The Cafeteria Is Closed Architectural Tour

By the way folks, I just happened over to The Cafeteria Is Closed which you might want to take a look at as well.

Gerald, the author of that blog, is on what you might call his "Michael S. Rose tour of European churches" right now. Now this is a bit of an exaggeration, because it is not that he is going into throughly modern ecclesial constructs. Rather, he has been documenting some of the churches he's been visiting and photographing during the course of his visit to various parts of Italy and Austria. In this Austrian leg, he has run into some interesting sanctuary "reforms".

Seeing the juxtaposition can accomplish two things; first, there is the edification to be found in looking at the beauty of the traditional ecclesial architecture of old Catholic Europe. But second, the juxtaposition of this with modern addendums allows for a good opportunity for critical discussion of the trends in modern architecture when compared with the traditional visual vocabulary of sacred architecture.

In other words, aside from the fact that they aren't great additions, we are rather given a very revealing comparison of two very different approaches, and the architectural, artistic, ecclesiological and liturgical principles that underly those differences.