I am unfortunately becoming obnoxious to my family with this refrain, but everything around me confirms my thesis: all of the disorder we see before us, in every dimension--architecture, morality, education, and beyond--is because of the total infiltration of Marxism into Western Culture for more than a hundred years. And by "total," I do mean total.
Before 2020, I thought it was just a failed economic theory. Oh no, it seeks to take all things from all men.
Lots of modern 🇺🇸 nondenominational evangelical church buildings are very angular and quite stark, an almost puritanical adherence to relevance and acoustics. Dead Space/ iconoclastic.
Blessed Feast of the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy. 🌐⛪️☦️🔔
When I was younger, before I knew anything about architecture, I would always get a queer feeling whenever I encountered a strange-looking building -- usually something like fear; or, I would wonder if I was not walking in a dream. The image of the old version of the Cathedral connected to the new one, and then the later one of the interior before the bombing, make me want to cry. Such beauty all done away with! I hope someday we can return to architectural sanity and realize how necessary beauty is in our everyday lives.
I know I'm in the minority here but I like brutalist architecture.
It's important to differentiate between modernism and brutalism - concrete and straight lines do not make a building brutalist. Modernism was about reshaping society to meet an ideal of simplicity (which is why we got rows of boring concrete rectangles for apartment blocks) while brutalism was about revealing society through complex shape. Brutalist buildings are hulking, bulbous, asymmetrical, and bizarre precisely because each room, each use case, is given its own shape and space. Notice how the churches here are ornamented by complex shapes - they are notable merely concrete boxes with four blank walls. Brutalism is always interesting even if it is not beautiful or comforting. If it is ugly and boring it isn't brutalist.
Now it's true that brutalism can be stark and discomforting. This may not be a good thing for most churches or homes, but that doesn't mean it has no worthwhile place in our world. At its best, when its unfinished concrete is juxtaposed with natural beauty (not just a mass rising from a sea of urban pavement), it appears both ancient and futuristic, simultaneously alienating and an impenetrable refuge. It invites us in even as it looms menacingly over us. In this way brtutalist churches, when done well, reflect an undomesticated divinity, inviting the faithful to receive grace from a wild, untamed, unfathomable God.
Why would you want something that, in your own words, is hulking, bizarre, stark, discomforting and looms menacingly over us in the space created for humans? What good does that add? I'm honestly curious. For me, looking at brutalist architecture gives a similar feeling as looking at misshapen limbs or wounds. It grips attention, but in an unhealthy way.
It's appropriate that you mention misshapen limbs or wounds. The figure of an emaciated, beaten, dying man hanging on a cross is a common image in churches. One might also find depictions of an open wound draining from a corpse. There is a sense in which such images are bizarre, disgusting, and discomforting, and yet we think there is space for them in our churches. We erect them in prominent places specifically to challenge and unsettle us. By hanging a crucifix in the midst of beauty we teach the marvelous truth that the God of wonder and beauty willingly condescended to suffer as the depicted man and did so for us. The love of God and the weight of sin are both there only because it is grotesque.
In the same way, I think it is legitimate for the building itself to convey the transcendent strangeness of the divine. God is not like us - he is in many respects unknowable and terrifying. This is precisely why there is comfort in the revelation of God in scripture and an encounter with God through sacrament. The Lord that we pray to is beyond our full comprehension. That should terrify us and give us great confidence.
Well, that's just about the most twisted and bizarre justification I think I've ever read for wilfully producing extreme ugliness and using it to (literally) brutalise the faithful. And more than a little blasphemous.
This provides deep insight into how the trajectory of modernism infiltrated our current cultural paradigm. There is a reason these brutalist structures look like temples of Sauron. It is part and parcel of the diabolical disorientation orchestrated by the evil one to alienate man from God and man from himself.
It is the subtle or in this case the brutal attempt to create a world subjugated entirely to the prince of the power of the air. His plan is to demoralize humanity to its breaking point so he can in mock fashion parade in as humanity’s “savior”. These brutalist edifices are preparing us for worshipping a “new god”. They have his essence embodied in their very structure.
