reorganisation and destruction of irish catholic churches

Baptismal Theology and Practice in the Age of St. Thomas Aquinas

http://www.dspt.edu/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&ModuleInstanceID=138&ViewID=7b97f7ed-8e5e-4120-848f-a8b4987d588f&RenderLoc=0&FlexDataID=132&PageID=237

@Praxiteles wrote:

Perhaps the Iglesia Nuestra Segnora de la Peña de Francia in Porto de la Cruz in Tenerife ?

If so, this is the Retablo de la Inmaculada Concepción, late XVII century, dominated by the arms of the kingdom of Ireland (just visible behind the chain of the sanctuary lamp), and the gift of the Walsh family to the parish. The attic has a picture of the Cristo de La Laguna. The upper register, has a descent from the Cross flanked by the apparition of Our lady and the Christ Child to Santa Rosalia of Palermo and a Assumption of Our Lady. The niches in the lower register have statues of Santa Rita of Cascia, a Madonna and St. Patrick. The altar mensa is a a late 19th century reproduction of the original.

It may be currently run by the Augustinians.

Now I have to say thats impressive Praxiteles, I had started off looking for that in Spain alright but soon gave up when I was finding that there are lots of similar Spanish made Reredos dedicated to St. Patrick that been exported to places as far flung as Mekico & other ex-Spanish colonies . . I’d love to be as cognizant on these topics.

Might any of you be able to throw some light on identifying the architect of this one, its the Nativity Roman Catholic Church in Kilcormac, County Offaly

More images here http://www.buildingsofireland.ie/niah/search.jsp?type=images&county=OF&regno=14815012
Description
Detached Roman Catholic church, built c.1880, with six-bay nave, lean-to side aisles, chancel to west and sacristy to south-west. Built on the site of a former chapel. Pitched slate roofs with limestone coping, carved stone cross finials, limestone chimneystack and cast-iron rainwater goods. Terracotta ridge cresting to sacristy and chancel. Cut stone bellcote to east gable. Snecked limestone walls with dressed stone quoins. Pointed-arched window openings with block-and-start surrounds and stained glass to nave. Rose window to east elevation. Traceried stained glass windows to chancel and western aisle. Shoulder-arched openings to sacristy. Pointed-arched door openings with limestone block-and-start surrounds, hoodmouldings with floral stops and double timber battened doors. Timber roof trusses to interior. Grave markers to yard. Stone grotto in corner of yard near pointed-arched gateway with cast-iron gate to convent. Cross from Cistercian monastery in boundary wall. Churchyard bounded by random coursed wall with ruled-and-lined wall to eastern end with piers and cast-iron gates. Swivel cast-iron pedestrian gate.

Appraisal
This Roman Catholic church is of both architectural and artistic merit. The finely executed stonework, including the stone dressings, bellcote and finials attest to excellent craftsmanship at the time of construction. Features such as the stained glass windows and also some of the decorative stonework add artistic interest to the site. The grave markers, stone grotto and wall mounted cross enhance the setting, which is completed by the boundary walls and gate piers. Together with the neighbouring convent, the Nativity Church forms part of a group of ecclesiastical structures at the centre of Kilcormac.

[attachment=0:36gvc25z]old interior painting 1879.jpg[/attachment:36gvc25z]

The first image above is a bit of a rarity I think, its an oil painting of the interior from 1879 which hangs in the sacristy, painted from before the apse was added in 1907.

[align=:39biv5uf]Monument by Duncan Stroik to Columba Marmion[/align:39biv5uf]

Rome, Italy, Nov 15, 2012 / 12:22 am (CNA).- Cardinal Raymond L. Burke recently unveiled a monument he commissioned for his titular church – Saint Agatha of the Goths – of a saintly Irish monk who was ordained there in 1881.

“Cardinal Burke loves to build and loves to beautify … and this is a monument to this great man and this great event in his life, to remind us where this saint was ordained,” said Duncan G. Stroik, the monument’s designer, in a Nov. 14 interview with CNA.

The monument, to Blessed Columba Marmion which was dedicated Oct. 25, is located on the side aisle of the church and features a bas relief profile of the blessed above a Latin inscription.

The inscription proclaims, “Here in the church of Saint Agatha of the Goths, June 16, 1881, Joseph Marmion was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Dublin by Tobias Kirby, rector of the Irish College. Then, after entering the Order of Saint Benedict and taking the name Columba at the Abbey of Maredsous, he was elected the third abbot of the same community.”

“Excelling in priestly virtue and renowned for his sanctity, he died January 30, 1923, and was beatified September 3, 2000 by Pope John Paul II.”

It also notes that “His Eminence Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke took care to erect this monument in AD 2012.”

Stroik said that the extraordinary beauty of Roman churches is due to the fact that they are cared for by cardinals. Part of being made a cardinal by the Pope is that each cardinal receives a titular church.

