I have some reservations about what Philip Bess means by “the sacred” and “response to the sacred,” but his applications to architecture are very intriguing ( Till We Have Build Jerusalem ; ISI, 2006). When people encounter “the sacred,” he says, they respond with sacrifice, prohibition, obedience. Architecture is one form of response to the sacred (altars built where theophanies take place, eg), and architecture as a response to the sacred embodies these values: Verticality, light and shadow as a symbol of the “immateriality of the sacred,” “delight in craftsmanship” as an expression of the inherent goodness and sacramental potential of creation, employment of mathematic or geometric structures, unity, hierarchy.

Even much modern architecture was a recognizable response to the sacred, even though these features of sacred architecture are increasingly detached from specific religious intention:

“Because the architectural care once lavished most conspicuously upon temples and churches came to be applied also to courts and palaces, schools and libraries, hospitals and gymnasia, it is all the more important not to overlook the sacred aspects of these secular institutions . . . . justice, knowledge, and healing are all characteristics commonly attributed to the sacred, and it therefore may represent a more advanced and nuanced rather than a diminished sacred sensibility for communities of compassion and architects to devote their talents to the creation not only of temple of worship, but also to what architects themselves often refer to - perhaps not merely pretentiously - as ‘temples of justice,’ ‘temples of learning,’ and ‘temples of healing.’”

Today, though, there are “few signs around us that contemporary architecture is conceived as an address to sacred order, at least as I have described it . . . . most of the evidence found in late twentieth-century life and architecture points the other way. Opulently appointed commercial buildings and enormous retail complexes dominate the urban and suburban landscape. Churches, schools, libraries, and other historically ‘sacred’ civic buildings are built meanly in out-of-the-way places, too frequently careless of the logic of construction and building materials. There is little sign of sacrifice in contemporary building, of lavishness expended unaccompanied by hard calculation of its potential return in dollars or prestige . . . . contemporary architectural discourse displays a seemingly endless fascination with transgression and blurring of distinctions, dominated by men and (increasingly) women quite content to understand architecture first and foremost as a symbol of power and self-aggrandizement.” Modern spacec is “nonhierarchical, abstract, rational, universal, and undifferentiated; i.e., shapeless, not purpose-specific, and not characterized by the specific formal and figural qualities found in traditional spaces such as public squares, streets, and rooms.”