Newsmaker

Every Friday, we choose an alum who has been making headlines—for better or for worse.
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Duncan Stroik ’87MArch

By the staff | 4:29pm March 19 2010

Catholic children are sometimes taught that the important part of their church is not the building, but the people. That doesn’t mean the building has to be ugly, though. Ask Duncan Stroik ’87MArch, a Notre Dame professor and church designer whose work is profiled and praised in the March 18 Wall Street Journal. Citing a pair of modern, non-Stroik American cathedrals—“the one a concrete behemoth, the other a glazed, truncated cone”—the Journal wonders: “Is ersatz-traditional schlock the only alternative? The answer is no,” as two recent Stroik churches “powerfully attest.”

The Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, sitting high on a Wisconsin hillside, is “meant to be a place for the faithful to come on pilgrimage,” writes Stroik, who also founded and edits the journal Sacred Architecture. And at his chapel for Thomas Aquinas College in Southern California, the Journal notes, bells in the Spanish baroque tower “call the college’s 350 students to Mass three times daily.” It seems that urban, East Coast architecture critics aren’t the only ones taking notice of Stroik’s work.

Filed under school of architecture, buildings, religion
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