“It’s the cardinals’ responsibility to take care of their titular church, that’s why churches in Rome have been so beautified, is because the cardinals are spending money on their churches,” Stroik said.

When Cardinal Burke was given Saint Agatha of the Goths, he saw that “here’s a man who is going to be named a saint in matter of time, and there’s no monument to him in the church where he was ordained, so that was the impetus for the monument,” Stroik recalled.

Reflecting on the importance of beauty in drawing man’s heart to Christ, Stroik said, “Are not our churches theology in stone? Beauty draws us in and affects us … when we do things for the glory of God, it should be our best. Since he is beauty, our best should be beautiful.”

The monument is made of Giallo marble – to “pick up the beautiful rich marbles in the apse” – and the abbot’s profile was sculpted by Giuseppe Ducrot.

Stroik said it was designed to be both unique and to fit in with the rest of the church in a harmonious way. Below the inscription is a coat of arms for Bl. Marmion, which features an abbot’s crozier and two shamrocks to represent his native land.

Joseph Marmion was born in Dublin in 1858 and went to the Pontifical Irish College in Rome for his final seminary studies. At the time, Saint Agatha of the Goths was the site of the Irish College.

He served as a parish priest, professor, and spiritual director while he served the Dublin archdiocese.

After five years as a diocesan priest, he obtained permission from his bishop to join the Benedictine monastery of Maredsous, Belgium. After becoming abbot, he continued to devote himself to spiritual direction, focusing his retreats on Christ as the model for the life of Christians.

His classic spiritual works include “Christ, the Life of the Soul,” “Christ in his Mysteries,” “Christ the Ideal of the Monk,” and “Christ the Ideal of the Priest.”

Stroik has authored a book, “The Church Building as a Sacred Place: Beauty, Transcendence, and the Eternal,” which will be available in Dec. 2012 from Liturgy Training Publications.

Modern Catholic churches resemble museums, says Vatican

Opposition is mounting in the Holy See to a spate of recent, ultra-modern churches, in Italy and abroad, by high profile architects.
“The lack of integration between the architect and the faith community has at times been negative,” said Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Vatican’s Pontificial Council for Culture. “Sometimes it goes wrong.”

Cardinal Ravasi said a church built in 2009 in Foligno, Italy by the celebrated Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas, which resembles a monolithic concrete cube, has been “highly criticised”.

In his native town of Merate in Lombardy, Cardinal Ravasi said the local priest needed to bring his own image of the Madonna to mass, because Mario Botta, the architect who designed the church, had not installed one.

“The problem is that in Catholicism, unlike Protestantism, things like the altar, the images, are essential, while architects tend instead to focus on space, lines, light and sound,” said Cardinal Ravasi.

The last architects to work closely with the church were back in the 17th century Baroque era, he added.

Cardinal Ravasi’s attack was backed last month by Antonio Paolucci, the head of the Vatican museums, when he spoke at the launch of a book celebrating the building of dozens of new churches in the suburbs of Rome since the 1990s.

Instead of praising the churches, Mr Paolucci lashed out, claiming that: “At best, these are like museums, spaces that do not suggest prayer or meditation.”

Cardinal Ravasi conceded that one of Rome’s most controversial new churches – Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church, which resembles a yacht with spinnakers hoisted – had won over locals, but complained that “the building materials were the focus of pre-construction meetings, not the liturgical life”.

Cardinal Ravasi was speaking after inaugurating the Vatican’s first ever art exhibit at the Venice Biennale on Saturday, which focuses on the Book of Genesis through photography and paintings by a Los Angeles artist, Lawrence Carroll, who uses melting ice in one work.

Vatican officials believe the show can help heal what they call a century old “fracture” between religion and art, and Cardinal Ravasi said the Church now had its sights on commissioning modern liturgical art, for installing in churches.

“The Venice Biennale exhibit has been the first step on a journey,” he said. “Further down the line could come liturgical art, meaning we could commission modern artists to create altars, fonts, tabernacles, lecterns, pews and kneelers,” he added.

But after letting modern architects push the envelope too far, the Church will keep a wary eye on liturgical art commissions, he said.

“We will need to build up dialogue with artists before we commission any liturgical art,” he said.

Vatican to spend millions on new churches… and on artists to furnish them

Art may have become the new religion, to judge by the queues for many of our major exhibitions, but now it looks as though religion is going to become the new focus of artists.

The Vatican has revealed that it is going to spend millions of euros on building new churches, and it wants to commission the world’s greatest contemporary artists to furnish them.

This year marks the 500th anniversary of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said that it was time for the church to re-establish its role as a major patron of contemporary art.

“Art and faith are sisters,” he said. “They both have the same aim of discovering the foundations of reality – not just reflecting the superficial.”

