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The Native Tourist
reformed/biblical observations on Christianity and culture

Monday, October 04, 2004
Article on Architecure
The Roots of Modernist Church Architecture by Duncan Stroik, who is Roman Catholic and an arch defender of classicism. It would be fun to see Stroik debate Pugin, the 19th c architect who wrote vociferously that Gothic not pagan Classicism was the ideal for church architecture.

An interesting (telling?)quote from Stroik:

In the Reformation, Catholic churches were stripped of statuary, paintings and traditional symbols. New churches were designed as "meetinghouses", as if going back to early Christianity when believers met in each others' homes. Architecture, having lost its ability to signify the sacred, became seen as merely providing for the assembly's material or functional needs. The concepts of the church as auditorium and theater in the round derive from early Calvinist buildings which were designed to enable people to see and hear the preacher, such as at Charenton, France.