No wonder so many have left the church and blame the brutalization they feel on God and the Church.
Lord, have mercy on these souls and lead them back to a true understanding of their humanity and your identity which is love in communion. Show them the beauty and grandeur of your threeness and your oneness. Show them the God who was brutalized for them that they would not have to be brutalized by death.
Lord, restore your church. Adorn her as a bride awaiting her groom. Make your church beautiful, even as you are beautiful. Make her holy and then she will be truly beautiful.
I am so thankful for this post. I was raised Protestant and am now Catholic. I have always been passionately attracted to the beauty of the Mass (more traditional Mass even better!). And I am so disappointed by so many Catholic Churches where I live. So stark. Not brutalist. And maybe it had to do with money. The church I go to now was one I used to drive by all the time thinking it was Protestant. Looks like a classic New England Protestant Church. The current priest has done his best to create a more traditional interior. But no stained glass, no soaring anything; no sense of the profligate abundance and creation of God. Give me a church with angels peeking out from behind a column, vines and birds, Madonnas staring you in the face, a crucifix that isn’t beige. We went so wrong in our abandonment of the Divine both in churches and culture. I do feel a resurgence occurring. I pray it’s not just my imagination.
It's not your imagination. Here in central Ohio, many Catholic churches built from the 50s through the early 80s were horrifically ugly, but this is no longer the case. The newer ones are more or less properly built. And in one case, a 1960s monstrosity was actually razed by its parish and replaced with a much more traditional form.
The more detailed adornment, though, is tough to replace due to costs and lack of skilled craftsmen and masons, and modern frame construction is just frankly more difficult to adorn after the fact.
My own Orthodox parish is, for instance, in the process of funding a new construction, and while we would love to build a stone and masonry temple, current costs just for a frame build are already exceedingly high. So it's going to be a bit of a compromise.
Following Father Bailey’s comment, a useful exercise is to compare side by side the rubrics and prayers of the Traditional Latin Mass with those of the Novos Ordo.
The Modernists also stripped from the Mass much of its ancient beauty, mystery, rhythm, reverential aura and transcendence.
On pilgrimage to Rome in 2013 we ventured outside the Holy City on an Angelic Doctor theme one day… Anagni, Aquino for Mass, Roccasecca for lunch, and Monte Casino monastery. The church in Aquino is the place where St. Thomas of Aquino grew up attending Mass. The church is gothic, I think, but it is stripped bare of any ornament or color except for the image of the Madonna over one of the portos. I imagine that there must have been at some point a more beautiful wood paneled interior, but if it was not properly maintained, the decision was taken to not renovate and replace. It has a distinct Brutalist aesthetic to it, simple, bare, grey, sterile.
Well, a church like this would certainly never have had wood panelling. But would also have been covered in frescoes, most likely. It's not Brutalist though. far from it. Just bare.
It certainly wasn't Brutalist in the sense it was designed and built by architects of the post-war Brutalist "school", but it seems to me it currently shares with Brutalism the same aesthetic of predominant grey, colorless, un-ornamented stone, naked and austere, stripped of former beauty.
I wonder if the impulse to renovate and restore the remnants of the former beauty of this Romanesque-Benedictine style, which we get a hint of in the beautiful mosaic of the Madonna and child over the main portal as well as a faded fresco over the side portal, weren't suppressed by the sort of Modernist/Brutalist sensibility you describe in your essay?
By way of contrast the chapel of the nearby monastery of Montecassino (of which the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Libera is supposed to be a copy) which we visited after lunch which was wrecked by Allied bombing during WWII was in its reconstruction well decorated, and the choir does indeed contain some carved wood pews and and paneling:
No, again, Brutalism is a specific thing, with specific characteristics. Just being bare isn't enough to make it Brutalist. Your medieval example can't be Brutalist: it's not modern. It's not made of undressed poured concrete. Its structural design is Gothic. Lacking paintings or frescoes doesn't make something Brutalist. Just plain. The frescoes, if there ever were any (not all churches could afford them) have probably just come off. it's a thing that just happens with age and weathering if they're not maintained. Brutalist doesn't mean "not pretty" or "not decorated."
