www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Modern church design versus traditional church design

Well said.

The church in which I worship now is a non-descript, prefabricated light industrial building. At least on the outside. The interior has been converted to a very nice Byzantine temple, complete with a marvelous baptistry, a full iconostasis, a pseudo-dome with pantocrator and lovely wall icons. One of the best of the Ruthenian parishes meets in a converted house, so small that the proskomide has to be performed in the nave. If you go to Rome, you will find many of the nicest churches (e.g. Sta. Prassaeda, Sta. Pudentiana) are either not recognizable as churches or are not visible from the street, other buildings having been erected directly against their exterior walls.

Church exteriors are nothing. The interior makes the church. The traditional Western church is derived from the Roman basilica, which originally was a secular building used for meetings, legal proceedings and even as a market. Characterized by a long axis divided into a central aisle and two side aisles by a row of columns, it has an apsidal end with a raised platform, on which the magistrate would sit to hear petitions. The Jews began using the basilica for synagogues some time in the first century AD, because it was extremely convenient for Jewish worship. Christians followed suit. The apse became the sanctuary, the elevated benches along its inner wall becoming seats for the bishop and his council of presbyters.

The main Christian addition to the style, from the middle ages onward, is the crossing, or the addition of two transcepts at right angles to the main axis of the church (which, canonically, was oriented to the east), but many parish churches were just simple long halls, lacking even side aisles, let alone a crossing.

From the 6th century, almost all Byzantine churches were derived from Justinian's Hagia Sophia, on a cube-circle layout featuring a central dome over the nave, a short narthex, and an apsidal sanctuary. Variations would add more domes with small side chapels.

The main problem with modern church architecture is the same problem with modern architecture generally--the elevation of function over aesthetics. Moreover, the Jews and Christians were able to adopt the basilican floorplan because, at least in part, the Roman basilica was a sacred as well as a secular building (the lines between the two being somewhat blurred back then). Since then, sacred and secular architecture have diverged, just like sacred and secular art, or sacred and secular music. If one attempts today to express the sacred in a secular motif, one usually ends up expressing the secular with religious symbols. It just doesn't work.