He was speaking at the opening of the Venice Biennale, the world’s pre-eminent contemporary art festival, in which the Holy See has taken part for the first time. It has spent ¤750,000 on building a pavilion in one of the most prominent positions on the exhibition site and filled it with the first of the cutting-edge art pieces it has commissioned.

Interactive films made by the Milanese art group Studio Azzurro, based on the Book of Genesis, feature deaf performers enacting the creation of animals and prisoners that of man.

It leads on to a room of photographs showing man’s destruction of the environment, by the Czech artist Josef Koudelka, and concludes with a painting covered in ice that is slowly melting, by the American-Italian artist Lawrence Carroll.

“Our presence at the Biennale is the first step in a long journey that involves not only the building of churches in a contemporary style, but the creation of new liturgical objects,” Cardinal Ravasi said. He confirmed that contemporary artists will be paid to design new altars, baptismal fonts, tabernacles and lecterns.

Among his favourite architects, he said, are the Spanish Santiago Calatrava and the Japanese Tadao Ando, as well as past Modernist masters, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto.

“We will get artists from all continents involved and in particular we need women artists; they have another language.”

A plan to fill one of the rooms of the pavilion in Venice with work by the Colombian-born sculptor Doris Salcedo, featuring flowers of the Amazon, was thwarted by incessant rain over the last week in the Italian city, he said.

The move into contemporary art and architecture is a clear attempt by the Vatican to open its doors at a time when, rocked by scandal, it stands accused of being out of touch and secretive.

The cardinal, who writes his own tweets, has criticised priests in the past for their “boring” and “irrelevant” sermons, and is one of the prime movers in the effort to make the church more relevant to the secular society of Western Europe.

In an effort to embrace other aspects of popular culture, he is also launching a Vatican cricket team. He was ordained in 1966, is a former professor and archeological scholar, and was widely tipped to become the new pope earlier this year.

His affection for paintings developed, he said, when as the prefect of the Ambrosian library for 20 years he saw, on an almost daily basis, a Caravaggio painting of a fruit basket that hung on the library’s walls.

“It pushed me into a surprising new form of linguistics,” he said.

The programme of designing the new churches will begin next year, to be followed by the fine art commissions thereafter.

“For 20 centuries art and faith walked together, but in the last 50 years they have been separated,” Cardinal Ravasi concluded. “It is time now to get over that divorce.

Mass at Notre Dame de Paris to mark the 850th. anniversary of the consecration of the present Cathedral
29 May 2013

http://www.schola-sainte-cecile.com/2013/06/01/messe-traditionnelle-a-notre-dame-de-paris-les-photos-et-lenregistrement-audio/

850th Anniversary of Notre Dame de Paris

Special commemorative stamps issued by French Post Office

http://www.notredamedeparis2013.com/2013/01/17/lancement-des-timbres-des-850-ans/

From the City Journal:

MYRON MAGNET
Can We Still Build Real Architecture?
Two recent Manhattan buildings say, “Yes!”

One of Dickens’s villains boasts that he’s never moved by a pretty face, for he can see the grinning skull beneath. That’s realism, he says. But it’s a strange kind of realism that can look through life in all its vibrancy to focus only on death.

Much of today’s architecture brings that misanthrope to mind. Beauty? For our advanced culture, it’s as spectral as classical philosophy’s two other highest values: the good and the true. A building might be cutting-edge, boundary-breaking, transgressive. But simply beautiful? The arts have transcended such illusions.

A pity. Part of the pleasure of metropolitan life is the pre–World War II city’s manifold loveliness. When you see the illuminated Chrysler Building glowing through the evening fog, or walk by the magnolias blooming in front of Henry Frick’s museum, ravishing outside and in, or gaze up at the endlessly varied historicism of lower Broadway’s pioneering skyscrapers, you know you are Someplace—someplace where human inventiveness and aspiration have left lasting monuments proclaiming that our life is more than mere biology and has a meaning beyond the brute fact of mortality. Like all our manners and ceremonies, from table etiquette to weddings, beauty in architecture humanizes the facts of life. So we don’t want a machine for living—a high-tech lair to service our animal needs—but rather a cathedral, a capitol, a home, expressive of the grandeur, refinement, urbanity, and coziness of which our life is capable.

Two recent Manhattan buildings gracefully exemplify the life-affirming architectural humanism I have in mind. First is a gemlike house at 5 East 95th Street, just east of Central Park, by celebrated London architect John Simpson, designer of the enchanting Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace. Completed late in 2005, it looks like an independent townhouse but is, in fact, an extension of the landmarked Beaux-Arts mansion at 3 East 95th Street that Philadelphia architect Horace Trumbauer designed in 1913 for Marion Carhart, a banker’s widow, who died before she could move in. In 1935, the Lycée Français bought the house, and years of high-energy students left the structure battered by the time the school sold it to a Hong Kong–based developer in 2001. Layers of battleship-gray paint covered the first floor of its grimy limestone street wall; the interior, with its institutional bathrooms and fire doors, had grown shabby; and a jerry-built, three-story 1950s annex, resembling an auto-body shop, adjoined it at 5 East 95th.