So true! The great gothic cathedrals uplift and inspire with a sense of God’s presence. Chartres *feels* holy as soon as you walk in. Conventional modern churches are blah, tepid, boring—especially Protestant churches, which feel like offices or theaters. Brutalist churches are a contradiction in terms. They deserve to be abandoned and replaced with something less “original” but more appropriate.
Surprisingly, Lourdes has THREE basilicas, two beautiful (The Basilica of the Immaculate Conception & The Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary); and one brutalist: the Basilica of St. Pius X.
Very well researched and written. I could not agree more. Pray God the future will bring about more beautiful churches, instead of these sterile structures.
The brutalist cathedral in Los Angeles, California is another example of willfully choosing the brutalist aesthetic over traditional models, even when honoring tradition would have been cheaper. A few decades ago, the city’s lovely old cathedral, St. Vibiana’s, experienced some earthquake damage and needed seismic retrofitting. Cardinal Roger Mahony rejected that possibility, claiming that such repairs were probably impractical and certainly too expensive. Instead, he spent many times the cost of those repairs to build what it seems he truly wanted: a new cathedral in the brutalist style. Here’s the kicker: the supposedly “uneconomical to repair” St. Vibiana’s was quietly sold to developers — who promptly repaired it and reopened it as a commercially successful event site, Vibiana’s.
Marxism.
I am unfortunately becoming obnoxious to my family with this refrain, but everything around me confirms my thesis: all of the disorder we see before us, in every dimension--architecture, morality, education, and beyond--is because of the total infiltration of Marxism into Western Culture for more than a hundred years. And by "total," I do mean total.
Before 2020, I thought it was just a failed economic theory. Oh no, it seeks to take all things from all men.
Lots of modern 🇺🇸 nondenominational evangelical church buildings are very angular and quite stark, an almost puritanical adherence to relevance and acoustics. Dead Space/ iconoclastic.
Blessed Feast of the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy. 🌐⛪️☦️🔔
When I was younger, before I knew anything about architecture, I would always get a queer feeling whenever I encountered a strange-looking building -- usually something like fear; or, I would wonder if I was not walking in a dream. The image of the old version of the Cathedral connected to the new one, and then the later one of the interior before the bombing, make me want to cry. Such beauty all done away with! I hope someday we can return to architectural sanity and realize how necessary beauty is in our everyday lives.
"Sauron’s temple of Morgoth worship in the last days of Old Numenor? " This is accurate.
A lovely takedown of the recent film:
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-most-serious-film-ever-made/
I know I'm in the minority here but I like brutalist architecture.
It's important to differentiate between modernism and brutalism - concrete and straight lines do not make a building brutalist. Modernism was about reshaping society to meet an ideal of simplicity (which is why we got rows of boring concrete rectangles for apartment blocks) while brutalism was about revealing society through complex shape. Brutalist buildings are hulking, bulbous, asymmetrical, and bizarre precisely because each room, each use case, is given its own shape and space. Notice how the churches here are ornamented by complex shapes - they are notable merely concrete boxes with four blank walls. Brutalism is always interesting even if it is not beautiful or comforting. If it is ugly and boring it isn't brutalist.
Now it's true that brutalism can be stark and discomforting. This may not be a good thing for most churches or homes, but that doesn't mean it has no worthwhile place in our world. At its best, when its unfinished concrete is juxtaposed with natural beauty (not just a mass rising from a sea of urban pavement), it appears both ancient and futuristic, simultaneously alienating and an impenetrable refuge. It invites us in even as it looms menacingly over us. In this way brtutalist churches, when done well, reflect an undomesticated divinity, inviting the faithful to receive grace from a wild, untamed, unfathomable God.
