Christ Chapel, Trinity Church

371 Delaware Ave

architect: Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson (Remodeled, 1913)

years built: 1870

Originally built in 1870, the interior of this chapel is today an excellent example of the work of the best known American firm of Gothic Revivalists. Quiet and restrained in its use of late Gothic forms, admirable in its proportions, it owns much of its effectiveness to the polychromatic decoration of the handsome wooden ceiling and the chancel walls.

As in domestic architecture, the wiser traditional church architects have arrived at simplicity and good proportions, but in so doing have lost much of the romantic picturesqueness which gave strength to nineteenth century revivalism.

“”Taste”” is a rather negative virtue in architecture, indubitably present in such conventional contemporary architecture. It is absent or irrelevant in the great industrial edificies that really strike the modern imagination and in the powerfully individual works of Frank Lloyd Wright and Richardson.