The developer’s idea was to tear down the annex and extend the Carhart Mansion eastward, to create four princely condos suitable for the quietly posh Carnegie Hill neighborhood and the giddy, new-century real-estate boom. An establishment architectural firm drew up plans for a modernist extension, which the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved. But a tough-minded broker recruited to presell the condos dismissed the plan as economically unviable, reasonably observing that no gilt-edged buyer would pay millions to live in an apartment that started out a Beaux-Arts Dr. Jekyll at one end and turned into a glass-loft Mr. Hyde at the other. So it was back to the drawing board—after a call to City Journal contributor Simpson (see “Reimagining the Far West Side,” Autumn 2004).

For starters, what Simpson and his New York coadjutor, Zivkovic Connolly Architects, had to do was bring the Carhart house’s original magnificence back to life, cleaning, repointing, and repairing. Magnificence, of course, was Horace Trumbauer’s stock-in-trade: as architect to many Gilded Age plutocrats, he had built The Elms, one of the grandest Newport summer “cottages,” for a Philadelphia coal tycoon, and in Manhattan, he designed a dozen or so urban palaces, of which a few still survive—including the 40-room 9 East 71st Street, built for one of the Macy’s-owning Strauses, and the Fifth Avenue marble palace of tobacco magnate James B. Duke at 78th Street. A virtuoso of the French classicism that American architects had imported from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris around 1890, the self-taught Trumbauer created for Mrs. Carhart a suave limestone facade enlivened with dramatic banded rustication—the tops and bottoms of the stones are beveled to create deep horizontal stripes—on the ground floor. He recessed the carved stone frames of the windows—arched on the second floor to echo the arched doorway and two flanking windows of the first floor—so that the remaining stone of the facade appears to project slightly forward, suggesting four pilasters that tease your eye as you try to follow them upward toward capitals that you find only as a sedately witty coda above the deep stone cornice that crowns the composition. A shallow wrought-iron balcony resting on four consoles that are a signature motif of the Beaux-Arts style runs across the second floor and finds an echo in wrought-iron grilles across the bottoms of the third-floor windows.

©2012 JONATHAN WALLEN/COURTESY OF JOHN SIMPSON ARCHITECTS
. . . complements the lush romanticism of Horace Trumbauer’s 1913 Beaux-Arts facade.
Understanding that he wasn’t designing in a vacuum, Simpson planned an adjoining facade for his new building that constantly plays off against Trumbauer’s, creating a whole that, in the comparisons it constantly invites your mind’s eye to make, is greater than the sum of its parts. If Trumbauer, with his pilasters, goes vertical, Simpson, with his emphatic moldings between each floor, opts for horizontality, making his building look as wide as its partner when it is, in fact, 25 percent narrower. Trumbauer’s verticality looks all the more lofty because his pilasters rise above the tight horizontal bands of his ground floor’s rustication; Simpson, by making his rusticated bands twice as wide as the original, makes his ground floor appear to spring upward by comparison, a dynamic contrast to the strong horizontality above. Where Trumbauer’s facade seems to recede with a feminine discretion between its pilasters, Simpson’s is all broad-chested masculine assertiveness: even the carved stone panels he sets between the second and third floors, answering Trumbauer’s demurely set-in ones and inventively varying his cornucopia design in bolder relief, intrepidly protrude. But lest you think Simpson is stuck on the horizontal, he subtly echoes Trumbauer’s pilasters as frames for his three third-floor windows. On the rear of his building, he pulls out all the stops and plays a bravura variation on Trumbauer’s theme, with wrought-iron balconies, pilasters, inset windows, and arches, rising above one another in a yellow-brick fanfare.

Simpson had an advantage that Trumbauer lacked: the east wall of the new building doesn’t abut another structure but fortuitously overlooks the little front garden of the redbrick Italian Renaissance townhouse that Grosvenor Atterbury designed for Ernesto Fabbri and his Vanderbilt-heiress wife in 1916. The Fabbris had made a deal with friends who planned to build a house at 5 East 95th Street: each couple’s house would have a set-back section, so that the two together would form an airy, vest-pocket forecourt that would allow light to flood into the interior rooms. But Number 5 never got built as planned, giving Simpson a chance to adorn the demi-piazza with another classical limestone facade, this one blossoming as it reaches the top into a breathtaking classical pediment that makes triumphantly explicit all the Greek-revival allusions of his main front. And above that rises the profile of another columned temple behind it—an acropolis in the sky on East 95th Street!

