Saturday, November 11, 2006

Woah! Have you read THIS?

I mean,check it out!

(got your six, buddy.)

And here's a Sunday-appropriate post from the same blogger, the excellent See-Dubya of JunkyardBlog:

My point is just that there is a truly sad poverty of good design out there. No, scratch that; there is plenty of good design, there simply isn't the will to insist on it. But whether you're Catholic, Fundamentalist, or Swedenborgian, I hope we can all agree that churches, even those built cheaply or quickly, ought to eschew both banality and repellent ugliness for its own sake. As someone who loves Christianity and wants to see it succeed, please, please, take an interest in the face your church presents to the secular world.
The man's got a point. I've seen some ugly stuff out there. Heck - I've performed in some ugly church buildings over the years.

Mormons approach things from a slightly different viewpoint, separating - in terms of design - our temples from our regular meeting buildings.

Our temples, which are places set apart and considered (by us, at least) to be no less holy as the temples mentioned in the Old Testament and as filling the same general functions, are built to reflect our belief in their purpose and place in the world; hence, the usually beautiful - some could say elaborate (but never, thankfully, religion-channel-style gaudy) - design.

Meetings houses, on the other hand, serve more or less as Mormon community centers, complete with chapels, administrative offices, and all-purpose recreation rooms which by definition include basketball courts and stages on which to perform plays and etc. Their functionality dictates that we still want a clean, traditional design, but when you know that boy scouts are going to be running around like wild animals a couple of times a week all through the building, well, let's just say you don't want to build a Mormon meeting house with the same philosophy in mind as, say, the Glass Cathedral. The Glass Cathedral wouldn't last ten minutes if it were exposed to a typical hunting pack of Webelos.

I'm serious. Maybe nine minutes on the outside.

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