[astine]

I like the interior of the first church more than the exterior. I feel that it manages to capture the spaciousness and lightness that you expect in a cathedral, though I wish it had more of the ornamentation that you see on the older cathedrals. I've always felt that minimalism was less valuable in architecture than in other mediums like print, because one's relationship with the medium is different. With print, you already have a lot of detail for the viewer parse (in the form of text) and the viewer wants to understand it quickly. Ornamentation gets in the way there, but with buildings, there is usually nothing to parse quickly and people have all the time in the world to slowly get used to it.

Churches are an even more relevant example because they traditionally served a didactic purpose all by themselves. The buildings and the art inscribed into them served as means of propogating the culture through the generations and people going to the same cathedral every week would be surrounded murals and statuary of all sorts. They don't have to take it in all at once, they have the rest of their lives to do that and so increased detail is better.

I think that is one of the unexpected failings of the more minimal modern styles of architecture, brutalism included. At first glance they are quite striking but as time passes, they seem bland, sterile, or merely impossing.