In Praise of Purgatory

Classical Traditions in an Age of Immediacy

The ICAA is proud to share this essay by Tiffany Abernathy.

The opinions expressed in this essay belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the ICAA. We are excited to share this piece in hopes of fostering careful reflection and thoughtful debate on the meanings and aims of classicism.

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“First, the taking in of scattered particulars under one Idea, so that everyone understands what is being talked about … Second, the separation of the Idea into parts, by dividing it at the joints, as nature directs, not breaking any limb in half as a bad carver might.”

— Plato, Phaedrus

“Limited by space, a frog in a well cannot
Understand what is an ocean;
Limited by time, an insect in summer cannot
Understand what is ice.”

— Chuang-tzu (Zhuangzi), Autumn Flood, Chapter XVII

I.

We are uneasy with the in-between. Jun’ichirō Tanizaki knew this. In his luminous essay “In Praise of Shadows,” the Japanese novelist and critic observed that culture had begun to lose its tolerance for gradation — that electric light had flooded interiors once shaped by the intelligent deployment of darkness, that refinement had yielded to glare. His meditation was not merely aesthetic. It was a warning: in its pursuit of clarity and speed, modernity risked abandoning the subtle intervals in which culture matures.

What Tanizaki mourned was not candlelight for its own sake, but the epistemic patience that shadow demands — the trained eye that learns to dwell in transition, that finds in the penumbra something that full illumination destroys. Shadow was once understood as a condition of depth — not the privation of light but its complement, the medium in which form acquires relief, weight, and interiority. What is true of form may be equally true of ideas: that they require something withheld in order to become fully themselves.

Architecture today faces a cognate condition. Ours is an age of the instantaneous: images circulate faster than buildings can be properly imagined, digital tools compress design processes once rooted in enduring craft, and public symbols are drawn into charged, ideological contests. In this climate, classical architecture occupies a peculiarly exposed position — invoked by some as guarantor of continuity and dignity, read by others as a sign of political allegiance, a legibility that has become, paradoxically, its vulnerability.

Yet another reading is possible. And for it, we need Dante.

II.

Classical traditions today dwell in what Dante called il Purgatorio — not a site of punishment or annihilation, but a terrain of ascent. In Dante’s Commedia, Purgatory is the mountain where the impure is shed, where the pilgrim is made worthy of what comes next. It is not a place of ending but of preparation: the interval in which soul and will are disciplined toward clarity. The terraces of the mountain are not stages to be escaped but lessons to be lived, each one burning away another layer of distortion until what remains is essential. The in-between is not merely transitional. It is where the real work happens.

If this sounds spiritually reflective, it is also — translated with care — architectural. As German philosopher Josef Pieper observed, the medieval tradition drew a distinction between two modes of understanding: ratio and intellectus. Ratio is the power of discursive, logical thought — searching, examining, abstracting, defining, concluding. Intellectus is the capacity for simplex intuitus, that simple vision to which truth offers itself like a landscape to the eye. Our knowing is both these things in one, simultaneously ratio and intellectus — the mode of discursive thought impregnated by an effortless, receptive awareness. To know in this way is to think non-dually: not choosing between analysis and receptivity, but learning to move between them as naturally as breathing.

Classical traditions have always inhabited such intervals. Unlike the instantaneous image or the rendered spectacle, buildings emerge through a measured negotiation between ideal and reality. Proportions, order, typology, tectonics: these are forms of the ideal meeting the obdurate fact of matter, gravity, context, and need — what Japanese spatial thinking might recognize as the interplay of ma (間), the charged interval, and ki (気), the animating force that moves through it. The architect's task has never been to dwell entirely at either pole but to navigate the gradient between them — to aspire toward ideal order while contending with imperfection, ambiguity, and constraint.

III.

