A Design to Set Thoughts Aloft

An interesting article about a planned chapel at a Franciscan school on Long Island.I like, among other things, that this fellow does not blame "VaticanTwo" for the sheer unsightliness of so many of the newer Catholic churches in this country. The Cult of the Ugly and the Mediocre was already well established before the Council...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/realestate/09lizo.html?_r=1&ref=realestate&oref=slogin
BROTHER GARY CREGAN, a Franciscan friar and the principal of St. Anthony’s High School here, speaks plainly when discussing the modernist architecture of many area parochial schools and churches built in the mid-20th century.
“I have a general disgust for Catholic architecture since the 1950s,” he said recently. ...he becomes animated — even enthusiastic — as he discusses the high school’s plan to build a new, more traditional chapel.
The $3 million structure, designed by Baldassano Architecture, is inspired by a 12th-century Romanesque apse that is part of the Cloisters collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Upper Manhattan, according to Alex Badalamenti, one of the architects who worked on the school’s design.
Many modernist churches, he added, are laid out horizontally. The school chapel that is being replaced, for example, is integrated into a side wing of the building with a classroom-style entry door, across the hall from a science lab. Its ceilings are eight feet high, and behind the pews there is a small niche with an electronic keyboard.
By contrast, the new building and its tower are rising from behind a glass corridor that connects the two wings of the school — classrooms on one side and the gym and auditorium on the other.Brother Cregan and other Franciscans who “want to stress verticality,” he said, believe that the new chapel, with its soaring 30-foot ceilings, will teach teenagers that they are “worshiping God, not each other.”
In church architecture, the return to traditionalism is a trend across the country, according to Duncan Stroik, a specialist in the design of Catholic churches.Mr. Stroik is also a professor at the University of Notre Dame. in the school’s classical architecture and traditional cities program, one of the few of its kind.