Built St. Louis > > MidCentury Modernism > > Emil Frei Stained Glass

Immaculate Heart of Mary Church
south city
Architect: Maurice Carroll
Date: 1964

Stained Glass: Emil Frei Stained Glass Company
Design: Milton Frenzel

I have read complaints that Modernist churches are indistinguishable from gymnasiums. Immaculate Heart of Mary Church may well be the prototypical example of such. Designed by one of the same architects who did the exuberant St. Catherine of Siena-Pagedale, it displays none of that building's bursting, frenetic geometry or interior granduer.

Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, however, is notable not for its exterior design but for its windows. Two groupings, vertical lower windows and horizontal clerestory windows, are done in two complementary styles.

The lower windows come in vertical strips, portraying a variety of saints on a background of variously colored rectangles.

The upper windows are more abstracted; they portray figures only in outline, without color, and against a background entirely in shades of blue.

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