The church has not adopted any particular style of art as her
own . . . The art of our own times from every race and country shall also be
given free scope in the Church, provided it bring to the task the reverence
and honor due to the sacred buildings and rites.
-Sacrosanctum Concilium, no. 123
If you wish to see great Modernist architecture you must have plenty
of time and your own Lear jet.
-Robert Krier
To many educated observers it would seem that the reductivist buildings
commissioned for Roman Catholic worship today are the direct correlary of Church
teaching, modern liturgical studies and contemporary theology. Of course, if
that were so, Modernist architecture would be the officially sanctioned style of
the Church and difficult to criticise. Indeed, in the 1960's after the Vatican
Council, there was a great surge of construction of churches which were austere
and often resembling commercial or factory buildings, bearing out the belief
that they were mandated by the spirit of Vatican II. But these concrete boxes,
barnlike shelters and sculptural masses all had precedent in the pre-Conciliar
era. In fact, radical new church configurations had been experimented with since
the dawn of Modernism in the late 19th century. The idea to model churches on
auditoria, Greek theaters, large houses, or theaters in the round grew out of
low-church Protestant worship, whereas the reductivism of post-Conciliar
churches grew out of the Modernist architectural movement in Europe.
This is to say that current church architecture is not merely the child of
modern theology, it is also a child of the "masters" of Modernism: Le
Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright
and others. The Church willingly accepted and even adopted the architecture of
the secular realm for its sacred buildings. Yet in promoting this
"International Style," did the Church unknowingly adopt the philosophy
of Modernism and unwittingly undercut its own theological agenda?
First of all, it is well understood that the philosophical basis for
Modernist architecture can be discovered, like her theological cousin, in the
French Enlightenment and German rationalism. What is also of note is the
parallel between the architecture of the Protestant Reformation and the
iconoclastic architecture at the end of our century. In the Reformation,
Catholic churches were stripped of statuary, paintings and traditional symbols.
New churches were designed as "meeting-houses," as if going back to
early Christianity when believers met in each others' homes. Architecture,
having lost its ability to signify the sacred, became seen as merely providing
for the assembly's material or functional needs. The concepts of the church as
auditorium and theater in the round derive from early Calvinist buildings which
were designed to enable people to see and hear the preacher, such as at
Charenton, France. Modernism was particularly attracted to the auditorium and
theater types because of their scientific claims to acoustical and visual
correctness, as well as the belief that the form of a building should be
determined by its function. In the Reformation, destruction of altar, tabernacle
and sanctuary were commonplace, and often a pulpit or baptismal font replaced
the altar as a focal point. The theological proscriptions against images and
symbols in the Reformation were taken up by the Modernists in the 20th century,
becoming a minimalist aesthetic requiring austerity and the absence of image.
An essential tenet of Modernism at the turn of the century was the need to
break with the past, in order to find a national architecture or an
"architecture of our time." Inspired by Hegel, buildings were seen as
a reflection of the spirit of the particular age in which they were built, and
therefore distinct from previous epochs and styles. This was confirmed by the
"modern man" who because of his uniqueness in history required a
unique architecture, preferably abstract, progressive, and scientific. It was
made clear by the early promoters of Modernism, such as Louis Sullivan, Frank
Lloyd Wright, and Otto Wagner, that any semblance of historical elements or
styles was not of our time and must be rejected. At first this rejection of
tradition took the form of subtracting or abstracting traditional motifs in
buildings. Later, being inspired by non-objective paintings and sculpture,
Modernist architecture sought to end the distinction between floor and ceiling,
interior and exterior, window and wall, and sacred and profane, which
architecture has historically gloried in.
Aesthetically, Modernist architecture was inspired by works of engineering
including bridges, industrial buildings, and temporary exposition halls which
were large, economical and built fast. An essential paradigm was the machine:
Swiss architect Le Corbusier claimed the plane, the boat, and the car were
models for a functional architecture. Just as a plane was designed efficiently
for flight, so a house was a machine for living in. Just as the anthropological,
spiritual, and traditional aspects of domus for dwelling and raising a
family were stripped away in the "house as a machine for living in,"
so would ritual, icon and sacrament be purged from the "church as machine
for assembling in."
