Contemporary Church Architecture

The last decade has witnessed a whole new generation of church design. The initial catalyst for this was the Christian jubilee when high-profile architects such as Richard Meier, Renzo Piano and Alvaro Siza were commissioned to produce important new projects for the new millennium. Church building initiatives, though, have gained momentum driven by a sense that contemporary congregations require modern places of worship. Rather than drawing on traditional or Gothic approaches, these new designs are the culmination of a whole century of modernist design in both their planning and vocabulary. Laura Moffatt describes twenty-eight churches from around the world, which are extraordinary in their richness and diversity of approach. They vary from small devotional chapels to churches with larger congregations and a social as well as religious remit. The book encompasses the spare, purity of places of worship such as John Pawson's Nov'y Dvur Monastery in The Czech Republic and Tony Fretton's Faith House in Dorset, as well as churches by the likes of Steven Holl and Greg Lynn that employ cutting-edge design and construction techniques. The book is prefaced by two in-depth essays by Edwin Heathcote, which explore fully the modernist roots of the contemporary church and then explicitly the northern tradition, providing unique and current insights into the latest developments in church architecture.