Abbey Church
The Abbey Church in St. Louis stands as an extraordinary modernist work of church architecture by the late Gyo Obata (d. 2022), a world-renowned architect of Japanese descent.[1] It was completed in 1962.
This church, positioned on a hill, used geometric forms to attain the ideal of infinite access, as Christianity leads by welcoming all.
This church consists of two tiers of parabolic dark windows (20 apiece in the lower two tiers) and a top tier of thin parabolic openings for the bell tower (10 parabolas there). A large cross at the very top completes a parabolic shape of the contour of the outmost points in each tier. A white shell for each parabola and the insulation makes the church sparkle in sunlight.
The designer, Gyo Obata, was also the architect for The National Air and Space Museum in the Smithsonian, which ranks among the top 20 most-visited museums in the United States.
