Ecclesiastical lite.

CONTEMPORARY CHURCH ARCHITECTURE

By Edwin Heathcote and Laura Moffatt. Chichester: John Wiley 2007. [pounds sterling]45

Gather 28 of the most attractive looking recent churches by architectural names from across the world, print them up lavishly in colour with a couple of line drawings each, commission a couple of journalists to write a general history of the modern church and a rash of descriptive critiques, and hey presto it sells like hot cakes. That seems to have been the publisher's idea. The building presentations are a bit shorter than one would find in AR, with fewer drawings and less description/critique, but they hold up fairly well, and Laura Moffatt is a lively guide.

Architects include figures such as Moneo, Piano, Pawson, Botta, Mecanoo, Tesar, Holl, Meier, and Siza; but there is also an ingenious temporary paper church by Shigeru Ban, a temporary one designed for an exhibition by Von Gerkan and Zais, and Tony Fretton's tiny 'Faith House' which is admitted not to be a church at all but merely a place of contemplation. Fretton is described as an atheist, and Renzo Piano as being sceptical, yet the latter designed the enormous pilgrimage church at Foggia in celebration of Padre Pio, canonised for miraculous stigmata displayed in 1918. It must be successful, claims the text, because there are so many pilgrims.

Photos dominate the book, and from a purely visual point of view the minimalists seem to win, along with Siza whose elegant sense of composition shines through, but the jokers in the pack are a couple of cheap buildings by Sam Mockbee and Rural Studio, evidently playing a different game, and with people at last visibly present, a service actually in progress. Heathcote's history, which takes up the first third of the book, is disappointing. Running from Pugin to the present day, it is too wide, too questionable, and for the most part couched in overworn stylistic terms--Modernism, New Modernism, Expressionism, Rationalism. Minimalism and so on. The more we use them, the less we know what they mean. One can sympathise over the size of the task and welcome his rediscovery of Bartning, Schwarz, and Bohm, but all too often he skates on thin ice. The big questions which hover over the book scarcely addressed are the place of the church in a secular but also increasingly ecumenical world, and the role of its buildings as bravura pieces for atheist architects as opposed to expressing the shared beliefs of communities.

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