Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa

If you’ve ever contemplated the long desert drive to Marfa, Texas to see the work of American sculptor Dan Flavin, a metro trip to the end of the green line won’t seem like too much of an effort. The suburban Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa, an airy 1930s church, contains his last work, designed shortly before his death in 1996. The arrangement of red, yellow and blue fluorescent lights across the altar, apse and transept is a subtle work - the life and clutter of an everyday church goes on beneath it - but its mix of the formal and the emotional is all the more powerful for its setting.