reorganisation and destruction of irish catholic churches
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@Praxiteles wrote:
WIth regard to Rudolf Schwarz (1897-1961), the following entry in the Kirchenlexikon is interesting for what it has to say about Schwarz’s ideas about the transition from Crowd to People to People of God and the joining of Community and Altar]http://www.bautz.de/bbkl/s/s1/schwarz_r.shtml[/url]
An example of his work: the Corpus Christi Church in Aachen:
The Corpus Christi interior:
There is no doubt about it – we are living in the ‘Ugly Age’. 😮 :confused:
Influenced by Dominikus Boehm (1880-1955), Rudolf Schwarz (1897-1961) and Emil Steffann (1899-1968), Church architecture in Germany was marked by a radical simplification of form and of space while in post-was Grmany saw the dominance of stark spatial areas characterised by naked materials. Not only Le Corbusier (1857-1965) worked in this tradition but also, in a certain sense, Mario Botta who built the only Cathedral of the period.
In the German post war period, building material was made available in the form of surplus army stock, including huts, which seem to have had a peculiar infuence on post war Church design.
Emil Steffann, Sankt Bonifatius, Luebeck 1952.
ibid. interior
Perhaps visitors might like to know why the diocese of Cloyne chose Prof. O’Neill for the reordering of the sanctuary. View the following link for the official explanation:
http://www.cloyne.irl.com/catharchitect.htm
Makes for interesting reading in the light of the foregoing discussion on this thread!
So, O’Neill was chosen simply because he “did” the Pro-Cathedral. If true, it speaks volumes for the glitteratti lined up to make the big decision.
Re: posting 251: Carlow College, Eucharist Room
Richard Hurley describes the creation of the Eucharist Room in his book Irish Church Architecture in the era of Vatican II as follows: “The nerve centre of the institute [for Pastoral Liturgy] comprised a plan of four spaces – gathering area, the Eucharist Room, the Blessed Sacrament Chapel and the Vesting Room. The gathering room was of great importance in the scheme of things. It would provide a place of welcome, a place of assembly before and after the liturgy and also a place to enjoy the hospitality of the institute. The Eucharist Room is entered directly off the gathering area along a narrow “mall” partially two storeys high and containing an open-string staircase. The Eucharist Room is spacious and light -filled; it was the great room of the house….the layout of the room is orientated towards an informal antiphonal gathering surrounding a central area focused on the altar. This was a development of the idea of the family gathering around the table. WIthin this group the chief celebrant sat at one end of the axis with the altar and the ambo placed at the other side of the altar, on axis facing up the room. The surrounding stools provide an informal seating arrangement for the assembly. Everything in the room is a shade of white – wall, floor, ceiling, light fittings and carpet…The ambience of the room was intended to provide fertile soil for the growth of spiritual freedom. The limitations of the materials used also contained the inner intention, that to radiate the Spirit of Freedom. There was no “sanctuary” in the Eucharist Room in Carlow, only an expression of ritual space and the integration of everyone who participate in it”.
Praxiteles wrote:Re: posting 251: Carlow College, Eucharist RoomRichard Hurley describes the creation of the Eucharist Room in his book Irish Church Architecture in the era of Vatican II as follows: “The nerve centre of the institute [for Pastoral Liturgy] comprised a plan of four spaces – gathering area, the Eucharist Room, the Blessed Sacrament Chapel and the Vesting Room. The gathering room was of great importance in the scheme of things. It would provide a place of welcome, a place of assembly before and after the liturgy and also a place to enjoy the hospitality of the institute. The Eucharist Room is entered directly off the gathering area along a narrow “mall” partially two storeys high and containing an open-string staircase. The Eucharist Room is spacious and light -filled]
What a growth of spiritual freedom!!!!!
What a ratiation of the Spirit of Freedom!!!!!I do like those coyishly suggestive old-fashioned milking stools. I understand that a peculiar Galway version of the milking stool was used in the presbyterium of the Honan Chapel – the last very degenerate outcrop of the once vibrant Celtic Revival.
Continuing in the milking stool vein, I would be inclined to suggest that the sugan chair idiom would be a more authentic rendition of Celticism!
