Throughout history, great civilizations have left powerful imprints on the human habitat. From Angkor Wat to Yucatán, beauty and grandeur in the design of temples, palaces, memorials—even whole precincts or cities—have resulted. During the half century that Modern Age has been in print, however, the United States has emerged as the first preeminent power in the history of the world that has signally failed in these monumental endeavors. After World War II, our civic and religious buildings became test tubes for one forlorn architectural theory or other, our civic monuments became unmonumental or even anti-monumental—think of the pathetic, sprawling FDR Memorial in Washington, DC—and our community planning eschewed qualitative visions in three dimensions for essentially quantitative, two-dimensional blueprints.

World War II marks not just a point of transition but a veritable chasm in the annals of American civic art because we were doing quite well on the whole during the first decades of the twentieth century. Just check out a survey like The American Architecture of Today, published in 1927 and written by the Harvard scholar G. H. Edgell, and you’ll see what I mean.

There is no question that our civic art’s fall and modernism’s rise are joined at the hip. It is also significant that modernism was mainly impelled not by aesthetic motives but by developments outside the province of the visual arts such as Enlightenment rationalism and skepticism, the triumphs of modern science, the Industrial Revolution, and Hegelian and romantic divinations concerning the Zeitgeist. Functionalist planning pegged to the automobile’s advent was one byproduct of this cultural upheaval. Such planning lay at the heart of modernist visions ranging from Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City. But it also found fertile soil in the utilitarianism that runs deep in the American character and, mutatis mutandis, blossomed into “sprawl”—the leapfrogging, low-density urban tissue that by now accounts for the vast majority of the nation’s built environment.

For those of us who dislike sprawl basically because it doesn’t look good, modernism’s inartistic roots should serve as a reminder that focusing on aesthetics only gets you so far. Sprawl is part of the fabric of American life, and increasingly tied to upwardly mobile lifestyles the world over. It is going to be with us as long as there is a plentiful supply of cheap land.

Indeed, those who care about beauty and grandeur in the world we build must acknowledge our currently countercul-tural status. In a country as wealthy and culturally diverse as the United States, however, countercultural movements can create important roles for themselves, particularly when they are grounded in enduring human aspirations. At a very deep level, human beings have always sought, and always will seek, a world built on humanist terms—a world that makes the human body at home, while enriching the life of the spirit. In the modern age, that yearning must compete with other, supposedly more practical, desires. But it will always be with us.