Rich people should build beautiful public spaces

Plus: Project 2025, good citizens and good government, and more

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Rich people should build beautiful public spaces

I live in Pittsburgh, an epicenter of Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropic legacy. Before moving here, I vaguely recalled Carnegie, from high school history classes, as a fabulously wealthy steel industrialist in a jumble of Gilded Age “robber barons” like J.P. Morgan, John Gould, and John D. Rockefeller. Living here, it’s difficult not to think of him primarily as a philanthropist because the built legacy of his giving is everywhere you look.

The Carnegie libraries are a big part of it, of course. They’re gorgeous. Have you heard of Braddock, Pennsylvania? It’s the “hell” town where Sen. John Fetterman used to be mayor.¹ Much of Braddock is literally in ruins, but the town has at least one refuge of stable beauty: the library, complete with gym and music hall, thanks in recent years to local philanthropists who restored the building but originally to Andrew Carnegie. It looks like a castle.

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The libraries aren’t only on this area, incidentally. Carnegie built thousands of libraries in the United States and abroad, his project extending far beyond the cities and towns with which he had some personal connection.

He built more than libraries, too. Attached to our main library branch is a natural history museum, an art museum, and a music hall. Pittsburgh is home to Carnegie Mellon University, and Carnegie also funded many other educational and cultural institutions around the world, often installing them in beautiful public facilities.

The cynical might say Carnegie did all that to create exactly the favorable impression I have of him. I don’t know, though I’m not inclined to such a cynical read. But whatever his motives, and whatever else he did, he built these buildings for the public, and many are still in good use.

Rich people today should do likewise. They should build beautiful public spaces, and they should think about architectural beauty basically as Andrew Carnegie did: symmetrical, ornamented, made of textured, organic materials (stone, wood, bricks), and designed in the traditional styles that research shows all kinds of Americans overwhelmingly prefer.² They should, as columnist Ross Douthat argued at The New York Times in a column on architectural beauty this past week, “see the world more humanistically and mystically,” and “regard [them]selves as stewards and sub-creators once again.”