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So you think that building is ugly? Glencairn Museum offers architectural historian's view on spirituality in modern design The commonly held notion that modern design was the beginning of the “death of God” couldn’t be further from the truth, according to the executive director of the Bryn Athyn Cathedral who will debunk the concept with “So You Think That Building Is Ugly?” an illustrated presentation April 7 at 7 p.m. at Glencairn Museum in Bryn Athyn. “They’re buildings nobody likes,” says Frank Vagnone, “steel skyscrapers, poured-in-place concrete structures. They’re viewed as mundane, stupid and functional and they’re blown off as tacky and cheap. But they are thoughtfully, artistically put together, equally as expensive to build as a stone wall.” And, says Vagnone, they’re imbued with spirituality.
Vagnone, an architectural historian known throughout the country as a
scholar of the arts and crafts movement, says modernists are “embracing
spirituality, not running away from it. It’s a different view of
spirituality,” he says, “exercised in built form.” For the past eight years, Vagnone, who holds bachelor’s degrees in architecture and anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a master’s degree in architecture from Columbia University, has been executive director of the Bryn Athyn Cathedral in Bryn Athyn whose history and architecture draws visitors from around the world. The cathedral has no right angles or straight lines and its walls are skewed against each other, bowing out in the middle and returning at the opposite wall. The General Church of the New Jerusalem, whose members worship there, says the architecture represents the “unpredictable path of human growth.” Vagnone, who has lectured around the country, including at Harvard University, promises anything but a “dry” lecture. He’s passionate about the subject and says his wife calls him the “Sister Wendy” of art history lectures, a reference to PBS’s unlikely art critic, 75-year-old Sister Wendy Beckett. Vagnone says his “colorful and fast-moving” presentation, “definitely won’t put people to sleep.” Vagnone reports that often after his college lectures, students and teachers say they still don’t like the buildings, but they “will never again look at them as ugly.” Admission to Vagnone’s presentation is $10, $5 for students. Children 5 and under are free. Glencairn Museum, housed in a 10-story Romanesque-style mansion, is a museum of religious history located at 1001 Cathedral Road, Bryn Athyn. Information: 267-502-2600 or www.glencairnmuseum.org.
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