Shanks Architects is a collection of people with shared passion. Not just for great design, but also for the fabric of the communities within which we work, play, raise our families and worship. It is amazing to realize that for the first 100 years of our nation's history, the church "meetinghouse" was central to most Americans' daily lives and that even after 200 years most churches were modest sized neighborhood based congregations. With the dawn of the third millennium we find very different influences in our cities and on our culture. Large sports complexes, theme parks and centers of commerce focus on attracting thousands of people. Broadcast media in the U.S. alone attract millions. The internet aims for billions around the world. In 1800 3% of the world's population lived in cities. Today 50% of the earth's 6.6 billion people live in an urban or suburban environment. This staggering reality drives us to design creatively, responsibly and with an understanding of the amazing interconnectedness of our world. It is this reality that challenges us as designers of the built environment to create communities in which there is connectivity and identifiability between the various destinations of our daily lives and that there is purpose and meaning in how we design for shelter, learning, commerce, leisure and worship.