Marcel Breuer would have been proud. So would Baldwin Dworschak. And maybe even St. Benedict as well. Breuer, the New York Bauhaus-trained architect, and Dworschak, the far-sighted abbot of a Benedictine monastery in rural Minnesota, were the central figures in a unique collaboration that produced one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century religious architecture, the acclaime (...)
Article
The Monks & the Modernist
What the Benedictines Built at Collegeville
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I wish you had a few pictures of this church...the description is wonderful. It seems indeed a place of grace.
I had many Benedictine friends in the Midwest during the 50's and it does not surprise me that one of theirs would choose such an inspiring memorial.
When the building was not yet completed, a few of us Johnnies climbed up and walked inside the huge concrete roof beams that, as I recall, had some openings through which we could have fallen to the floor some distance below. Please don't tell anyone.
Patricia, to me it looks like a concrete bunker or airplane hangar. Perhaps a good example of brutalism, but what is that saying, exactly?