Tour Spotlight: The Abbey Church and Brutalist Architecture

The entire north wall of the church is composed of 430 hexagons of stained glass set in a honeycomb concrete lattice. When it was completed, it was the largest stained glass wall in the world.

A Behind-the-Scenes Tour at Our Inaugural Story Feast Gathering at St. John’s Abbey

Every Story Feast gathering includes more than a meal. We invite guests to explore the places where they dine, to understand what makes them extraordinary. At St. John's Abbey, that meant offering three optional tours before the cocktail hour. Every single one was filled to capacity.

This is what we love about Story Feast guests: you come curious!

A Building That Changed Architecture

Before there was a film called The Brutalist, there was a church in rural Minnesota that helped inspire it.

St. John's Abbey Church was designed by Marcel Breuer, the Hungarian-born, Bauhaus-trained architect who would go on to shape the look of the 20th century. Built between 1958 and 1961, it was his first religious building and remains one of only two churches he ever designed in the United States.

The director of The Brutalist discovered St. John's through a small book written by a monk who had kept minutes of his meetings with Breuer. That monk's memories, of working alongside a visionary architect to build something unprecedented, helped spark the film's fictional story of a Holocaust survivor and immigrant architect building his masterpiece in America.

The real masterpiece sits on a quiet campus in Collegeville, visible from Interstate 94 over a mile away.

The Bell Banner

The first thing you see is the Bell Banner, 112 feet of poured concrete and steel rising from the prairie. It holds five bells, the largest weighing 8,000 pounds, that call the monks and community to prayer. The upper window frames a cross made from oak trees harvested from St. John's own arboretum.

It's not a steeple. It's not a tower. It's something entirely new, a shield, a beacon, a statement of faith in concrete form.

The Stained Glass Wall

Behind the banner, the entire north wall of the church is composed of 430 hexagons of stained glass set in a honeycomb concrete lattice. When it was completed, it was the largest stained glass wall in the world.

Designed by Bronislaw Bak, the art professor at St. John's, the colors shift through the liturgical year, reflecting the seasons of the church calendar in glass and light. On a sunny day, the whole interior glows.

The hexagon pattern isn't just beautiful, it's structural. Each piece supports its neighbors. Monks, faculty, students, and volunteers assembled the glass panels together in the abbey's old dairy barns.

Poured by Monks

What makes St. John's even more remarkable: the entire structure was cast in concrete poured on-site, supervised by Breuer's team but built largely by local carpenters and the monks themselves. The concrete still bears the impression of the wooden forms they constructed.

Inside, massive concrete columns rise like trees, branching into beams that support the folded plate roof. The nave seats 1,500 worshippers in a trapezoidal space designed to bring everyone as close as possible to the altar, no columns blocking the view, no hierarchy of seating.

It was radical for its time. It still feels radical today.

International Significance

I.M. Pei once suggested that were it not hidden in rural Minnesota, St. John's Abbey Church could be ranked among the 20th century's greatest architectural achievements. When it was dedicated in 1961, one reviewer called it "the most exciting architectural story since the building of the great medieval churches in Europe."

Breuer went on to design the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, the Whitney Museum in New York, and dozens of other landmark buildings. But St. John's remained special, the project that marked his turn from furniture design to monumental architecture, and the one he returned to throughout his career.

I.M. Pei once suggested that were it not hidden in rural Minnesota, St. John's Abbey Church could be ranked among the 20th century's greatest architectural achievements.

What Guests Experienced

On the evening of our gathering, one of the monks led a tour of the church and its architecture, explaining the Bell Banner, the stained glass, the folded concrete walls, and the vision that Abbot Baldwin Dworschak brought to the project in the 1950s.

Guests walked the space where monks have prayed five times daily for over sixty years. They stood beneath the honeycomb wall as afternoon light filtered through. They heard the story of a small community in Minnesota that dreamed boldly and built something that would stand for centuries.

That's what it means to understand a place. To get a real sense of it.

Looking Ahead: 2026–2027 Season

For our upcoming season, Story Feast tours will be even more expansive. You'll have the option to spend a few days, or just one, or just an hour (or to skip it all because sometimes you just want to get to the feast!) immersing yourself in a place. Touring the places that comprise a location’s food culture. Meeting the makers. Understanding the sense of place and identity that makes each location extraordinary.

Because a great meal isn't just about what's on the plate. It's about where you are, who built it, and what that place means.

My newsletter

Every Wednesday in my Substack newsletter, What’s Good Here, I share a new, well-tested recipe alongside guides, how-tos, interviews with inspiring people, and stories about what it means to live a good life. Every other Friday I also share five original recipes plus a step-by-step guide to host a Fantasy Feast inspired by your favorite movies, books and television shows.

Subscribe to What's Good Here →

Interested in partnering with us for a future gathering? See partnership opportunities →

Interested in joining a future gathering? See upcoming events →