and Delight [beauty].” What makes any building attempt Delight? I think it is God who gives humanity the ability to see beyond shelter, and the Bible captures that essential imperative.

Genesis was written about 3,500 years ago. Rather than fantastic fables and legends of supernatural gods and goddesses, the Bible is a mirror of what humans did then, and do now, including building beyond the burrow or nest humans build to satisfy their hopes beyond survival. One parable in Genesis understands the motivations of humans to go beyond themselves, beyond faith, into manifesting their control in built form — in the Tower of Babel:

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” (Gen. 11:1-4)

The overt, built, aspiration to “make a name for themselves” is no different from the scores of new Needle Towers in New York City in its aesthetic rationale. God allowed us the hubris to err, and we can try to understand our folly rather than rationalize our overwhelming desire to control a world that we did not make. Inevitably God will reveal our inability, no matter what we build, and he did in Babel:

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Architecture is unique among human endeavors because it tries to substantiate our desires by building them. The profession of “architect” has only been around for two centuries, since the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris defined the aesthetics of invention in buildings. Up until then, “Master Builders” applied vernaculars and traditions to the act of building.

Like defining religion, the desire to intellectually define the design of buildings and our lives beyond knowing the presence of God is what humans evolve into. The oxymoronic dance between our fundamental love of beauty and its inscrutably compelling and transformative source being given to us (and not controlled by us) is fully evident in the life of Jesus.

The evangelist Matthew recounted the extreme beauty of the transfiguration of Jesus — and, like the Tower of Babel, the unfiltered Peter, like humanity, like me, fully jumped into the hopes of creating that beauty himself:

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” (Matt. 17:1-4)

Like all architects, me included, Peter wants to build the beauty that God has given them. But no architect can overcome our essential inability to manifest the gifts that we cannot design. Instead, we try to invent the exquisite beauty that is continually revealed to us:

While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. (Matt. 17:5-6)

But the same God who gives us beauty, and continually reveals our inability to define it, also gives every architect, every person, the ability to discover the beauty that passes all understanding: “But Jesus came and touched them, saying, ‘Get up and do not be afraid’” (Matt. 17:7).

Rather than lament our, my, inability to define and design beauty, I can realize that humanity is given the unique gift of sensing it, knowing it, living it — when we can see what God has given us. This understanding is not a rationalization of limitation, but a challenge to go beyond the hubris that builds the Tower of Babel or a Tabernacle in response to miracle.

In a personal letter, the 16th-century artist Michelangelo said, “The sculptor arrives at his end by taking away what is superfluous.” The paraphrase of this remark is often expressed as “I carved and carved until I set the angel free.” Since there was no mediator, no judge, no canon between Michelangelo and the block of marble that he carved, he simply encountered the beauty God gave him to see beneath the superfluous to reveal the beauty that was already there.

Beyond the artist, the architect has the full mantle of manifesting all the possibilities of what we can make — beyond just the object, shelter, space or even the community, architects aspire to go beyond Commodity to Delight. No architect has ever tried more diligently to understand what beauty is, and how to define it, than Christopher Alexander, who died in 2022. His 60 years of teaching, writing, and building as an architect, academic, and thought leader has sold millions of books and taught thousands of designers at MIT, Berkeley, and across the world.

At the end of his professional life, Alexander wrote an article titled “The Long Path that Leads from the Making of our World to God.” For Alexander, the world is “the garden in which we live and we its gardeners, tending to and expressing what we have already been given. Consequently, the sacredness of the physical world — and the potential of the physical world for sacredness … is a powerful, surprising, and sure path to recognizing, and providing small steps towards understanding the existence of God, whatever God may be, as a necessary part of the reality of the universe.”

For this world-class artist and thinker, creativity comes by listening to the God who made us rather than through conformity to “the Canon” that all architects were steeped in in the 20th century. I think a lifetime devoted to understanding design and humanity made Alexander recognize what was in plain sight.

The unmitigated thrill of experiencing the beauty God gives us — in a baby’s smile, the sunset, the rolling sea — does not excuse humanity from manifesting what God gives us. Architects might not be able to honestly claim that they define beauty. I cannot — but we can find it in ourselves.