Why would you want something that, in your own words, is hulking, bizarre, stark, discomforting and looms menacingly over us in the space created for humans? What good does that add? I'm honestly curious. For me, looking at brutalist architecture gives a similar feeling as looking at misshapen limbs or wounds. It grips attention, but in an unhealthy way.
It's appropriate that you mention misshapen limbs or wounds. The figure of an emaciated, beaten, dying man hanging on a cross is a common image in churches. One might also find depictions of an open wound draining from a corpse. There is a sense in which such images are bizarre, disgusting, and discomforting, and yet we think there is space for them in our churches. We erect them in prominent places specifically to challenge and unsettle us. By hanging a crucifix in the midst of beauty we teach the marvelous truth that the God of wonder and beauty willingly condescended to suffer as the depicted man and did so for us. The love of God and the weight of sin are both there only because it is grotesque.
In the same way, I think it is legitimate for the building itself to convey the transcendent strangeness of the divine. God is not like us - he is in many respects unknowable and terrifying. This is precisely why there is comfort in the revelation of God in scripture and an encounter with God through sacrament. The Lord that we pray to is beyond our full comprehension. That should terrify us and give us great confidence.
Well, that's just about the most twisted and bizarre justification I think I've ever read for wilfully producing extreme ugliness and using it to (literally) brutalise the faithful. And more than a little blasphemous.
This provides deep insight into how the trajectory of modernism infiltrated our current cultural paradigm. There is a reason these brutalist structures look like temples of Sauron. It is part and parcel of the diabolical disorientation orchestrated by the evil one to alienate man from God and man from himself.
It is the subtle or in this case the brutal attempt to create a world subjugated entirely to the prince of the power of the air. His plan is to demoralize humanity to its breaking point so he can in mock fashion parade in as humanity’s “savior”. These brutalist edifices are preparing us for worshipping a “new god”. They have his essence embodied in their very structure.
No wonder so many have left the church and blame the brutalization they feel on God and the Church.
Lord, have mercy on these souls and lead them back to a true understanding of their humanity and your identity which is love in communion. Show them the beauty and grandeur of your threeness and your oneness. Show them the God who was brutalized for them that they would not have to be brutalized by death.
Lord, restore your church. Adorn her as a bride awaiting her groom. Make your church beautiful, even as you are beautiful. Make her holy and then she will be truly beautiful.
I am so thankful for this post. I was raised Protestant and am now Catholic. I have always been passionately attracted to the beauty of the Mass (more traditional Mass even better!). And I am so disappointed by so many Catholic Churches where I live. So stark. Not brutalist. And maybe it had to do with money. The church I go to now was one I used to drive by all the time thinking it was Protestant. Looks like a classic New England Protestant Church. The current priest has done his best to create a more traditional interior. But no stained glass, no soaring anything; no sense of the profligate abundance and creation of God. Give me a church with angels peeking out from behind a column, vines and birds, Madonnas staring you in the face, a crucifix that isn’t beige. We went so wrong in our abandonment of the Divine both in churches and culture. I do feel a resurgence occurring. I pray it’s not just my imagination.
It's not your imagination. Here in central Ohio, many Catholic churches built from the 50s through the early 80s were horrifically ugly, but this is no longer the case. The newer ones are more or less properly built. And in one case, a 1960s monstrosity was actually razed by its parish and replaced with a much more traditional form.
The more detailed adornment, though, is tough to replace due to costs and lack of skilled craftsmen and masons, and modern frame construction is just frankly more difficult to adorn after the fact.
My own Orthodox parish is, for instance, in the process of funding a new construction, and while we would love to build a stone and masonry temple, current costs just for a frame build are already exceedingly high. So it's going to be a bit of a compromise.
Following Father Bailey’s comment, a useful exercise is to compare side by side the rubrics and prayers of the Traditional Latin Mass with those of the Novos Ordo.
The Modernists also stripped from the Mass much of its ancient beauty, mystery, rhythm, reverential aura and transcendence.
