Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 26, 1990 TAG: 9007260311
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Short
In the 1890s, as the cathedral was being planned, a committee voted 12 to 3 to approve a domed, Renaissance-style design of white marble with a long colonnade, submitted by noted American architect Ernest Flagg. Others favored the Greek Revival style of many of the capital's government buildings.
The cathedral chapter, or board of trustees, voted unanimously May 21, 1906, to build a Gothic cathedral instead.
"This is probably the last one,'' says Stanford Lehmberg, professor of history at the University of Minnesota and an authority on English cathedrals.
Some have questioned the appropriateness of using a 14th-century style for a cathedral that will be serving 21st-century worshipers.
"It's Christianity, as it were, in a period costume," says David Holmes, professor of religion at the College of William and Mary. "You have to ask what an unbeliever thinks. He or she may be awed, or may relegate the Christian message to an irrelevant position because the building is so anachronistic and almost Disneyland in character."
"I don't think that it will ever happen again," says E.A. Sovik, a leading church architect who works in the more modern style of the liturgical movement. "I think that it was a valiant gesture, but it was started during a period when architecture and architects were looking back and not forward.
"I think the whole Gothic revival was a mistake. But within that mistake, things were done well and done badly, and this one was done well."
by CNB