Last week, inspired by the highly-regrettable religious architecture of Claude Parent, Rod Dreher wrote about his “perverse fascination with ugly churches.” This week, as if by way of counterpoint, Catesby Leigh has a lovely piece about Duncan Stroik, the architect (and Notre Dame professor) behind two new Catholic churches, one in Wisconsin and one at Saint Thomas Aquinas College in California, that actually dare to look like churches — rather than, say, the dreadful Jedi fortresses that pass for cathedrals in Los Angeles and Oakland.
I have fairly reactionary taste in architecture, as the preceding passage no doubt suggests, but like many laypeople of the “why are these buildings so ugly?” school, most of my distaste is focused on the brutalism of the post-war period. (Dreher linked to Theodore Dalrymple’s wonderful essay on Le Corbusier, whose title, “The Architect as Totalitarian,” offers the perfect epitaph for that era.) I can admire, if not necessarily love, many examples of modernism and post-modernism — skyscrapers and museums, theaters and libraries and skyscrapers again. But I have never seen a church or cathedral executed successfully in any of the architectural styles that have prevailed since the 1920s and ’30s. From Italy to San Francisco, the showpiece modern churches tend to succeed as monuments but fail as spaces for prayer and worship; their smaller imitators, scattered across the American suburbs, are almost always blights on whatever religious community is unhappy enough to occupy them. In the end, I suspect that something in the spirit of modern architecture is inherently secular: The forms and tendencies can be appropriate for office buildings, government houses and museums, but churches adopt them at their peril.
