JOHNSON/BURGEE: Crystal Cathedral (Garden Grove Community Church)

摘要

The "Hour of Power" was a Sunday religious program funded by a Protestant organization. The group had secured a slot on the air and was building a steady following through this new outlet. Based in Garden Grove, a suburb of Los Angeles, Johnson was commissioned to design a new church to be built next to the previous one designed by Richard Ncutra. The large, column-free space is created by a steel truss built over a star-shaped plan, a variant of the cruciform. Covered with light- and heat-blocking mirrored glass, the building has the appearance of a blue, crystalline structure whose interior is obscured from the outside. The inside, however, is an expansive and open space with views of the blue sky and the surrounding greenery of Southern California. It is Johnson's architectural rhetoric: for those inside its walls, the closed of the traditional stone church has been opened up, but for those on the outside, the church remains off-limits. The new church, built for an emerging religious group of the TV Age, is designed with an unmistakeable connection to the history of traditional church architecture.