For those that do not know, I was born in Vienna, Austria in February 2007, and spent my formative years there before moving to the United States to attend Woodberry Forest School. I speak German fluently and have made a careful effort to maintain a connection with my home country — in fact, we still have my childhood home in Vienna. Not much has changed. Since selling my company, I purchased a home in the inner city near Stadtpark.

Vienna is one of my favorite cities in the world, in part because of its beautiful and deeply emotional architecture. During my late teen years, I had a really big problem with the death of good architecture.

I still do.

There is something that happens to a person when they grow up surrounded by buildings that were designed to be more than functional. The Ringstrasse, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Staatsoper — these are not just structures. They are arguments. They argue that beauty is not decoration, that the physical world we inhabit has a moral dimension, that what we build tells the people who live inside and around it something about what we think they are worth.

When I moved to the United States I encountered, for the first time in any sustained way, the glass box. The concrete slab. The office park. The strip mall that looks like it was designed by someone who had never once been asked to feel something. I remember the specific moment the contrast became unbearable — I was seventeen, driving past a stretch of commercial development in Virginia, and I thought: this is what it looks like when a civilization stops believing in itself.

That sounds dramatic. I mean it.

Architecture is perhaps the most democratic of the arts. You cannot opt out of it the way you can opt out of a painting or a film. A city is a total environment — it surrounds you, it shapes your mood without your permission, it makes implicit claims about the value of the human experience whether its architects intended to or not. A beautiful building says: you deserve this. A brutal or indifferent one says: your presence here is a transaction, nothing more.

Vienna understood this for centuries. The Habsburgs, whatever their political failures, had a theory of architecture that was essentially a theory of human dignity. They built on a scale and with an ornamentation that communicated permanence, meaning, and care. Walking through the first district is to be in conversation with people who died three hundred years ago, who thought deeply about what it meant to be alive in a city.

I am not nostalgic for empire. I am nostalgic for the belief that the built world should be worthy of the people who inhabit it.

What replaced that belief, in most of the Western world, was something that called itself progress. Modernism had genuine ideals — it wanted to make good design accessible, to strip away the ostentatious excesses of the aristocracy, to build honestly. I understand those impulses. But somewhere between the ideals and the execution, we arrived at a built environment that is, in most cities, aggressively hostile to the human need for beauty. We confused austerity with honesty and cheapness with virtue.

The philosophers who concern me most on this question are not architects. They are people who wrote about what beauty does to us — Kant, who argued that aesthetic experience is a form of moral attention; Simone Weil, who wrote that beauty is a trap God sets for the materialist; Roger Scruton, who spent the last decades of his life arguing that the destruction of beautiful cities is a form of cultural self-harm that we have not yet fully reckoned with.

Scruton is the one I return to most. He believed that architecture communicates in a register that bypasses rational argument — that a beautiful building produces in us something closer to recognition than to appreciation, as if beauty were not invented but remembered. I think he was right. When I walk along the Ringstrasse I do not admire it the way I admire a clever argument. I feel something more like relief.

I am not sure what to do with any of this, practically speaking. I am not an architect. I am not a policy maker. But I think the question of what we build and why matters as much as almost any other question a civilization can ask itself, and I think we have been answering it very badly for a very long time.

Vienna reminds me that it was not always so. That is why I keep going back.