Art: When Is a Church. . . ?

The argument, peculiar to modern times, over whether a church “should look like a church” was being fought again in the U.S. and England.

In England, the Old had the edge. A 1940 air raid left 14th Century Coventry Cathedral a Gothic shell; in 1944, while bombs rained on England, a dispute started raging on how Coventry should be rebuilt. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, 67, a Roman Catholic, and one of England’s foremost ecclesiastical architects, readapted a design which the Church of England had used but forgotten so long that it seemed new: a cruciform cathedral with the high altar at the center of the cross. This design provided sections of the cathedral where non-Anglicans could worship by themselves. Most of England’s ecclesiastics, historians and architectural esthetes were dead against it. The plan was abandoned; Sir Giles resigned.

A commission appointed by Coventry’s Bishop Neville Vincent Gorton announced this week what they had found to be the popular feeling: Coventry should be rebuilt in the English Gothic form with a traditional stone nave vault and plenty of stained glass. Since the job will take years, the architect should be young. Above all, added the commission, the new cathedral “should not be in violent contrast” to the old.

In the U.S., the New won a round. White-maned Frank Lloyd Wright’s unconventional plan for a new Unitarian church in Madison, Wis. was enthusiastically described last week by the pastor of Madison’s First Unitarian Society. Unitarian Wright’s idea of a ” ‘unit’arian” church involved combining steeple, auditorium and parish house into a unit under one roof (which would serve as “steeple”). The result looked like half a pyramid, vertically sliced; some people might have to be told that it was a church (see cut).