Invisible Architectures of the Southern Dimension

I’m writing from SR82, somewhere between scenic Ty Ty and Sylvester, Georgia.

The car’s CD player is broken, so we’re quietly jamming to Dylan, Mylo, Seefeel, Kaki King and The National Trust on my iBook’s tinny internal speakers. Basslines have temporarily become a thing of the past.

My return trip to Jacksonville from a friend’s wedding in Birmingham, Alabama has been pleasantly uneventful. Life’s as slow as it can be at 80 mph. With all this disconnected time to reflect on the weekend and stare out the window, I come face to face with the kudzu-choked wilderness and sacred landscapes of the former Confederacy.

Billboards advertising vasectomy reversals and 24/7 country kitchens cast shadows across bright green tobacco fields. A family’s material goods are strewn across a vacant lot at a truck stop yard sale. (I came *this* close to taking home the crappy little air organ shown above.) And the churches… they’re everywhere. This trip has supplied a full life-dose of Confederate flags and churches.

They’re in strip malls, sheds, trailers and converted restaurants. They’re virtually all Protestant-flavored. And from my air-conditioned Ford rental vantage point, the new churches appear to conform to a standard, invisible architecture.   

Rather than stand out as a “church,” these places adopt a sort of corporate camouflage. The idea is probably to repackage the experience of entering a Bed Bath & Beyond on a quest for the ultimate home appliance as a quest for spiritual redemption. Surely these featureless, commercial structures seem less threatening than a traditional church. We enter them riddled with domestic anxieties (“I need a trash can that fits my active lifestyle!”) and exit them as satisfied customers.

Contemporary church design appeals to a new generation of consumers trained to desire the stark, boxy uniformity of exurbian development. Steeples, bell towers and other sacred architectural references have mostly been replaced with a corporate, mass-produced look that fetishizes grayscales and cavernous spaces. In their halls of worship, churchgoers have traded the static feature of a stained glass window for the kinetic pop of a widescreen PowerPoint presentation.

The Birmingham church that hosted the wedding looked nothing like a church (from the outside, at least). But it didn’t adopt the corporate camouflage, either. Structurally, it resembled a hybrid of a Vermont ski lodge and an 18th century meeting hall. Visualize a Steak and Ale restaurant on steroids, and you’re almost there. It was a nice break from the continuum of the invisible, but something about it begs to be grouped with the rest of them under the architecture of denial. Like hamburger shaped tofu, really. 

Enough of my Rybczynski impersonation. It was a great wedding. And now I'm going home.

Comments

[Parag]

Thee Ale House has long been a fine place of worship for all of those who want steak and a potato at a reasonable price.

[bec]

have you noticed the churches that pop up in strip mall storefronts? wwwwweird...i can't imagine being dragged to church immediately next door to a Dollar Tree...