ABSTRACT
Using works of Western art and architecture made over the past three millennia, this chapter seeks to demonstrate that the most thoughtful and innovative architects and visual artists have used skill, taste, and creative imagination to fashion objects in two and three dimensions that pursue the beautiful, illuminate the human experience, or do both. I also argue that by seeking to understand our material inheritance as fully as possible we can better understand not just our material present but also ourselves, because we have gotten here thanks in no small part to who and what preceded us.
