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Comment by jhallenworld | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking jokingly that this is a chance to replace that old fashioned Gothic design with a nice Modern Brutalist one. Well sure enough, there is such a cathedral:

https://www.wallpaper.com/architecture/brutalist-clifton-cat...

oh, and another: it looks like a nuclear power station:

https://www.e-architect.co.uk/liverpool/liverpool-catholic-c...

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I like the interior of the first church more than the exterior. I feel that it manages to capture the spaciousness and lightness that you expect in a cathedral, though I wish it had more of the ornamentation that you see on the older cathedrals. I've always felt that minimalism was less valuable in architecture than in other mediums like print, because one's relationship with the medium is different. With print, you already have a lot of detail for the viewer parse (in the form of text) and the viewer wants to understand it quickly. Ornamentation gets in the way there, but with buildings, there is usually nothing to parse quickly and people have all the time in the world to slowly get used to it.

Churches are an even more relevant example because they traditionally served a didactic purpose all by themselves. The buildings and the art inscribed into them served as means of propogating the culture through the generations and people going to the same cathedral every week would be surrounded murals and statuary of all sorts. They don't have to take it in all at once, they have the rest of their lives to do that and so increased detail is better.

I think that is one of the unexpected failings of the more minimal modern styles of architecture, brutalism included. At first glance they are quite striking but as time passes, they seem bland, sterile, or merely impossing.

If you want a nicer concrete church, try Hallgrímskirkja

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallgr%C3%ADmskirkja

I'm not a fan of the facade, but the inside is pretty nice!

The facade was designed to evoke the surrounding terrain...

Hallgrímskirkja: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ca/Reykjavik%27s...

Basalt formation at Reynisfjara Beach: https://photos.smugmug.com/Travel/Iceland/Rework-lightroom/i...

Are you being sincere? I find the end result of replacing all of the “old fashioned” architecture with “modern” designs leaves everything, no matter the city or country, looking sterile and the same.

I believe that’s the point.

As an aside, there is a cathedral built during the 90s in the modernist style in France. It is in Evry, just 40km south of Paris. I have visited it, it's actually pretty nice. It's very bright inside and accoustic is supposedly very good.

http://cathedrale-evry.net/smart/textes/exterieur.htm http://cathedrale-evry.net/smart/textes/interieur.htm

Wow, thanks for exposing me to this amazing piece of architecture! Such a cool building.

There’s also ‘Paddy’s Wigwam’ as we used to call it, not very nicely I now see as an adult, as kids.

Liverpool famously has two cathedrals very close to each other, within a mile, Church of England and Catholic Church.

Nice pic link below shows both together with further individual pictures further down that page.

https://images.app.goo.gl/vy5ZJ43FBx9Y1S5A7

Something about this reminds me of the Witch-King of Angmar.

aka the cooling tower.

The Anglican cathedral, started in 1904 was finished later, in 1978 - was very much of the classical mould inside and out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_Cathedral

Rome prefers steel-cladding on their otherwise brutalist cathedrals now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mary%27s_Cathedral,_Tokyo

Wow, I'm trying to decide if it's oppressive or sci-fi (on the inside): maybe a little of both.

Bendix West!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Saint_Mary_of_the...

There’s this: https://christcathedralcalifornia.org/explore/

Another one is Royan Cathedral which looks properly terrifying

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