Religion: EUROPE’S NEW CHURCHES

GOD’S house was not always Gothic; the soaring arch and ribbed vault were daring innovations in the 12th century. The lights and lines of the church interiors shown on the following pages may be as revolutionary as Gothic architecture once was, may seem distractingly unchurchly to worshipers for whom religion and tradition go necessarily hand in hand. But each day’s worship—and each generation’s—also has an immediate, here-and-now quality; all over Europe new churches are going up that are inspired by this immediacy of religious faith. Their builders, like modern U.S. church architects (TIME, Sept. 19, 1955). were influenced partly by the materials available, but even more by the desire to break with a tradition-heavy past. These churches, photographed on a tour of Europe in 1957 by U.S. Architect G. E. Kidder Smith, are designed in the belief that Christians at worship want to breathe the air of the present. Not all of the churches please all worshipers. But, says Kidder Smith of the surge of church building in western Europe: “There is hardly any warmed-over pastiche or fainthearted aping of ancient forms. There is the very firm conviction that church building today can contribute just as much to the religion and culture of our time as it has throughout the greatest periods of architecture.”