Drawing on the writings of Viollet Le Duc and John Ruskin, it was alleged by
the historian Nicholas Pevsner and others that the modern age required the use
of modern materials such as steel, glass, and reinforced concrete, whereas
morality required that they be expressed in the building. It was also argued
that a modern style grew out of the use of modern materials and that these
materials lent themselves inherently to a reductivist aesthetic. This was
partially a critique of the ongoing construction of masonry buildings such as
St. Patrick's Cathedral and the National Cathedral, being built in the 20th
century, as well as many chapels and churches built by architects in Classical
or Medieval modes. In fact at the same time Auguste Perret built a Modernist
hall church in concrete in Paris, Ralph Adams Cram and others were building
Gothic and Renaissance churches in reinforced concrete (at West Point and
California) complete with ornament, moldings and sculpture. Not unlike the
ancient Romans who used concrete hidden within the walls and domes of Classical
buildings, early 20th century traditionalist architects brilliantly used the
most current technology of construction, heating and plumbing all within a
humanistic aesthetic.
While the majority of Catholic churches built in the U.S. before 1940 were in
traditional styles, many Protestant, Unitarian and Christian Scientist
congregations experimented with industrial building forms. Frank Lloyd Wright's
Unity Temple of 1904 is a cubic auditorium with geometric and floral ornament,
while "der liebe meister" Louis Sullivan designed St. Paul's United
Methodist Church in 1914 as an abstracted Roman theater. In Germany in the late
1920's, Otto Bartning designed Evangelical churches in the round out of glass
and steel and concrete with little iconography or delineation. Dominikus Bohm
followed his lead by designing a number of expressionistic Catholic churches
including St. Engelbert, a circular building complete with parabolic shaped
ceilings. Rudolf Schwarz also designed Catholic churches in abstracted rectangles
and the flowing space of the "International Style." Schwarz and Bohm
were both associated with the liturgical movement in Germany and produced
abstract spaces for Catholic worship long before Vatican II.
After World War II, the Modernist movement was embraced as an expression of
technological triumph of the war. Many pastors followed the lead of government
and big business by building abstract, asymmetrical and futuristic churches in
modern materials. In France, for the rustic church of Notre Dame at Assy,
Dominican Father Piere Marie-Alan Couturier commissioned fifteen of the best
known Modernist artists to make murals, tapestries, mosaics, and stained glass.
Also under the patronage of Couturier, the architect Le Corbusier designed
perhaps the two best-known churches of this century: the pilgrimage church at
Ronchamp and the Dominican Monastery at La Tourette. Le Corbusier made it very
clear from the beginning that he was not a religious man and undertook the
projects because he was given the freedom to express his ideas within an open
landscape. Ronchamp is the epitome of the church as abstract sculpture and was
likened by Le Corbusier to a temple of the sun. La Tourette, on the other hand,
is a severely orthogonal building with a tomb-like concrete chapel and a
cloister that can not be used. The monastery had many problems, including a high
incidence of depression due to its prisonlike cells and oppressive spaces which
forced it to close (for a time it became a retreat center for Modernist
architects). Fr. Couturier, believing that all "true art" is
"sacred art," argued that it was better to have a talented atheist
making Christian art or designing churches than to have a pious artist who was
mediocre. This premise was the opposite of the historic view of the church as a
"sermon stone," a work of faith by architect, parish and artisans. For
Couturier, the church building was no longer seen as a teacher, minister, or
evangelist but rather as a space for functional assembly. Likewise, the
architect was no longer an inspired co-creator but a conduit for his own
personal expression and the "spirit of the age."
Interestingly, other than Wright in the U.S. and Aalto in Finland, few of the
Modernist "masters" were interested in designing churches or
synagogues (Le Corbusier refused other commissions). Part of the belief in
"modern man" was that religion was something unscientific, and hence
churches were irrelevant to contemporary needs. While most of the Modernists
came from Protestant backgrounds, the majority were known atheists or agnostics.
