Posted on 11/30/2004 9:37:02 AM PST by Alfred Hitchcock
Upon returning to her childhood home of Oakland, California, Gertrude Stein noted that "there is no there, there." While this may have been true of the Oakland of 1934, more and more towns and cities since then, adopting the lifeless gray and brown boxes of Modernism, have become "placeless places." Rather than drawing upon the various local customs and traditions, we have found our cities over-run by the 'international style' of architecture: an architecture that has come to exist everywhere, but belongs nowhere.
This Modernist modus operandi is especially devastating when applied to sacred architecture. The current design for the Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, produced by Craig Hartman of the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, could just as believably be in downtown Dallas, or Malaysia, or southern Germany. It could be a museum, an opera house or business center. Typical of this problem, many contemporary churches have become cold, stark and iconoclastic. It can be said of them that "there is no sacred there."
(Excerpt) Read more at dellachiesa.com ...
I hate that Gertrude Stein quote, which by now is both hackneyed and meaningless.
Ping.
Did Ave Maria scrap the glass greenhouse for the Spanish style plans of the Notre Dame students?
lol, true!
For a building which is supposed to last indefinitely, it would be worth changing the plans, imo.
Now THAT'S nice!
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