On pilgrimage to Rome in 2013 we ventured outside the Holy City on an Angelic Doctor theme one day… Anagni, Aquino for Mass, Roccasecca for lunch, and Monte Casino monastery. The church in Aquino is the place where St. Thomas of Aquino grew up attending Mass. The church is gothic, I think, but it is stripped bare of any ornament or color except for the image of the Madonna over one of the portos. I imagine that there must have been at some point a more beautiful wood paneled interior, but if it was not properly maintained, the decision was taken to not renovate and replace. It has a distinct Brutalist aesthetic to it, simple, bare, grey, sterile.
Here are some photos from our Mass there:
<https://share.icloud.com/photos/097DjraAOvBfIOGU_hNkPJXrg>
Well, a church like this would certainly never have had wood panelling. But would also have been covered in frescoes, most likely. It's not Brutalist though. far from it. Just bare.
It certainly wasn't Brutalist in the sense it was designed and built by architects of the post-war Brutalist "school", but it seems to me it currently shares with Brutalism the same aesthetic of predominant grey, colorless, un-ornamented stone, naked and austere, stripped of former beauty.
I wonder if the impulse to renovate and restore the remnants of the former beauty of this Romanesque-Benedictine style, which we get a hint of in the beautiful mosaic of the Madonna and child over the main portal as well as a faded fresco over the side portal, weren't suppressed by the sort of Modernist/Brutalist sensibility you describe in your essay?
Photos of those ornaments here:
<https://share.icloud.com/photos/032WiYsswrfpGDcjtwWQHkT3Q>
By way of contrast the chapel of the nearby monastery of Montecassino (of which the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Libera is supposed to be a copy) which we visited after lunch which was wrecked by Allied bombing during WWII was in its reconstruction well decorated, and the choir does indeed contain some carved wood pews and and paneling:
<https://share.icloud.com/photos/080O4b47yIVrQIe4VULCUSqzA>
No, again, Brutalism is a specific thing, with specific characteristics. Just being bare isn't enough to make it Brutalist. Your medieval example can't be Brutalist: it's not modern. It's not made of undressed poured concrete. Its structural design is Gothic. Lacking paintings or frescoes doesn't make something Brutalist. Just plain. The frescoes, if there ever were any (not all churches could afford them) have probably just come off. it's a thing that just happens with age and weathering if they're not maintained. Brutalist doesn't mean "not pretty" or "not decorated."
These places look like the bowels of hell. Hideous and inhuman.
So true! The great gothic cathedrals uplift and inspire with a sense of God’s presence. Chartres *feels* holy as soon as you walk in. Conventional modern churches are blah, tepid, boring—especially Protestant churches, which feel like offices or theaters. Brutalist churches are a contradiction in terms. They deserve to be abandoned and replaced with something less “original” but more appropriate.
The Los Angeles Cathedral is another awful one.
Surprisingly, Lourdes has THREE basilicas, two beautiful (The Basilica of the Immaculate Conception & The Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary); and one brutalist: the Basilica of St. Pius X.
Seeing them right next to each is quite striking. https://open.substack.com/pub/novenaforamelia/p/lourdes-pilgrimage-day-5
Interesting that the Novus Ordo finds itself at home in such “worship spaces.” Perhaps that is because it is in itself brutal.
Very well researched and written. I could not agree more. Pray God the future will bring about more beautiful churches, instead of these sterile structures.
The brutalist cathedral in Los Angeles, California is another example of willfully choosing the brutalist aesthetic over traditional models, even when honoring tradition would have been cheaper. A few decades ago, the city’s lovely old cathedral, St. Vibiana’s, experienced some earthquake damage and needed seismic retrofitting. Cardinal Roger Mahony rejected that possibility, claiming that such repairs were probably impractical and certainly too expensive. Instead, he spent many times the cost of those repairs to build what it seems he truly wanted: a new cathedral in the brutalist style. Here’s the kicker: the supposedly “uneconomical to repair” St. Vibiana’s was quietly sold to developers — who promptly repaired it and reopened it as a commercially successful event site, Vibiana’s.
What in the Eyes Wide Shut is this monstrosity?!
I believe you have hit upon it.