Marcel Breuer's Saint John's Abbey Church in Collegeville, Minnesota, is one of the few churches in the United States to have merited a previous monograph—Whitney Stoddard's Adventure in Architecture: Building the New St. John's, written several years before the church's dedication in 1961.1 That Stoddard, a medievalist, was so fascinated with this decidedly modernist landmark suggests much about the building's positioning at the time. Victoria M. Young's study of the church's history and its design now helps us to understand fully why it was so important to its contemporaries. Her own long relationship with the abbey (Young is a professor of architectural history at the nearby University of St. Thomas) shows in her sensitive descriptions of Breuer's clients, the monks, and her stress on the dynamic relationship between the two, which, she argues, produced a masterpiece neither could have been responsible for alone. She deftly balances architectural history...
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September 2017
Book Review|
September 01 2017
Review: Saint John's Abbey Church: Marcel Breuer and the Creation of a Modern Sacred Space, by Victoria M. Young
Victoria M. Young
Saint John's Abbey Church: Marcel Breuer and the Creation of a Modern Sacred Space
Minneapolis
: University of Minnesota Press
, 2014
, 216 pp., 17 color and 80 b/w illus. $34.95, ISBN 9780816676163
Catherine R. Osborne
Catherine R. Osborne
Loyola Marymount University
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Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2017) 76 (3): 400–401.
Citation
Catherine R. Osborne; Review: Saint John's Abbey Church: Marcel Breuer and the Creation of a Modern Sacred Space, by Victoria M. Young. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 September 2017; 76 (3): 400–401. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2017.76.3.400
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