eBook

Visions of the Future

Rampley, Matthew

2025

Overview

Some of the most striking examples of modernist architecture are churches, yet they have seldom been subject to extended critical analysis. In this book, Matthew Rampley provides just such an analysis, focusing on the Catholic Church in interwar Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. A powerful institution in the Habsburg Empire, the Catholic Church continued to be a central social, political, and cultural agent after 1918, working in alliance with political parties and national governments to promote visions of a new national culture. As a result, church building took on an important ideological and political function. Rampley’s study is set against the backdrop of two interrelated issues: the role of architecture in the Catholic Church’s response to an increasingly secular modernity, and church architecture as part of the Church’s attempts to shape social and political life in the states that emerged after the collapse of Austria-Hungary. Rampley also examines the aesthetic, cultural, and political contexts that informed architectural projects, including the conflict between Catholicism and social democracy, the embrace of fascism, Catholic theories of technology, and discourses of regionalism and ruralism. In bringing to light an untold chapter in the history of modern architecture, this book also engages in methodological reflection on the implications of the study of modern church architecture for the historiography of modernism. This book will appeal to students and scholars of architectural history, religious and political history, and interwar Central European history.

• Publisher: Penn State University Press,Pennsylvania State University Press
• Subject: 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999 / Architectural history / Architecture / Architecture and ideology / Architecture and modernity / Architecture and nationalism / Architecture: religious buildings / ART / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945) / Austria Czechoslovakia Hungary / building program / building program, Catholic modernism / c 1500 onwards to present day / Catholic Church and the state / Catholic church buildings-Europe, Central-History-20th century / Catholic Church-Europe, Central-History-20th century / Catholic modernism / Central European history / Church architecture / Church architecture-Europe, Central-History-20th century / Clerical fascism / Early 20th century c 1900 to c 1950 / European history / Fascism and Catholicism / Habsburg Empire / Habsburg successor states / Historiography / History / History and Archaeology / History of art / History: theory and methods / Interwar architecture / Interwar Europe / Modern architecture / Modern movement (Architecture)-Europe, Central / Modernism and religion / Modernist churches / Political Catholicism / Pre-Raphaelite / reactionary modernism / Religion and politics / Sacred architecture / Style qualifiers / Styles (P) / The Arts / The Arts: treatments and subjects / Time period qualifiers / Twentieth century European
• ISBN: 0271100109, 9780271100104, 0271099399, 9780271099392