Download Free Americas Religious Architecture Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Americas Religious Architecture and write the review.

A guidebook to the architectural styles of American churches and temples, Houses of Worship is highly illustrated with color photographs and explanatory line drawings. A survey of American religious architecture, this book is a history of the development of American religious history, a guidebook to assist in the identification of the style of individual buildings based on historical examples of typical buildings, and a travel guide to regional monuments of interesting architecture.
From the Moorish synagogue in small Texas town, to the New England meetinghouse nestled in the palm trees of Hawaii, this comprehensive historical survey of America's religious architecture celebrates the country's ethnic and spiritual diversity through the magnificent breadth of these community landmarks. The first comprehensive architectural and cultural history of its kind, the book features 500 places of worship nationwide, many listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Includes over 300 black-and-white photographs and foreword by Bill Moyers, creator of the PBS "Genesis" series.
After World War II, Americans constructed an unprecedented number of synagogues, churches, cathedrals, chapels, and other structures. The book is one of the first major studies of American religious architecture in the postwar period, and it reveals the diverse and complicated set of issues that emerged just as one of the nation's biggest building booms unfolded. Price argues that the resulting structures, as often mocked as loved, were physical embodiments of an important time in American religious history.
Houses of God is the first broad survey of American religious architecture, a cultural cross-country expedition that will benefit travelers as much as scholars. Beautifully illustrated with over 100 photographs — some by well-known photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange — this handsome book provides a highly accessible look at how Americans shape their places of worship into multifaceted reflections of their culture, beliefs, and times.
This full colour publication explores the rich and diverse response to the quest to sustain the Hebrew heritage that has resulted in prominent designs.
The Unitarian religious tradition was a product of the same eighteenth-century democratic ideals that fueled the American Revolution and informed the founding of the United States. Its liberal humanistic principles influenced institutions such as Harvard University and philosophical movements like Transcendentalism. Yet, its role in the history of American architecture is little known and studied. In American Unitarian Churches, Ann Marie Borys argues that the progressive values and identity of the Unitarian religion are intimately intertwined with ideals of American democracy and visibly expressed in the architecture of its churches. Over time, church architecture has continued to evolve in response to developments within the faith, and many contemporary projects are built to serve religious, practical, and civic functions simultaneously. Focusing primarily on churches of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple and Louis Kahn's First Unitarian Church, Borys explores building histories, biographies of leaders, and broader sociohistorical contexts. As this essential study makes clear, to examine Unitarianism through its churches is to see American architecture anew, and to find an authentic architectural expression of American democratic identity.
In the 1880s, socio-economic and technological changes in the United States contributed to the rejection of Christian architectural traditions and the development of the radically new auditorium church. Jeanne Kilde links this shift in evangelical Protestant architecture to changes in worship style and religious mission.
The classical revival style of architecture made famous by the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago left its mark on one of the most sustained classical building movements in American architectural history: the Christian Science church building movement. By 1920 every major American city and many smaller towns contained an example of this architecture, financed by the followers of Mary Baker Eddy, the church's founder. These buildings represented a new, burgeoning American institution that appealed to business people and to young men and women working to succeed. Characterized by middle-class congregations that in the early part of the century were over 75 percent women, Christian Science suggested radical civic reform solutions based on an idealistic and pragmatic individualism. It attracted criticism from traditional churches and from the medical establishment due to its rapid growth and to its reinstatement of primitive Christianity's lost elements of physical healing and moral regeneration. Prayers in Stone spins out the close connections between Christian Science church architecture and its social context. This architecture served as a focal point for debates over the possibilities for a new twentieth-century urban architecture that proponents believed would positively shape the behavior of citizens. Thus these buildings played a critical role in discussions concerning religious and secular architecture as major elements of religious and social reform. Drawing on a wide range of documentary evidence, including material from the archives of the Mother Church in Boston, Paul Ivey uses Christian Science architecture to explore the social implications of architecturalstyles and new building technologies, to illuminate class-based notions of civic reform and beautification, and to investigate the use of architecture to bring about religious and social change. In addition, the book explores complex gender issues, including early attempts to define a professional space for women as Christian Science practitioners. Lavishly illustrated, Prayers in Stone focuses on four major city arenas of Christian Science building -- Boston, Chicago, New York, and the San Francisco Bay area -- to demonstrate the vital intersection of architecture and religion at the so-called margins of American society.
Mid-20th century sacred architecture in America sought to bridge modernism with religion by abstracting cultural and faith traditions and pushing the envelope in the design of houses of worship. Modern architects embraced the challenges of creating sacred spaces that incorporated liturgical changes, evolving congregations, modern architecture, and innovations in building technology. The book describes the unique context and design aspects of the departure from historicism, and the renewal of heritage and traditions with ground-breaking structural features, deliberate optical effects and modern aesthetics. The contributions, from a pre-eminent group of scholars and practitioners from the US, Australia, and Europe are based on original archival research, historical documents, and field visits to the buildings discussed. Investigating how the authority of the divine was communicated through new forms of architectural design, these examinations map the materiality of liturgical change and communal worship during the mid-20th century.
The American landscape is host to numerous works of religious architecture, sometimes questionable in taste and large, if not titanic, in scale. In her lively study of satire and religious architecture, Margaret Grubiak challenges how we typically view such sites by shifting the focus from believers to doubters, and from producers to consumers. Grubiak considers an array of sacred architectural constructions—from "Touchdown Jesus" at the University of Notre Dame to the Wizard of Oz Mormon temple outside Washington D.C. to the renamed "Gumby Jesus" of the Christ of the Ozarks statue in Eureka Springs, Arkansas - and how such constructions are confronted by the doubt and dismissiveness articulated by the more skeptical of their viewers. These responses of doubt activate our religious built environment in ways unanticipated but illuminating, asking us, at times forcefully, to consider and clarify what it is we believe. Opening up new avenues of thinking about how people deal with theological questions in the vernacular, Grubiak’s book shows how religious doubt is made manifest in the humorous, satirical, blasphemous, and popular culture responses to religious architecture and image in modern America. Midcentury: Architecture, Landscape, Urbanism, and Design