Mies van der Rohe and Aero Saarinen designed churches which were seen as sublime
objects, yet when imitated by others the originals lost their iconic power,
which came from being a unique expression of the architect. The Benedictines in
the U.S. were the equivalent of the Dominicans in France, being great patrons
of Modernist art and architecture, as well as being liturgically progressive. At
Collegeville, Minnesota they hired Marcel Breuer, originally of the Bauhaus, and
at St. Louis Airport, for new abbeys. These buildings were sleek,
non-traditional and critically acclaimed by the architectural establishment.
Contemporary with these buildings, the documents of Vatican II were being
developed. While short in length, the chapters pertaining to the arts are
poetic, inspiring and alive to the artistic tradition of Catholicism. However,
in spite of the intention by the Council to reform and recover liturgy,
particularly early Christian liturgy, there was little interest shown by
architects in the recovery of early Christian architecture. The Council's
acceptance of styles of the time and rejection of any particular style can be
seen as a careful opening of the window to Modernism. The architectural
establishment, by this time thoroughly cut off from its historical tradition,
opened up the "window wall" and came in like a flood. At this point a
few architects and designers such as Anders Sovik, Frank Kaczmarcik and Robert
Hovda made an effort, following Schwartz and Couturier, to argue for a modern
architecture imbued with a Christian theology. Partially based on the studies of
Jungmann, Bouyer and other scholars they promoted a "non-church"
building emphasizing the assembly, without hierarchical orientation, fixed
elements, or traditional architectural language. These architects' rejection of
most of Christianity's architectural and liturgical development, coupled with
their promotion of an abstract aesthetic, seems to baptize, confirm and marry
Modernism and the Church. These principles of modern liturgical
"spaces," later embodied in the Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy
document of 1978 (Environment and Art in Catholic Worship), are
essentially the iconoclastic tenets of 1920's Modernism.
Interestingly, at the same time the Catholic Church was reconciling Herself
with Modernism in the early 1960's, the architectural profession witnessed the
beginning of a serious critique of heroic Modernism. Architects Robert Venturi,
Louis Kahn, and Charles Moore in their buildings and writing proposed a new old
architecture of memory, symbol, and meaning, spawning what became known as
the "Post-modern" movement. They also inspired the work of numerous
other architects including John Burgee, Michael Graves, Allan Greenberg, Philip
Johnson, Thomas Gordon Smith, and Robert Stern who willingly embraced humanistic
urban planning and a variety of architectural styles.
While there still continues to be allegiance to the Modernist style, many of
its philosophical beliefs have been questioned and criticized during the past
thirty years. The preservation movement, repentant Modernist architects,
architectural historians, and structural disasters all have exposed the
limitations and failures of Modernism. The liturgical design establishment on
the other hand has barely acknowledged the critique of Modernism and continues
to promote Modernist revival or even "deconstructivist" church
buildings as witnessed in two recent international competitions for a church in
Rome and the Los Angeles Cathedral.
And while most architects trained since World War II do not know how to
design Classically there is an ever increasing number of architects practicing
in traditional languages all over the world as well as a number of architecture
schools teaching humanistic alternatives to Modernism. Of great inspiration to
architects, pastors and laity alike are the chapters in the Catechism of the
Catholic Church devoted to the Universal Church's teaching on sign, image
and the church as a visible symbol of the Father's house. In recent decades we
have seen new or renovated Catholic churches which express these aims and those
of Vatican II through a restoration of sign, symbol and typology. These include
the renovated St. Mary's church in New Haven, the renovated Cathedral of the
Madeleine in Salt Lake City, parish of San Juan Capistrano in California, the
church of the Immaculate Conception in New Jersey, the church of St. Agnes in
New York, and Brentwood Cathedral in England. These and other buildings indicate
that the future of Catholic architecture will go beyond the narrow confines of
the Modernist aesthetic to the broad and vital tradition of sacred architecture.
Duncan Stroik, A.I.A. is an architect and an associate professor
of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame.
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