Architectural Fun « Laodicea

Laugh, cry, slap your forehead in despair, clap your hands in delight: here are pictures of modern churches of which the blogger approves. There are a lot of nice things there. The blogger has already told me to go and and learn the subject before spouting off, as I did on the subject of the Golden Turnip in the Tattie Fields, but as the various arts and architecture people in the bat Ionah clan agree with me on this one, I am not sure educating me would resolve our difference. Have a look on his blog (the Lichen shrine). Now, if you were to build a sanctuary in the middle of more or less nowhere, would you build this (not a new church but a renovated Orthodox monastery near Białystok):

or something like this:

Admittedly I’ve never been to Licheń, but I have been to many more modest new churches in Poland built in a variety of pastiche styles, and whatever one thinks of their silhouette the clash between the shape and the building material gives one a rude shock. It’s like a theme park. I was terribly disappointed the first couple of times. This is a case in point (below). You think “well, at least it’s church-shaped!”. Then you go in, and you are pleased by the arrangement of the interior, clearly designed for the celebration of Mass. I don’t mean that one can’t succesfully marry traditional shapes and modern materials and techniques, but whoever did this one failed to pull it off. But on the whole these things, unlike Licheń, were in new developments, surrounded by shopping centres and suchlike of comparable scale, so they at least blended in – the same construction techniques, materials and what-have-you.

This makes a change. Normally it’s me defending pious tat!

Actually here’s one I was going to send to that chap, but I can’t find a contact email for him, so here it is instead. Vittorio Emmanuele built something that looks like a wedding cake from the outside. Here’s a wedding cake interior!

Some church in Białystok itself – I took some photos with my mobile when I was there last year.

And here’s one I quite like – the photo does it no justice, but I can’t find a better one online. From the outside it looks like a 1950s radio, on the inside a little like this though not as nice - here’s a photo from I think the Easter Vigil.