Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Worship "spaces"

David Greusel, the architect who designed PNC Park, where the Pittsburgh Pirates play, is a Christian with concern about the direction church architecture has taken over the last century. In an article about him at WORLD magazine, his views are summarized:


Architecture is a serious calling, but also a joyful and optimistic one, combining the pragmatic with the poetic. .... [more]
And from David Greusel's essay, "God’s Trailer":
.... Church designers (again, uniformly but not universally) are guilty of following the dicta of modernism that we were all taught in school, the ABCs of architecture: Form follows function, ornament is crime, less is more, and so on. These axioms, questionable in their own right, become downright deadly when applied to the design of worship spaces, where the “function” of encountering the Divine Presence is much harder to express in a formula than the function of holding, say, 500 seats and a choir. And it is the former function which invariably gets shorted when church design is limited to functional problem-solving. ....

In North America, the Church (broadly understood) has always been underfunded, yet it did not until recent decades build so poorly. Even frontier chapels erected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by pioneer communities have a dignity and beauty that is largely lacking in the North American Church’s more recent physical manifestations. And it is hard to argue that our communities are actually poorer than they were seventy or eighty or 120 years ago. .... [more]
WORLDmag.com | All-star architecture | Janie B. Cheaney | Jun 30, 12, God’s Trailer | Cardus Blog

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous7:19 AM

    The dstruction of certain features has changed the theology of Worship of a congregation over a period of time.

    It also has destroy our commitment to defining principles when we bury the V=baptismal pool and leave the Communion Table in plain sight we separate the two sacraments

    My SBC and Independent Baptist friends more often than not have the Baptisry high and lifted up.

    When we remove the cross from the sanctuary or for that matter any place in the meetinhouse what do we really say.

    When access is not avaailable for the who ar physically challenged is the Gospel really for all.

