Post-Modern Church Buildings

The Boy has not been to see a great many of the world's more lovely church buildings. In fact, I'm not sure he's seen any. We worship in a building that was built in the 1960s and follows one of the two common styles for buildings of that era in Church of Christ architecture. Ours is, in fact, the worse style, being built with the classrooms down the sides of the auditorium and thus making windows impossible.

I certainly don't think architectural design or even the beauty of the building are the most important things at play. Learning about God and worshipping with other Christians are far more important, but I do sometimes wish we had at least a little more beauty in our building. As this article (via Theosebes) points out, twentieth century church architecture in general does leave much to be desired.

As I said, The Boy has yet to see any of the world's beautiful cathedrals or church buildings. When he started building a Lego town the other day, is it any wonder that the church building looked like this:



I asked him to please consider, if he ever went into architecture and designed church buildings for a living, putting a lot of windows into them. The Boy said, "We only spend a few hours in the building each week. Why would it need a lot of windows?"

My son is not only obviously a Protestant, I think he's taken secret architecture lessons from the East German School of Ugly Building Design.

Which is not to say that I don't think his dabbling in church design isn't neat. I just want to find something prettier to inspire him.