Review: The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America, by Gretchen Buggeln

The postwar suburban American church is a complicated subject. Religious buildings occupy a typological history largely driven by the interpretation of monuments, yet these churches tend instead toward a kind of mainstream vernacular. Their unassuming modernity challenges presumptions both of a heroic modernism overcoming tradition and of a conception of sacred space reliant on drama and transcendence. That they were built by congregations often newly formed as part of the postwar flight from cities makes relevant the many sources of contemporaneous and later criticism of suburban culture, from racial segregation to alienating sprawl to housewife drudgery and reactionary conformity in the face of a growing counterculture. Without a...