Berkley Center

The European Union had a problem. As almost every individual, group, and nation has experienced, it pertained to money.

Six years after its founding in 1993, the European Union decided to mint its own currency as a way to further integrate its member states. However, the designers of the new bank notes faced a dilemma: they needed to create a unifying theme for the bills that would support the euro’s basic purpose.

So what did they ultimately choose? Famous politicians? Religious and scientific figures?

Architecture.

Illustrations of windows, doorways, and bridges adorn the front and backs of all euro notes. Yet as the European Central Bank emphasizes on their website, the structures depicted on each bill are not real. Instead, they represent features characteristic of the major architectural styles throughout European history.

This information was not new to me when I arrived in Europe—it had been covered in a text during Father Carnes’ "Comparative Political Systems" course exactly one year earlier—it just never registered with me as having significance beyond simple fact. But as I confronted architecture both in my coursework in Scotland and travels throughout Europe, what I had learned a couple semesters earlier now seemed rather relevant.

There is something about the skyline of Edinburgh, like many other European cities, that is shocking to an American accustomed only to the outline of downtown Chicago. At first, the surprise is a superficial one. Gone are the steel and glass behemoths whose design can only be appreciated from miles away; in their places stand works of brick and stone, erected exclusively by man and not machine.

But soon this initial observation is replaced by another, more contemplative one. Architecture in Edinburgh, as in Paris and Barcelona, is not just its own. Like the different denominations of the euro note, each city records the history of the continent in its architecture: monuments of antiquity dot Calton Hill in Scotland's capital just as they do on the Athenian Acropolis; Paris's Arc de Triomphe takes its cue from Roman triumphal arches; and the Church of Sant Felip Neri in Barcelona embodies the essence of the Baroque movement that grew throughout neighboring countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.These historical connections suggest something special about human society: we are exceedingly interested in our past.

Yet the reason people from all over the world flock to structures like these, and why I wanted to study architectural history in the first place, is not exclusively because we are interested in the monuments of the people that predate us, but also because we as people are attracted to the sublimity inherent in the act of creation. What fills us with awe is not the precise carving of the stones, nor the manner in which they are arranged, but the realization that we as human beings are capable of creating beauty.

Architecture is optimism. It's a reminder to society that there are certain things in life that tie us all together, that we are capable of great accomplishments, not just shameful failures.

By acknowledging the unifying quality of architecture, the designers of the euro notes, like the great architects before them, succeeded in helping to create something beautiful: a more integrated, peaceful slice of the world.