Architecture and Society

Extract

When church building became possible again after the second World War there must have been many English Catholics who looked forward confidently to an era of vigorous and inspiring new churches enriched with the best examples of contemporary art. Among them were certainly a number of architects who, after a long enforced separation from their calling, longed for an opportunity to express, in the creation of a new church, their gratitude for a safe return and their hope for the future.

Now, after nearly ten years during which many new churches have been built or planned, the prospect is so bleak that most of these architects, and many laymen with them, are feeling nothing but discouragement and frustration. A few of the new churches really do express a living art. The rest are pitiful proof of timid conventionality and of the still powerful effect of Pugin’s teaching that Gothic is the only proper and morally defensible style of architecture for churches, or for any buildings even remotely connected with them. Even where the strict Gothic is abandoned, the alternative seems only too often to be a veritable fruit salad of mixed conventional forms, something for all tastes.

Art, it has been said, is the mirror of society. Just as Classical Greek culture produced the refined beauties of the Parthenon, so the vigorous and exuberant background of the four centuries following the Norman Conquest produced, by gradual development from the staid Romanesque, all the upsoaring excitement of Gothic architecture.