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Hmm . I see the author is a right wing RC who used to work for Donald Rumsfeld and seems to think the American bishops are just too darned liberal. I suspect that this “ugly church” thing is more about reactionary ideology as it is aesthetics – or, rather, a conflation of ideology and aesthetics in which all Right Thinking Christians love only traditional architecture and anyone who likes certain schools of 20th century religious architecture is a Modernist Heretic.
Bill Dilworth
Almost as bitchy as the Bad Vestments blog.
I agree that some of those houses of worship were quite ugly. One seemed rather ordinary (Church by the Sea). Others, I thought, were beautiful. I imagine that most of them, ugly or not, are loved by those who attend them.
Bill Dilworth
You get the feeling that the author never saw a Pseudo-Gothic he didn’t adore (and there *are* Neo-Gothic FAILs out there!).
JC Fisher
Some are clunkers, but others imaginative uses of native materials & cultural preferences
I agree with JC Fisher above. It’s not the churches in this slideshow that are ugly, but the attitude toward them. OK, there are a couple of clunkers, architecturally speaking, but many of them seem to have been chosen simply because they serve as rich targets for the author’s snark.
John Banks