The Look of a Church

Many an American thinks of a church as a plain, white clapboard rectangle with a steeple and stained-glass windows. He might have difficulty recognizing some of the 3,616 churches now on postwar planning boards. Among the more outlandish designs, most of them reported in this month's Architectural Record: P:A community church in Carmichael, Calif., which will include a badminton court, tennis court and swimming pool, for the strengthening and immersing of the congregation.

P:A super-modernistic Presbyterian Chapel in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains at Delaware Water Gap, to be equipped with movable seats and altars, whose arrangement will depend "upon the time of day, the position of the sun and the purpose of the meeting." The tower will contain a water tank (see cut).

P:A Thermal, Calif, chapel, "conceived as an oasis in a desert community," will be built around an open court, which wall be full of green vegetation, and floodlighted at night. The congregation will be able to look at the oasis through a big glass window at the head of the chancel. A cube-shaped "tower" will house machinery tc keep parishioners cool.

P: A Lutheran Church planned for a Midwestern town will be adorned with boxlike windows and a "reflection pool" reminiscent of prewar world's fairs (see cut).

P:A proposed Catholic Church (not yet sold to any parish) would be semicircular, with tiered seats like an amphitheater. Its tower would be two high walls intersecting at right angles to recall "the mission to go forth and preach the Gospel to the four corners of the earth."

But most new churches will look just like the old ones. Says Walter A. Taylor, consultant to the Interdenominational Bureau of Architecture: "History and logic to the contrary, the now familiar forms of the Victorian and neo-Gothic have become a tradition--the phrases of architectural language which say 'church.' "

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