Contrasting Tendencies in Protestant Church Architecture

Noting that “private prayer can dispense with the arts, public prayer cannot”, Dr A L Drummond calls for a creative attitude to architecture and the arts in the building of churches.  Tracing developments from Colonial times in the USA, and in post-Reformation Germany, he notes that while in the former there were, under the influence of Dr Ralph Adams Cram, many excellent medieval-inspired buildings of the 20th century “there is but little radical modernism”, in Germany there had emerged a tradition-denying Functionalism that reduces architecture to machinery.   He concludes that “not engineering but biology should be the root idea of religious architecture” and suggests that change should be governed by a law of growth not by architectural revivalism.