©2012 JONATHAN WALLEN/COURTESY OF JOHN SIMPSON ARCHITECTS
An acropolis in the sky crowns Simpson’s building.
But here we come to a conundrum. Whereas the developer’s original plans for a lackluster modernist extension to Mrs. Carhart’s house sailed through the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, Simpson’s design met stiff resistance. It’s an architectural shibboleth that an extension of a historic structure must be sufficiently differentiated from it that no one can mistake the new work for old—which, for sensible preservationists, might mean merely not staining new wood to look aged. But some now-forgotten secretary of the interior set architectural standards for extensions of historic federal buildings—on which states and localities have modeled their own historic-preservation rules, and on which historic-preservation tax credits depend—that all but require modernist additions, not so much in the bland language of the standards as in the pictures that illustrate the dos and don’ts. (Memo to reformers seeking to clear away harmful government regulation: the purpose—and the poison—often hides in the details and attachments.) The great apostasy to this dogma, in the eyes of its acolytes, is Kevin Roche’s 1993 extension of the Felix Warburg mansion, housing New York’s Jewish Museum. Using stonemasons whom the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint John the Divine had trained, as a way of giving a livelihood to impoverished minority kids who lived in the cathedral’s then-seedy neighborhood, Roche masterfully extended the museum’s Fifth Avenue facade in the same stone and French-Renaissance style as C. P. H. Gilbert’s 1908 original. To me, his work is a moving, reverent homage to the past and a miraculous triumph of skill and craftsmanship that I had feared our own age had lost—and that we should celebrate, not execrate. What’s more, Roche’s extension replaced a 1963 glass-and-steel annex that, despite its small size, was, in my view, Gotham’s most hideous monument of preening modernist vulgarity—but that would comply perfectly with the secretary of the interior’s standards.

For all its hesitation, the Landmarks Preservation Commission conceded that Simpson’s austere Greek classicism contrasted sufficiently with Trumbauer’s lush Beaux-Arts classicism, and the result is triumphant proof of their decision’s wisdom. If you have any doubts about it, only compare the urbanity with which the extended Carhart Mansion enhances and harmonizes its block of Carnegie Hill with the jarringly dreary effect on West 44th Street of the Harvard Club’s clichéd 2003 glass annex, linking the soberly decorous neo-Georgian main building that McKim, Mead, and White built in stages between 1894 and 1915 to Warren and Wetmore’s gorgeously phantasmagorical fin-de-siècle Yacht Club to the west.

To get to Yes, the commission had to overcome yet one more shibboleth that David Watkin, Cambridge University’s emeritus professor of architectural history, has exploded in these pages more than once: that building new structures in historical styles is inauthentic because it produces buildings that don’t express today’s zeitgeist. How do buildings designed in the modernism of the 1920s or thirties or even fifties express the spirit of the twenty-first century? Watkin asked. And has not the architectural vocabulary that developed from the Greeks and Romans to the Europeans of the Middle Ages and Renaissance allowed every age to express its vision of the good life with its own distinctive accent and emphasis? (See especially “Why a Classical Lincoln Center Is Visionary,” Summer 2001.) No one would mistake a Michelangelo or an Inigo Jones building for one of John Soane or Edwin Lutyens: each is classical in the spirit of its own age—as is John Simpson’s. And each is beautiful.

Tom Wolfe coined the wonderful word “plutography” to describe the voyeuristic peek at the airbrushed lives of the very rich that glossy architecture magazines procure for their readers; and if such indulgence offends you, feel free to skip this paragraph and the next. But oh, what grand apartments Simpson and Zivkovic created for the Carhart Mansion’s new cohort of mega-millionaires—while making ingenious use of space by horizontally slicing some of the loftier rooms into two. Opening off Trumbauer’s sumptuous marble entrance hall is a 15-room triplex, whose paneled, 45-foot-long drawing room, with five windows opening onto a rear terrace, is the bottom half of the original house’s 21-foot-high ballroom, while what was to be Mrs. Carhart’s bedroom, with a marble fireplace and a 16-foot-high ceiling swirling with painted mythological figures, the blueprint designates a “den.” The old basement contains a family room and kitchen opening onto a 1,000-square-foot garden.

Simpson and Zivkovic turned the second story into a 17-room duplex, with full-height rooms, including a salon 45 feet long and 18 feet tall, behind Trumbauer’s facade, while behind the new facade, two levels of rooms rise a more down-to-earth 9 1/2 feet—still higher than most Manhattan apartments. The 12-foot-high third story is a 12-room, full-floor apartment, while Simpson transformed Trumbauer’s old mansard-roofed attic—probably just servants’ rooms—into a fantastic ten-room penthouse, whose showstopping centerpiece is a brand-new 40-by-22-foot salon crowning the new extension, with light-streaming windows on three sides, those at the front and back opening onto airy terraces, one of them backed by a pedimented temple that makes you feel that you have ascended to Parnassus in Manhattan. But even that’s not all, for you climb a stairway with a hand-carved mahogany banister to Trumbauer’s rooftop solarium, surrounded by three more terraces totaling some 3,000 square feet and giving views of Central Park, with one final garden on its roof—more than a tenth of an acre of gardens in the sky, Elysium indeed.