Aristotle would have recognized the structure of that navigation. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he describes practical wisdom — phrónēsis — not as the application of abstract rules but as the trained capacity to discern right action within specific circumstances. The practically wise person is not an algorithm. She reads the situation, brings principle to bear, and exercises judgment where the two do not cleanly intersect. This is precisely what classical training, at its best, cultivates: not the rote application of the orders, but the disciplined perception that makes them intelligible — and therefore useful — within conditions the canon may not have anticipated.

Plato would have pressed further. In the Phaedrus, he depicts the soul as a charioteer guiding two horses — one noble, one unruly — toward the vision of the Forms. The charioteer’s task is not to suppress the horses but to harness them: to hold the reins with enough firmness to maintain direction, enough suppleness to absorb the pull of circumstance. Dante, centuries later, returned to this image — the careful control of motion and intent as the precondition of safe ascent. For both, mastery is not the elimination of tension but its governance. Classical traditions, understood through this lens, are less a fixed language than a sustained practice of exactly that governance: disciplines by which imagination is held in productive tension with the demands of making.

IV.

What classical traditions provide, specifically, is tectonics — and here the stakes are ethical as much as aesthetic. That tectonic honesty has been argued from unexpected directions. The German architect and critic Gottfried Semper, whose materialist theory traditionalists have rightly questioned in other respects, nonetheless insisted on a principle that classical traditions share: a building that communicates how it stands and what it is made of creates a form of civic truth. A building that reveals its means communicates something that transcends expression — what Augustine called veritas: truth not as proposition but as disclosure, the thing showing itself as it is.

Architect and scholar Demetri Porphyrios extends the argument through an analogy that resonates across traditions. Tectonic order, he argues, conveys both a sense of the necessary and of freedom. It is necessary because order is delimited by the form-giving capacity of materials. Yet it also steps outside 'real' construction, setting its own rules as image and make-believe of shelter — rules that become, once established, a treasure retained in memory and transmitted across traditions. "The profound affinity between play and order is what makes the analogy with tectonics plausible," he writes. "This is what classical antiquity taught and it is precisely this that we seem to have forgotten." The parallel with ma returns here with fresh force: constraint and freedom are not opposites but conditions of each other.

In her essay "Against Interpretation," Susan Sontag would have added another layer. Her concern was not with tectonics but with interpretation — with the habitual compulsion to find meaning behind form rather than attending to what a thing simply is. Yet even Sontag acknowledged that for Dante the design of works experienced on several levels was once "a revolutionary and creative move." Her complaint was not with depth but with its modern debasement — the principle of redundancy, as she called it, that had become the principal affliction of contemporary life. Classical traditions have suffered exactly this reduction: their forms mistaken for messages, columns wrongly made to stand for tyranny or authority depending on the decoder's politics. What is lost in this hermeneutic scramble is the quidditas that Aquinas called the "whatness" of the thing — its sensory particularity prior to any meaning layered over it.

This is also what Tanizaki was protecting: not shadow as mystery, but shadow as a distinct quality of light that demands a different kind of seeing. Building, at its best, offers the same demand. Before it means anything, it is something — weight, proportion, the particular sound of footfall on stone.

V.

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” — Lord Acton, Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887

Algorithmic design tools and image-driven media culture have altered the sequence of creation: software drives construction; representation outruns structure; rendering precedes and sometimes shapes the building. These shifts do not erase traditional principles, but complicate them.

When a building's tectonic logic is legible, it communicates hierarchy, stability, purpose. When separated from its ethical foundations — when the column becomes a graphic element detached from load — form risks becoming pure image, appropriable for ends unrelated to the public good. The work of purgation must now contend with virtual renderings, instantaneous narratives, and the allure of spectacle: that condition in which the shadow cast by architecture is mistaken for architecture itself. German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that the disappearance of rituals is the structural erosion of the symbolic techniques by which a culture makes itself at home in the world — and architecture, when reduced to image, loses its capacity to be one of those techniques.

The contested meanings that now surround classical forms are a pressure toward clarity. Classical architecture is not authoritarian by nature. Historically, it arose as a language of civic order: a way to articulate institutions, shared spaces, the decorum of collective life. Its legibility is also its virtue. The tension surrounding classical work today is, in this sense, the fire of purgation: it demands that architects articulate principle with renewed lucidity, or watch their discipline be claimed by those less interested in principle than in appearance.

