• DOI:10.5749/BUILDLAND.19.2.0077
• Corpus ID: 161996488

The Danforth Chapel Program on the Public American Campus

@article{Grubiak2012TheDC,
  title={The Danforth Chapel Program on the Public American Campus},
  author={Margaret M. Grubiak},
  journal={Buildings \& Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum},
  year={2012},
  volume={19},
  pages={77 - 96}
}

• Margaret M. Grubiak
• Published 13 December 2012
• Education
• Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum

In an evaluation of the American college chapel published in the late 1950s, religious historian Martin Marty cele brated Colorado State University’s Danforth Chapel and eight other college and university chapels as outstanding examples of a new era in church building. He believed these chapels, with their modernist, progressive architecture, could make religion relevant to the modern age, becoming “the magnet of students who before this never knew that the Christian faith was addressing itself to them as children of the twentieth century.” In its stark form and small size, the Danforth Chapel at Colorado State exemplified the kind of worship space that turned a focus to simple and intimate worship (Figure 1). The Colorado State University Danforth Chapel was remarkable as a religious monument on a public university campus, and despite Marty’s identification of it as a Christian space, its architecture directly engaged margaret m. grubiak