Tucked away in its quiet Manhattan corner, the Carhart Mansion delights mostly its neighbors and architecture buffs who seek it out. But no one can miss the second new building worth considering—the Ralph Lauren store on the southwest corner of Madison Avenue and 72nd Street, one of Gotham’s most prominent crossroads. Marketing wizard Lauren has put his stamp upon that metropolitan hub for decades to come by constructing a coolly elegant French château as a women’s clothing store to balance the men’s store he opened on the other side of Madison Avenue in 1986 in the neo-Renaissance 1898 Rhinelander Mansion. Like its brawnier, beautifully restored older brother across the street, the luscious new limestone confection, which opened late in 2010, rises only four stories, considerably fewer than zoning would allow. So Lauren has given the city an urban-planning as well as an architectural gift, creating an airy, low-rise oasis on the Upper East Side, where two evocations of French classicism, sixteenth-century and eighteenth-, engage the eye and the imagination.

In the New York tradition of looking a gift horse in the mouth, the Landmarks Preservation Commission, with jurisdiction over the Upper East Side Historic District of which this site forms the heart, hesitated, out of piety to the historic-preservation dogma that makes desecration preferable to deference. Perhaps the near-universal acclaim that met the Carhart project—including a prize to Simpson from Carnegie Hill’s residents—swayed the commission’s ultimate approval. Perhaps, too, it saw that there was nothing inauthentic about the Carhart extension, with its sumptuous, load-bearing limestone facades, thick walls, and finely crafted ornament. Perhaps that made the commission all the readier to consent to Lauren’s hôtel particulier—a nobleman’s townhouse—with its thick walls (though the Indiana limestone is a screen hung on cement blocks), its elegant, lacy metalwork balconies crafted in the Czech Republic, its Turkish limestone floors and Italian marble stairs, and its skillfully carved solid limestone embellishments.

Designer Michael Gilmore of the Scottsdale-based Weddle Gilmore architectural firm told a shelter-magazine reporter that he designed the Madison Avenue château with some of its Upper East Side neighbors as inspirations—above all, the Frick Museum and the James B. Duke house, by none other than Horace Trumbauer, one more link with the Carhart project. Certainly, you can see the Duke house’s influence on Gilmore’s contrast of chaste expanses of sumptuous limestone with areas adorned with refined, restrained ornament. Most notably, Gilmore uses rusticated quoins—carved, beveled blocks that form the corners of a building—in the same way Trumbauer does, stacking them evenly on top of one another, rather than alternating long and short corner blocks in the more usual fashion.

COURTESY OF RALPH LAUREN
Ralph Lauren’s delectable limestone palace on Madison Avenue embodies a French classicism so avant-garde that it never existed—until now.
Which raises one further question of architectural authenticity: Trumbauer closely based the Duke house, now the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, on the exquisite 1770s Château Labottière in Bordeaux (just as he based The Elms in Newport on the 1750s Château d’Asnières just north of Paris). But he blew up his models to American size—and, in the Duke house, stretched out his eighteenth-century pattern horizontally, producing something very different in its exaggerated monumentality, in the way that Michelangelo’s David belongs to another world from its classical models in its astonishing 17-foot height. The Duke mansion is no more a fake than the David is: Trumbauer’s homage was also a transformation.

Gilmore’s French classicism, though, is more inventive than Trumbauer’s. The Arizonan got a hands-on course in that style when he remodelled an 1890 Beaux-Arts townhouse for Lauren’s Paris store on ultra-chic Avenue Montaigne; but the Madison Avenue hôtel particulier bespeaks a sophisticated understanding not just of Beaux-Arts architecture but also of the earlier French models from which the Beaux-Arts style springs. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France developed a refined classicism that doesn’t rely heavily on the Greek and Roman orders, letting rusticated ornament—beveled stones—do the work of articulating the structure, just as the Duke house’s quoins suggest the columns that hold up the corners of the building. Some of the most daring French eighteenth-century buildings—for example, the Parisian Hôtel Biron of around 1730 (now the Rodin Museum) or the 1725 Hôtel Matignon, home of France’s prime ministers—do entirely without Ionic columns or Corinthian capitals or Doric triglyphs. With his assured use of the vocabulary of French classicism and his Beaux-Arts quotations, Gilmore has produced a highly original structure in an eighteenth-century French style so avant-garde that it never existed until now—one more proof of classicism’s endless capacity for reinvention and renewal.

