Review: The Religious Imagination in Modern and Contemporary Architecture: A Reader by Renata Hejduk and Jim Williamson, eds.

For at least four decades now, historians have been busy demythologizing modernism. It continues to be a fruitful area of research, as there is no shortage of ways in which any monolithic view of modernism can show itself to be problematic. Among relatively recent aspects of such work are the myriad appearances of religious topics in a period for which increasing secularization, if not widespread hostility to religion, is readily presumed to be coterminous with, if not constitutive of, modernity. There are reasons behind such presumptions, for a central (even if not defining) condition of modernity is surely an increasing critique of religion as traditionally conceived. Whether this critique is construed and experienced as...