If Jesus walks into one of these congregations one day, will God say, “Good and faithful Servant?”, or “You wicked, lazy servant!”?

You decide.

The 16,000-seat sanctuary of Lakewood Church in Houston (at right), the nation’s largest nondenominational congregation, has padded theater seats instead of wooden pews, a stage instead of an altar, and video projection screens instead of stained-glass windows. Hardly a classic place of worship, although the expansive expression of religious community in this vast space is as impressive, in its way, as any soaring medieval nave.

Lakewood Church is actually a converted sports arena—the Compaq Center, once home to the Houston Rockets. The modified exterior (at right) raises an important issue: The desire of congregations to make their place of worship a part of everyday life rather than a place apart is admirable, and one can sympathize with the wish to avoid the traditional ecclesiastical symbols that have been pretty much co-opted by mainstream religions. But having turned their backs on tradition, megachurches need to find appropriate architectural alternatives. Just putting up a sign and a fountain is not enough. The overbearing and clumsy exterior of Lakewood Church, designed by Morris Architects of Houston, demonstrates the peril of downplaying architectural design, especially in a building as large and imposing as this one.

Photograph by Kevin Beswick. Image
courtesy Willow Creek Community Church.

Willow Creek Community Church in the Chicago suburb of South Barrington, Ill., pays attention to design. The sprawling complex, on an attractively landscaped 155-acre site, includes not only two sanctuaries but also a gymnasium that serves as an activity center, a bookstore, a food court, and a cappuccino bar. Goss/Pasma Architects of Evanston, Ill., did not include any traditional religious symbols on the exterior: no steeples or spires, no bell towers, no pointed arches, not even a crucifix. It doesn’t look like a place of worship, but what does it look like? A performing-arts center, a community college, a corporate headquarters?

Photograph by Steve Hall. Image courtesy
Willow Creek Community Church.

Paul Goldberger once observed, “The Gothic cathedral was designed to inspire awe and thoughts of transcendence. Megachurches celebrate comfort, ease and the very idea of contemporary suburban life.” Since many Early American garden suburbs had beautiful Episcopalian churches, I don’t see any contradiction between transcendence and suburban life, but it’s true that most contemporary megachurches are resolutely secular in design. The 4,550-seat sanctuary—it’s actually called the Main Auditorium—of Willow Creek (at right) appears to have good sightlines, excellent audiovisual facilities, and comfortably wide aisles for moving around in. But inspiring it’s not. It’s the architectural equivalent of the three-piece business suit that most nondenominational pastors favor.

© Timothy Hursley. Image courtesy Zimmer
Gunsul Frasca Partnership.

The largest religious assembly space in the country is the recently completed Conference Center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in downtown Salt Lake City. It was built to accommodate 21,000 people for the Semiannual General Conference of church members, but it also houses the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and is used for church pageants. The approach of the architects, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca of Portland, Ore., shows the influence megachurches have had on mainstream religions. The ecclesiastical imagery is confined to the giant pipe organ. The arena seating, the mainstream decor, the profusion of lighting and television broadcasting equipment, as well as the surrounding lobbies and vestibules, are distinctly secular. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

© Eckert & Eckert. Image courtesy Zimmer
Gunsul Frasca Partnership.>

The exterior architecture of the Conference Center is more architecturally ambitious than most megachurches. It recalls Depression-era stripped classicism, the sort of thing that Paul Cret did—with much more conviction—in buildings such as the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Federal Reserve Board Building in Washington, D.C. What is remarkable about the Salt Lake City building, however, is the landscaped roof, which includes stairs, terraces, fountains, and reflecting pools. The design, by the Olin Partnership, is not historical and contains no religious symbols. Yet, like most parks, it has a contemplative, quasi-religious atmosphere. The central features are a three-acre alpine garden, dramatic views of the surrounding mountains, and the spires of the Salt Lake Temple. The landscaping, which steps down the walls of the building, shrouds it in a veil of greenery. And it provides an answer to the question of how to design a megachurch: Make it disappear.

© Reuters/CORBIS

Megachurch congregations rarely hire big-name architects. Perhaps they are afraid that the messenger will outshine the message. Not so for the Catholic Church, whose shortlist to design a new cathedral for Los Angeles included Frank Gehry and Rafael Moneo, both Pritzker Prize winners, and Thom Mayne (who would win the Pritzker a few years later). Moneo got the job and produced an abstract design that is as nontraditional as any megachurch. The heavy, pigmented concrete walls, as well as the stylized campanile, are intended to evoke the traditional adobe of early Californian mission churches. Yet the abstract forms and louvered windows make this graceless building look more like a power plant than a cathedral. Moneo’s earnest minimalism is more fashionable than Lakewood Church’s clunky design, but it is no more evocative of religious feeling.

© J. Emilio Flores/Corbis.

The bright interior of Our Lady of the Angels is a modern version of a traditional church. But the wooden ceiling is a poor substitute for a fan vault, just as the alabaster panels in the windows have none of the numinous quality of stained glass. The 100-foot-tall nave, which holds 2,600 people, feels squat rather than soaring. The artworks attached to the walls, presumably intended to humanize the architecture, feel makeshift, as if the large space were originally designed for some other function and had been converted into a sanctuary. This busy and confusing interior points to the peril of trying to “update” a traditional architectural idiom. It’s as hopeless as translating Shakespeare into hip-hop.

Photograph by Michelle King. Image courtesy
Crystal Cathedral Ministries.

One has to go back to the late 1970s to find a megachurch with architectural ambitions. The Rev. Robert Schuller, a popular televangelist (The Hour of Power) who had already built a Richard Neutra-designed drive-in church for his Garden Grove, Calif., congregation, commissioned Philip Johnson to build what would become known as Crystal Cathedral. Johnson, always knowledgeable about architectural history, although not yet embarked on the postmodern phase of his career, sought inspiration in Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart’s visionary Glasarchitektur of the early 1900s. The religious function of the building is signaled by a stalagmitelike spire (the inelegant rectangular steeple of Neutra’s adjacent church is visible in the image on the right), although there is nothing specifically ecclesiastical in the prismatic glass forms. From certain angles, the building actually recalls Mies van der Rohe’s famous Friedrichstrasse glass tower project.

Photograph by Cristian Costea. Image
courtesy Crystal Cathedral Ministries.

Crystal Cathedral is both strikingly modern in its crystalline geometry and its transparency and a throwback to the medieval cathedral-builders’ preoccupation with structure and lightness. Although the spectacular glass sanctuary (at right) resembles nothing so much as a giant greenhouse, Johnson and his partner, John Burgee, included several religious cues. The 2,800 congregants sit in wooden pews. To improve sightlines, these are distributed in a tiered, arenalike fashion rather than a nave. A giant organ and a choir stall form a backdrop to the pulpit, not unlike in a traditional church. In the place of religious icons one finds only water and foliage, a practice introduced by Neutra next door. The vast interior is too bright to be mysterious, but it is not without drama: During the service, a full-height section of wall behind the pulpit swings theatrically open to reveal the sky. With Crystal Cathedral, Johnson bravely ventured onto the knife-edge of kitsch and produced a building that was both familiar and new, suburban and transcendental.