The Madison Avenue château’s elegant ground-floor facade is relatively conventional, with three recessed arches—for an entrance and two flanking shop windows—piercing its banded rustication, and two larger show windows at either end, with concave curves at the top corners, like the moldings on French classical paneling. Above the three arches, a stone balcony rests on consoles. Things get more adventurous in the next three stories, where the building splits into three parts, suggesting two wings, each two windows wide, flanking a set-back central block three windows wide. The viewer’s eye sees the banded rustication on the second and third stories of the central block as pilasters supporting the fine stone cornice that separates the third floor from the fourth. Rusticated quoins, as at the Duke house, appear to support both corners of each wing, but—unusually—they are rounded, perhaps inspired by the Saint Regis Hotel or Trumbauer’s stable and coach house at The Elms. The relatively unadorned fourth story gives all the more emphasis to the stone balustrade crowning the whole top of the building. Delicate hoods on dainty consoles, like those at McKim, Mead, and White’s 1893 Metropolitan Club, adorn the second- and third-story windows of the wings, and the whole structure radiates romantic loveliness. If I had any criticism to make, it would be that the rounded quoins of the wings don’t seem to rest on any structural element on the ground floor, making the transition between the first and second floor seem slightly arbitrary and unsupported.

Inside, the great triumph of designer Gilmore and his New York executive architect, Thomas Hut of HS2 Architecture, is the ceremonial staircase, contained in the townhouse just to the west of the new building and incorporated into it. With the giant, sparkling beveled mirrors at every landing reflecting its flamboyantly filigreed, sensuously curved metalwork railing, it seems made for the grand entrance of a duchess or a movie star. The high-ceilinged rooms—adorned with big crystal chandeliers, finely cast plaster moldings with every elegant detail as yet unclogged by years of repainting, and a profusion of beveled mirrors artfully incorporated into the paneling and infinitely reflecting one another—flow into one another as in a French building, and gas fires blaze invitingly in the richly carved marble fireplaces. In a Pavlovian response, one salivates for gilded moldings, brocade curtains, Aubusson rugs, Sèvres vases, and subtly colored walls, but Lauren’s decorators have opted for white as far as the eye can see, along with modern furniture—and who can argue with success?

Marianne Moore wanted her poems to be “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”; on Madison Avenue and 72nd Street, Lauren and his architects have created a real palace with imaginary aristocrats in it. The marketing whiz made his success by grasping firsthand something at the heart of American culture. In a democratic society with equality of opportunity, how does anyone gain distinctiveness, let alone distinction? Even given America’s plutocratic strain, how does yet one more rich person stand out from the moneyed herd? When “old money” means the Wall Street boom-before-last, and “aristocracy” means descendants of the robber barons, Lauren saw a widespread craving among prosperous Americans for rootedness in a less egalitarian American past, when, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote (fatuously, in Ernest Hemingway’s view), the very rich were different from you and me. Fitzgerald’s great creation, Jay Gatsby—who was born James Gatz in a boondock, just as Lauren was born Lifshitz in the Bronx—yearned to make a fortune and, when he succeeded, yearned even more to win admiration for the refinement of spirit he believed he displayed in his waterfront Long Island mansion, his London-tailored shirts, his openhanded hospitality. Lauren, who in high school reportedly yearned to be a millionaire, became a billionaire by providing a version of the clothes Gatsby wished for (as well as the costumes for the 1974 Great Gatsby movie), along with advertising that evokes the Gatsby fantasy of polo ponies, tennis in white flannel trousers, attentive servants with silver trays, one-of-a-kind cars, furniture inherited rather than bought, a carefree life of privilege on manicured lawns—and now (why not?) a château.

Out of impulses like these great monuments can spring—not just the plutocratic Newport “cottages” but also the Grand Canal palaces of Venetian nobles trying to outdo one another or the great country houses of English lords trying to show who’s the lordliest of them all, since even in hierarchical societies, some of the eminent will crave preeminence. For myself, I like Lauren’s democratization of grandeur: just as with Mr. Frick’s museum that served as a model for Lauren’s new building, anyone can walk in and feel enlarged by what human imagination has created. And I like that in our free-market society, such a vision sells. It’s another straw in the cultural wind that, according to the New York Times, the apartments in two condominium buildings under construction on East 79th Street, incorporating traditional classical elements and limestone facing, are selling briskly, while apartments in two recently completed modernist glass buildings nearby on Park Avenue sold for discounts of up to 30 percent.

Maybe beauty is illusory only for the misanthropes.

Myron Magnet, City Journal’s editor-at-large and its editor from 1994 through 2006, is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. His next book is The Founders at Home.

From Robin Hood to David Cameron: the story of Britain through its favourite churches

Leading politicians, broadcasters, writers, actors and religious leaders have nominated their favourite place of worship as part of a project to compile a definitive list of Britain’s best loved churches.