Seen in this light, the present moment is an interregnum: a transitional period in which inherited forms confront new technologies, contested meanings, and the deliberate capture of civic language by those whose interest is in power rather than principle. Lord Acton's warning was directed at the Church, but its logic extends to any administration that mistakes the symbols of authority for authority itself. The mountain is still there. The question is who is permitted to name the path — and whether silence, in such circumstances, is a principle or its abandonment.

The frog in the well cannot understand the ocean; the insect born in summer has no concept of ice. Classical training, at its best, is the slow enlargement of that well — not the abolition of limits, but the learned recognition of where they lie and what lies beyond them.

VI.

In the studio, this purgatorial logic can be made pedagogically explicit. Students confronting precedents alongside contemporary tools — hand drawings and proportional studies coexisting with digital models and performance analyses — are not choosing between tradition and modernity. They are learning to hold the reins. Traditions are neither abandoned nor reproduced as facsimile; they are integrated, adapted, rearticulated against present conditions.

The studio, at its best, is revolutionary not because it overturns the canon but because it refuses to let the canon become inert. Each project is the path — not a rehearsal for some later competence, but the practice itself, in which the discipline and the person are simultaneously formed. Each critique is a terrace: something is tested, something is shed, and what remains is more essential than what preceded it. What is burned away is not the discipline but the habit mistaken for it — memorized applications confused with trained perception, reproduction confused with understanding.

The studio can be that kind of place: not a destination but a via, a way. The student who learns to discern principle from habit, tectonic clarity from excess, intelligibility from symbolic performance, is learning about more than buildings. She is learning to transmute the friction of circumstance into the material of understanding — what the scholar Joseph Campbell calls the hero's return — the journey inward that enables the gift brought back.

VII.

This is a living language, and there are living patterns in a place. The more a place comes to life as an entirety, the more it has — as architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander wrote — "that self-maintaining fire." When a building achieves this quality, it becomes a part of nature: like ocean waves or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety, held in the presence of impermanence. This quality cannot be made, only generated — "as a flower cannot be made, but only generated from the seed."

The life and beauty of the built world once arose from shared languages. In our time those languages have fragmented. To work toward a living language again, we must learn to discover patterns that are deep and generative — patterns whose connections form a living whole. And yet even this is not the destination: the language and its processes merely release an order that is already native to us. They do not teach so much as remind — of what we already know, when we set aside fixed opinion and attend to what emerges from within.

VIII.

There is a temporal register to all this. The Chinese philosopher Laozi understood growth as the basic function of everything alive: all things spring from nothingness, grow from incompletion toward their fullest maturities, and thereby become ready to return. Aware of the inevitable deterioration of any tangible form, he suggests that the way to face reality is to accept the negative side of being as well as the positive, and to leave completion to nature. This is not resignation. It is the deepest form of patience: the receptive mode of the intellectus, the rider who knows when to hold the reins and when to yield.

The horse requires the rider; the rider requires the reins. Dante's mountain is climbed step by step, each terrace reminding us of what the last did not. The classical building, in its best instances, embodies exactly that patience: a proportional system that reveals itself only gradually, the forms and patterns that point beyond themselves toward the invisible spirit that created them — the material that improves with age, the civic relationship that deepens over generations. Approached rightly, such buildings become not monuments but fountainheads: inexhaustible sources for those willing to learn from them.

Purgatorio, after all, is not where things end. It is where they are made worthy of what comes next. In these interludes of pressure and reflection, classical traditions are not eroded but clarified. Its principles, refined through the fire of debate, ideological contest, and technological transformation, illuminate the ethical and civic ambitions we carry as architects, teachers, and citizens. The pilgrim climbs, shedding what is inessential, discovering — in the transparency of things showing themselves as they are — principles that were always there, waiting to be seen.

