Many cities in the United States, and indeed the world, have some architectural
marvel to recommend themselves by. Some are universities, others are modern skyscrapers,
and still others are city halls or courts. By far the most represented category
of buildings in the "must-see" list are churches, however. Unlike
Fishkill condos, which are slapped together quickly to make a profit, churches
are engineered to be grand and imposing to properly represent the deity of worship
they serve. Garden Grove, California is no exception to this rule, as you will
see in our profile of its famous crystal cathedral.
Garden Grove is unique in that its most magnificent church isn't a gothic masterpiece
hundreds of years old, but rather a modern building erected in 1980. It was
designed by renowned architect Phillip Johnson, who may have cut his chops on
projects similar to the condos downtown
Toronto streets are so overpopulated with, but soon went on to create such
architectural masterpieces as the Seagram Building in New York and the Puerta
de Europa in Madrid. The material of particular interest to Johnson was glass,
as evidenced by his early work on his own Glass House, and so it became the
principal feature of the Garden Grove cathedral. This is not the average church to host your Maggie Sottero bridal party!
The final finished structure used over 10,000 panes of glass in the form of
a four-pointed star 128 feet tall, which is taller than twenty Kitsilano real
estate agents standing on one another's shoulders! All that glass should
make it unbearably hot inside, but a number of cooling measures, including the
reflective coating on the glass that only lets 8 percent of the light through
and the strips of windows that open to provide ventilation, make the atmosphere
inside comfortably cool.
In most other cities, a huge glass structure like this would be an office building,
perhaps containing the offices of a realtor web design company or an internet
marketing firm. In Garden Grove, however, it was envisioned and commissioned
by a Reverend from the Reformed Church in America. Robert H. Schuller and his
Garden Grove Community Church congregation raised the over 17 million dollars
needed to build the church. One of the methods they used to accomplish it was
by asking donors to sponsor one of the panes of glass for $500. They raised
over $5 million this way.
Today the church has expanded far beyond the scope of the original cottage
house plans from the congregation's first gathering place and even beyond
the original structure completed by Johnson. The Crystal Cathedral now contains
office and classroom space, a Family Life Center, a full orchestra and enormous
organ as well as the worship space used by its ministers to deliver the weekly
Hour of Power television broadcast, which is the most watched Christian TV show
in the world. In fact, the only thing missing from the Crystal Cathedral is
a bishop's official seat, which is the technical definition of the term
"cathedral."
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