I would have suggested something along those lines for the presidential chair in the Carlow room, but, it would seem from the photo attachment kindly provided by Gianlorenzo, that there is absolutely no distinction between president and assembly. Whatever else it is, this hardly reflects a Catholic understanding of the liturgy! It is more suggestive of a community celebrating nothing other than itself, after a fashion so rightly criticised by the then Card. Joseph Ratzinger in his seminal work The Spirit of the Liturgy.@Praxiteles wrote:
I do like those coyishly suggestive old-fashioned milking stools. I understand that a peculiar Galway version of the milking stool was used in the presbyterium of the Honan Chapel – the last very degenerate outcrop of the once vibrant Celtic Revival.
I don’t know about the use of the milking stool in the Honan Chapel, as in the attached photos, it seems to have been hidden out of sight, along with the Silk of the Kine. Of course, the rather oddly-shaped presidential chair could easily take its place in the cow-byre. In any case, there is an unmistakeable druidic air about the new arrangement!
References to Galway milking stools as sources of inspiration for modern neo-Celtic Revival handiwork are serioulsy explained in Virginia Teehan and Eilzabeth Wincott-Heckett’s monograph [img]The%20Honan%20Chapel:%20A%20golden%20Vision[/img]. We are told: ” A number of items of furnture by the Dublin sculptor (sic) Imogen Stuart were added following Vatican II. Designed and made in 1986-1987, these include a massive oak altar carved in relief with the Four Evangelists, now placed in the middle of the moasic floor in front of the sanctuary; ….an oak president’s chair adapted from the three-legged cottage chair of Connemara with a high back terminating in a celtic cross. [a number of items] were supplied to cater for the popularity of the chapel as a wedding venue. A bride’s chair and kneeler and a groom’s chair and kneeler, the symobolism of their design being explained on labels under the seats”.
If this is the best or only inspiration that neo-Celtic Revival can come up with, would someone please mercifully put it out of its misery.
The thing of beauty in the flesh:
Why such should be necessary is incomprehensible when one notices a perfectly adequate sedilia, designed to accomodate the usage of the Roman Rite, on the south wall of the sanctuary. It even has cushions to encourage the faint hearted!
Re Richard Hurley’s “job” on St. Mary’s Oratory in Maynooth, one can say that the standard milking-stool-inspired tuffets have mercifully been replaced by a more conventional chair redolent of influences ranging from provincial English regency dining chair to the more domestic kitchen chair. As for the “president’s” chair and its accompanying stools, it is not clear to me where the inspiration for this amalgam comes from – though I think I saw something reminiscent of it in an animated version of Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It is very interesting to note in this picture that none of the chairs has a kneeler to accomodate anyone who might wish to kneel down. It was perhaps to this phenomenon that Kieron Wood was referring to in an article published on 4 November 2005 in the Sunday Business Post. Apparently, unlawful disciplinary measures are taken against those in the Maynooth Menge who refuse to be socialized into Volk by resorting to such anti-social and psychotic behaviour as kneeling down. Clearly, it is no accident that the chapel is designed and laid out in a fashiion that is contrary to the current (post Vatican II) liturgical norms for the celebration of the Mass and disturbing because of some of the underlying concepts of liturgy as socialization whose sinister origins are to be found in German writers of the inter-war period – which should immediately counsel caution. How far is it from Volksgeist to corporate or aggragate or communal liturgy – none of which concepts makes even a fleeting appearance in Vatican II’s Sacroscantum Concilium ?
The reason for the enormous organ case in St. Mary’s Oratory, a relatively small space, is beyond me. ALso, placing the organ against the east wall obscures one of the more charming archictectural elements of the original chapel – namely, an enormous, simple, plain wall pierced only once by a tiny squat doorway.
Attachment 1 is a view of the Chapel as originally dcorated.
Attachment 2 is a view of the Chapel following the 1966 reordering (note the size of the organ)Interesting echoes between Richard Hurley’s Library at Glenstal Abbey and Rudolf Schwarz’s Fronleichnam Church in Aachen – just illustrates the flexible functionality of modern Bauhaus products.
