The Church Building as a Sacred Place: Beauty, Transcendence and the Eternal Duncan G. Stroik

This retrospective and forward-looking collection of 23 essays by Duncan Stroik shows the development and consistency of his architectural vision over the last eighteen years. The essays cover church modernism and modernity, renaissance and renewal, principles of church design, and a critique of modern iconoclasm.
The appendices feature: a  bibliography, a useful chart showing the comparative size of well known churches, as well as comparative sizes of baldacchinos in Rome, and a list of canonical documents pertaining to church architecture.
Packed with informative essays and over 170 photographs, this collection will help priests, bishops, liturgical consultants, lay commissions and  parishioners understand the Church’s architectural tradition.
Duncan Stroik’s architectural practice and career have helped lead the evolution of the international classical movement, and over the past decade his work has been instrumental in the new renaissance of sacred architecture.  Stroik and his work have been featured on PBS, A&E, and EWTN television.  His design work and essays on architecture have been featured in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Republic, Crisis, Inside the Vatican, Our Sunday Visitor, and Catholic Dossier.  He is the founder and editor of the journal, Sacred Architecture. He lectures widely on the principles of traditional architecture and Catholic church design.

"For decades Duncan Stroik has led the renewal movement in Catholic church architecture and its reengagement with tradition. Once a lone voice crying in the wilderness, he has since become a leading educator and practitioner, a man whose name is almost a household word and has proven that large, beautiful, traditional Catholic architecture is indeed possible today. For this reason, this book is almost as much a collection of primary source readings about Stroik's role in the New Classical movement as it is a primer on church architecture itself. The person who reads this book will not simply learn about the Church's architectural tradition, but be immersed firsthand in a rich and exciting historical narrative, getting in on the ground floor of a movement that historians have only recently begun to recognize and chronicle."

--Denis R. McNamara
Author, Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy
Assistant Director, Liturgical Institute
From the Foreword

Hardcover, 8 1/2 x 11