Post-war churches faced a dilemma: how to look like a house of worship while looking modern? You might say "that's only a dilemma if they thought churches had to look modern to attract believers," and you'd be right. There was no good reason churches had to cast off a thousand years of tradition and start dressing up like bank branches, but that's exactly what they did. The Depression and the War had done away with the old architectural vocabulary, and the triumphant rise of the Modernists meant that even churches would now be bent to the rationalist's lathe. (Or T-square.)

Here we have a perfect example: Our Lady of the Skies, a chapel at Idelwild Airport in South Ozone Park, New York. Bank or church? Well, without the statue of the Blessed Virgin perched precariously upon a propellor, you'd say Bank.