“Architecture has the capability to define through formal language that we come to identify the activities that occur within by the form of the architecture. The activities and the forms become interdependent. To the extent that the architecture incorporates these forms and linguistic elements we feel at home and comfortable. Conversely, to the extent that these elements are missing we may feel less at home, less comfortable. Our sense of well-being is affected by the architecture. The result of a sense of negative affect—or lack of well-being—may be a tendency not to return to the space, i.e. a loss of interest.”
Neo-gothic Architecture Today by Ethan Anthony in Sacred Architecture Journal Vol.5 2001.It seems to me, as one of the ‘plebs’ mentioned by Praxiteles in a previous post, that the above pictured churches were built by an architect for an architect. They certainly were not built with the ordinary churchgoer in mind, and as for God, well forget it, He doesn’t even get a look in. While the fall off from the Church cannot be put finally at the feet of architects or their misguided liturgical advisors, they must take some responsibility in the alienation of the people. From what I have seen, they are building for Man, while the people enter their buildings looking for God, and finding only Man, leave in confusion.
Please. No more Rudolf Schwarz. The pictures are just too, too distressing. Anyway, such supposedly “functional” buildings tend to be badly built and it is easy to predict that they will be abandoned or demolished well before mid-century. It could, though, be worthwhile preserving a few of them, in the German fashion, as a warning to future generations.
@Peter Parler wrote:
Please. No more Rudolf Schwarz. The pictures are just too, too distressing. Anyway, such supposedly “functional” buildings tend to be badly built and it is easy to predict that they will be abandoned or demolished well before mid-century. It could, though, be worthwhile preserving a few of them, in the German fashion, as a warning to future generations.
That is probably their only function. They are out of date now and their future can only be as ‘historical oddities’. Even the furniture is dated and passe. When will the apologists for Moderism and even post-Modernism realise that they are locked into their own time and, unlike what went before, beit Classical, Romanesque,or Gothic/Neo-Gothic, they have no future. Their appeal is to the ‘now ‘and that in itself is self- defeating in that there is no ‘now’. A look at other threads on this site will show how quickly things become outmoded and unfashionable. And that, in the end,is what the re-ordering of St. Colman’s is all about – it is a fashion trend that Bishop Magee, in his abysmal ignorance, feels he has to follow.
Regarding the ‘warning to future generations’, why is it that Ireland is always 10 years behind everywhere else. In the US and UK they are beginning to re-order the previous re-ordering, but here we are, prepared to destroy one of the truly worthy heritage structures in our land in the name of an our-dated and spurious ideology.Looking once again at the reordered St Mary’s chapel in Maynooth, there is another distinctly odd feature about the arrangement. Behind the presidential chair, on which the wizard Gandalf would feel quite at home, there appears to be a semi-circle of chairs positioned facing towards the tabernacle. I am inclined to think that this may have something to do with the decadent stage of Celtic revival characteristic also of the Honan Chapel (the druidic altar and Connemara milking stool) and the Carlow Euch-room (also furnished with milking stools). In this case, the designer seems to have in mind the cosy fireside chat, perhaps with claypipes and tay! A seanchai would not go amiss either.:D
I am compiling a list of the liturgical errors and omissions in the design and layout of St. Mary’s Oratory in Maynooth and would be glad to have comments from others before posting the list – just to ensure that I have them ALL..
Well, to-day, folks, it is a pre-Christmas trip to Santa in Lappland taking in a few views of the work of Alvar Aalto -a major influence, we are told, on Richard Hurley and Liam McCormack. Well, we can understand Aalto’s interest in white given that there is a lot of snow in Finland and Sweden. Indeed, one could even forgive him for feeling the need to introduce snow inspired colour into Finnish and Swedish interiors, but what is Richard Hurley up to in Ireland with all the whiteness. After all, we have not had anything like a blizzard for twenty years. I believe, however, that further exploration of this theme will shed some white light on the creations in the Euch. Room in Carlow and in St. Mary’s Oratory in Maynooth.
Heilig-geist Kirken, Wolfsburg
Another splendid example of “ecclesiastical” architecture
Kirche des Flachenkreuz in Seinaejoki (Schneeland)
interior
As for the enoblement of the stool:
see the Library, Viipuri (1929), Meeting Room
The Chruch of the Three Crosses,Vouksenniska, Imatra, Finland
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