Style and Real Estate

Abstract

The Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches have a long architectural heritage whose deployment in the design of American cities had preceded their arrival. Placed under a centralized church administration, Italians were subservient to an American Catholicism dominated by the Irish. Architecture became a tool to monopolize living connections with the Italian Renaissance and the Baroque. The Catholic Archdiocese, moreover, orchestrated real estate speculation and urban control through the intentional foundation of national parishes. In contrast, Greek immigrants encountered a fragmented church hierarchy that led to the ad hoc reuse of pre-existing buildings (especially aging Protestant churches). When building churches ex novo, Greek congregations chose the pan-European style of the national Cathedral of Athens, invented by the nation-state in 1842 to replace the medieval Byzantine past. By comparing Italian and Greek architectural stories, we illuminate a pluralism that shifted sameness and otherness across time and space.