It's ironic that architectural modernism, the seemingly logical vernacular for 20th century civic or commercial structures, is often most daringly represented in a far more unexpected place—churches. It's a rare suburb or small town whose most aggressively modern building isn't a church and, if cities offer somewhat more competition, it remains true that actual cathedrals are frequently more protypically modern than cathedrals of commerce.
This situation is loathed by some, enjoyed by fewer, and simply a fact of life for many churchgoers for over half a century now. It's increasingly the focus of scholarly attention across a range of faiths. Catherine R. Osborne's Catholic-focused American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow: Building Churches for the Future, 1925-1975, is an extremely informative entry into this body of work.
If you have strong feelings about this trend you'll find encouragement for them here. The topic is ubiquitous in debates concerning the Church's future and past, and liturgical traditionalism versus modernism. The ambitions of many architectural modernist supporters were far larger than steel and plate glass. As Osborne writes, enthusiasts “sought to convince a wide variety of audiences that church buildings would look different in the future because they would, fundamentally, be different: the building would both represent and bring into being a new kind of worshipping community.”
Advocates for modern church construction often overlapped with those arguing for, say, a submarine chapel of repentance travelling to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the sacramental merits of LSD, or disestablishing churches altogether. But the accord between architectural and liturgical modernism was far from total. A church's architecture doesn't generate guitar masses—congregations do.
Not all modern church construction followed the larger ideological shifts of Vatican II (1962-65). Many churches were transformed earlier, and had simpler origins in architectural practice. Much of the questioning of dogmatic assumptions about the proper style and material palate of church construction are difficult to fault. Barry Byrne, a Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice who designed many excellent churches (including one in Cork, Ireland) was no theological revolutionary. Osborne quotes his condemnation of rote resort to traditional forms: “a method unnatural and laborious, such as that of numerous and unnecessary pillars, and of cumbrous vaultings of brick or stone for the purpose of producing an effect to a degree that is unnatural and without sense.” Byrne preferred steel and concrete “which enable us to build churches free of pillars in a structural way that is natural and, in our time, unaffected.”
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