San Antonio Trip Preview

Here are some quick teasers for three churches visited last weekend while in San Antonio for the Texas Society of Architects (AIA) convention. I'm working of posting more photos and writing descriptions & analysis of each of these, but I've been overwhelmed with other projects this week. First up, the chapel at the Haven for Hope which was dedicated last Sunday afternoon. Haven for Hope is an incredible place built to serve and transform San Antonio's homeless population. The scope of the services and the number of organizations & service providers involved is an astounding display of what it means to serve the "whole person." The scale means that it can help everyone who seeks help, not just a few at a time. Overland Partners led the design team, including the design for the chapel pictured below.

Next up is another campus chapel with a similarly profound & pivotal relationship with its site. O'Neil Ford's chapel on the campus of Trinity University.

And then in the evening we traveled out to the Anglican Use Roman Catholic parish Our Lady of Atonement, where the Sunday evening Mass is said in Latin from the (current) Roman Missal of Paul VI. I was hoping for some sign of "tradition sans traditionalism" but unfortunately no trace of that most desired grail was to be found here. The interior is fairly nice with greatest care in all the right places, though signs of cheap construction abound. The exterior is proportionally atrocious & tectonically inauthentic, but more on that later.