— Tiffany E.U. Abernathy
London, March 2026
The views expressed here are my own and do not represent the positions of any organisation with which I am affiliated.

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Sources in order of appearance in text

Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (London: Vintage, 2001). The essay was originally written and published in Japan in 1933.

Dante Alighieri, Purgatory, translated and edited with an Introduction by Anthony M. Esolen, illustrations by Gustave Doré (New York: The Modern Library, 2003). Originally composed in the early fourteenth century. Cited in relation to illustration VI.

Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia, Purgatorio, Canti XXIII–XXXIII, commemorative edition in 9 volumes produced in collaboration with the Società Dantesca Italiana, with introductions by Stefano Massini, Melania Mazzucco, and Massimo Cacciari (Rome: GEDI Gruppo Editoriale, under the auspices of the Comitato Nazionale per le Celebrazioni dei 700 Anni dalla Morte di Dante Alighieri, 2021). Originally composed in the early fourteenth century. Cited in relation to illustrations III and VIII.

Josef Pieper, Leisure, The Basis of Culture, translated by Alexander Dru, with an Introduction by T.S. Eliot (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998). Originally published New York: Pantheon Books, 1952.

Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, translated by J.A.K. Thomson (London: Penguin Classics, 2004). Originally written in the fourth century BCE.

Plato, Phaedrus, translated by Robin Waterfield (London: Penguin Classics, 2005). Originally written ca. 370 BCE.

Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, Res Monographs in Anthropology and Aesthetics, translated and edited by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Die vier Elemente der Baukunst was originally published in 1851.

Demetri Porphyrios, Classical Architecture: The Living Tradition (London: Academy Editions, 1991).

Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2009). The essay “Against Interpretation” originally appeared in Evergreen Review, 1964.

Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton), Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1 April 1887. Published in Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, edited by Louise Creighton (London: Longmans, Green, 1904), Vol. I.

Drubwang Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Carefree Dignity: Discourses on Training in the Nature of Mind, compiled and translated by Erik Pema Kunsang and Marcia Binder Schmidt, edited by Kerry Moran (Hong Kong: Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 1998).

Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Essence, translated by Armand Augustine Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1949). De ente et essentia was originally written ca. 1252–56 CE.

Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, translated by Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020). Originally published in German as Vom Verschwinden der Rituale (Berlin: Ullstein Buchverlage, 2019).

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949; repr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). Consulted in audiobook edition, narrated by Arthur Morey, John Lee, and Susan Denaker (Brilliance Audio, 2016). Part of The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell.

Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

Adolphe Appia, Essays, Scenarios, and Designs, translated by Walther R. Volbach, edited and with notes and commentary by Richard C. Beacham (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989). Theater and Dramatic Studies, no. 57. Cited in relation to illustrations I, IV, V, and VII.

“Harmonize with its light,

Sympathize with its dustiness.

This is the way of natural unity.”

— Lao-tzu (Laozi), Tao Te Ching, Chapter 56, translated from the Ssu-pu-ts'ung-k'an edition

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Tiffany Abernathy is an architect, educator, and advocate whose work explores how classical and traditional architecture serves contemporary public life. She runs her own multi-disciplinary design consultancy, Abernathy, and has served as Director of US Projects at John Simpson Architects since 2014.

Trained at the University of Miami and the University of Notre Dame, she pursued postgraduate study at the Architectural Association and Part 3 Professional Studies at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Early in her career she was awarded the inaugural Rieger-Graham Prize from the ICAA, taken up as an Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2006-07. She was among the inaugural Michael C. Duda Visiting Professors of the Practice at the University of Notre Dame in 2021, has twice been named the School of Architecture's Undergraduate Educator of the Year, and continues to teach in Notre Dame's fifth-year thesis studio and Rome Studies Program. From 2022 to 2024 she led summer studios at the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture at the University of Cambridge.

She serves on the Board of Trustees of INTBAU and on the Committee for the Preservation of the White House. Her practice spans large-scale urban design, campus masterplans, and landmark buildings in the UK and abroad.