Ubiquitous across America and therefore usually unnoticed—such has been the fate of the church buildings examined by Gretchen Buggeln in The Suburban Church. Until very recently, the myriad post-World War II brick shoeboxes with their connected square towers and A-frame triangles sprouting from low expanses of educational wings have gone largely unexamined by architectural and church historians. When they did receive critical attention in the past, these buildings were typically dismissed as plain, sterile, ugly, insular, and bourgeois. Even Buggeln asks, only partially tongue-in-cheek, “What were they thinking?” (xviii). To answer this question, she examines both the congregations that commissioned modernist churches and the architects who designed them.
The scope of the book is regional and Protestant, focused primarily on Lutheran congregations in the Midwest, and follows two main lines of analysis, one social historical and the other architectural historical. In the first of these, the author examines these buildings as a “revealing repository of the history of American religion in the postwar years—its ecumenism, its optimism, and its liturgical and social innovation, as well as its fears about the increasing ‘irrelevance’ of institutional religion at a time when cultural and social change and dramatic demographic shifts rapidly transformed society” (xix). In the second, she explores the work of three Midwest architects of these churches—Edward Sovik, Edward Dart, and Charles Stade—and positions their buildings within the larger national and international church design context of the period.
The social historical argument is developed in chapters focusing on selected congregations’ perspectives on building processes, including their discussions and disputes regarding the modernist aesthetic in church architecture, their family-oriented priority of raising and educating children in their religious tradition, and their bonding experiences as congregation members shared the work of church building. The latter two themes highlight a distinctive familialism that merged nuclear and congregational families and informed efforts to design intimate sanctuaries and flexible fellowship and educational spaces. Working together to erect family-centered buildings, church members forged strong social bonds that united them in congregational families. Buggeln's second line of argument, focusing on the design history of these post-war churches, traces the development of the rectangular church initially created by Eliel Saarinen; the development and popularity of the A-frame church; and the religious buildings designed for Park Forest, a planned suburb outside of Chicago. In a chapter comparing the sanctuaries of three architects (Sovik, Stade, and Dart), the author links design to religious practices and congregational needs through an analysis of the men's varied approaches: Sovik integrated theological ideas into his designs, Stade was primarily interested in expressing the needs of each gathered community through modernist forms, and Dart tempered the avant-gardism of his modernist forms by evoking historical, local, or traditional symbolic meanings. Given these different design approaches, it follows that these architects also developed distinctive relationships with their clients, and the book probes the roles they played in helping congregations discern their needs, as well as in influencing and directing their desires.
The spatial and material features of these buildings are effectively brought to the fore in this well-illustrated book, and Buggeln offers an appreciative reading of the work of the three relatively unknown architects and of the buildings themselves. Perusing the numerous examples will make it impossible for readers to drive unawares past a modernist church again. With regard to these buildings’ social and religious histories, Buggeln's approach maps out fundamental contexts for understanding these church buildings, offers helpful interpretation, and points in new directions for additional investigation. Her treatment of the ecumenical effort, and failure, to establish a unified mainline congregation in Park Forest, for instance, is eye opening. Some topics, however, would benefit from a finer-grained analysis. Lutheranism figures strongly among the congregations investigated here, but distinctions among synods are hazy. For instance, Buggeln's deft underscoring that the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod's preference for architectural modernism squared with its theological conservatism insofar as it expressed a desire to keep Christianity relevant in the modern world will lead readers to wonder about the view of more theologically progressive synods. This was a period in which Lutheran synods were embracing an ecumenism that meant working with one another at least as much as working with non-Lutherans, and the function of modernist architecture in these unification efforts, which is signaled here, opens up important new territory for future scholars. Similarly, the book's persuasive analysis of the familialism embraced by these congregations and exemplified in the buildings invites additional investigation into its intersections with wider social contexts of the period, particularly the growth of racial divides. Although other authors have pointed toward such connections and this book touches briefly on these broader social contexts, Buggeln's dissection of the internal complexities of these congregations suggests that their relationships with the larger social contexts are far more complex than currently recognized.
By focusing scholarly attention on these often-ignored churches, The Suburban Church makes an enlightening contribution to the study of religious architecture. Buggeln is at her best in the detailed discussions of these buildings and their architects and in drawing upon her extensive interview and documentary research to reveal the concerns of individual congregations, lay members, and clergy as they erected these churches. This material provides a solid foundation for a richer understanding of the roles these buildings played in transformative social and religious developments of the period. In this creditable volume, seemingly non-descript Modernist churches emerge as illuminating windows into material and religious life in post-war America.
