Sangre de Cristo chapels

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As a bit of a follow up to a post from last year on the small village chapels in the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado, I recently took a trip down to the Sangre de Cristo mountains.  This range is in southern Colorado and makes the eastern edge of the San Luis Valley.  On this most recent trip I ventured to the other side of these mountains to look into the chapels and buildings still existing.

SdC chapels 02

What is most striking is the very clear morphology of these churches along the eastern side of the Sangre de Cristos,  compared with the much wider variety of forms and materials employed in the San Luis Valley.  As you can see, most of these chapels are simple, single-gabled longitudinal structures.  This forms remains fairly consistent even though the building material may vary from stucco-covered adobe to wood framing.  Equally consistent is the appearance of a simple, open-framed steeple and a diamond, usually square, window centered in the end gable.

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SdC chapels 03

About half of the chapels I visited were abandoned, in various states of decomposition.

Midwestern churches

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As I have talked about in a couple of recent posts on the flatness of the Midwest, a simple building standing in that relentlessly horizontal landscape is a powerful, singular moment.  This is even more apparent when it is a church, rising upward to heaven, a determinedly vertical building contrasting the vast horizon.

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Unlike other parts of the US and Europe, in the Midwest, the steeples of the surrounding churches are not the dominant markers of the landscape.  The grain elevators and silos far surpass the height of even the most ambitious chapel.  But what these local churches lack in the hierarchy of height, they make up for with a kind of bold simplicity and frank determination.  Wind-swept and storm-battered, the verticality of the church buildings is defiant, taking on the rain and wind and marking a place of gathering.  Though the Midwestern houses may seem to hunker down below spreading roofs, the churches make a claim for community, tethering a point on the ground to changeable cloudy skies above.

midwest church 01

The church is a fixed point in an otherwise often endless landscape, without definition.  These churches have no desire to "work with the topography" or "meld with the surrounding landscape" or any of the other tropes of place-making architecture. The grain elevators and silos may be taller and more audacious, but the steepled church has a dogged, determined optimism to make a place, to gather a space around it, and hold it for a community to gather around.  They don't so much work with the landscape as define it.

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