The list includes the church where David Cameron’s late son Ivan was christened and the parish where Robin Hood and Maid Marian are said to have been married.

The list includes the church where David Cameron’s late son Ivan was christened and the parish where Robin Hood and Maid Marian are said to have been married.
There is also a building in which worshippers have made room for hundreds of threatened bats and a Quaker meeting house which could prove to be Britain’s greenest church.

While some were selected for their historical or architectural importance others were chosen because they are special for deeply personal reasons connected to family and faith.

Prominent atheists and the UK’s most senior Muslim politician, Baroness Warsi, are among 60 public figures who nominated Christian places of worship to the list being compiled by the National Churches Trust, the charity which helps protect threatened churches, chapels and meeting houses, to mark its 60th anniversary.
It is asking the public to nominate their own favourite choices to complete a definitive list by the end of the year.

The choices demonstrate how, despite increasing secularisation, churches remain at the heart of community life in Britain.

The Prime Minister, who once described himself as having a faith which fades and re-emerges “like Classic FM in the Chilterns” chose two: St Mary the Virgin in his Witney constituency and All Saints in Spelsbury, Oxfordshire.

He said: “It is at All Saints, Spelsbury where my family sometimes worship when we are at home in Oxfordshire. It has a very special memory of my late son, Ivan’s, christening.”

While Mr Miliband does not profess a Christian faith, he nominated a church in his Doncaster North constituency which resonates with his political beliefs: the Norman St Mary Magdalene Church in Campsall.

“St Mary Magdalene is said to be the church where Robin Hood and Maid Marian were married,” he said.

“As strong believers in redistribution the people of Doncaster North are happy to reclaim his roots.”

Mr Clegg nominated the 15th century grade one St Nicholas’ Church in High Bradfield, in his Sheffield Hallam constituency, while Baroness Warsi, minister for faith and communities, and a Muslim, named Dewsbury Minster, within her home town of in West Yorkshire, as her favourite church.

She said: “This beautiful church is well loved by Dewsbury people of all faiths, including my own Muslim community, and I pray that it continues to prosper for another 1,400 years and more.”

The Mayor of London Boris Johnson nominated St Magnus the Martyr Church, in the City of London, and the Ukip leader Nigel Farage described St Thomas A Becket Church in Romney Marsh, Kent, as “quite enchanting”.

Meanwhile Michael Palin, the Monty Python star, chose St Margaret of Antioch Church, in Abbotsley, Cambridgeshire, where he was married, while actor Sir Patrick Stewart nominates Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon where Shakespeare is buried.

Meanwhile Bear Grylls, the explorer, nominated Holy Trinity Church, Brompton, west London, the evangalical congregation where the Archbishop of Canterbury the Most Rev Justin Welby was once a worshipper and lay leader.

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, chose St Edmund’s College Chapel in Ware, Hertfordshire, designed by Augustus Pugin.

He said: “It was consecrated by Cardinal Wiseman in 1853 and has witnessed many an ordination and important ecclesiastic gathering. To enter the chapel today is to catch something of this great and continuing tradition.”

Meanwhile Lord Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, nominated St Endellion Church in Cornwall.

He said: “The mixture of rock and space always gives me the feeling of sea-light, of something wide, ungraspable – very much a North Cornwall and West Wales and West of Ireland feeling, opening out on to a deep and broad horizon. An appropriate sensation for a church, I think.”

Julia Hanmer, chief executive of the Bat Conservation Trust nominated the Collegiate Church of Holy Trinity in Tattershall, Lincolnshire. It has installed a special roof allowing a colony of bats to remain without disrupting worshippers – or an estimated 30,000 tourists a year visiting.

Paul Parker, Recording Clerk of the Quakers in Britain nominated the Cotteridge meeting house in Birmingham, a simple modern building covered in solar panels which has recently undergone major refurbishment cutting its electricity bill by 90 per cent.

Claire Walker, Chief Executive of the National Churches Trust, said: “The UK’s 47,000 churches, chapels and meeting houses are a tremendous asset to the nation. Together, they form an unparalleled network of public buildings which sustain local communities.”

“The UK’s Favourite Churches’ is a celebration of some of our most loved and interesting places of worship. Over the summer holidays, I hope more people will discover the joys of visiting churches and seek out some of the churches chosen. There is plenty to see and much history to be discovered. When people do visit a church, I hope they will bear in mind that keeping churches, chapels and meeting houses looking beautiful, and able to cope with the demands of the 21st century, costs money. Replacing a leaking roof, fixing a leaning spire or repairing precious medieval stonework can cost many hundreds of thousands of pounds – which is much more than most church congregations can afford.”

Churches may be stripped, CBC warns after ruling

A RULING authorising a central-London church to sell an 18th-century painting could tempt other churches to sell off their treasures “to the highest bidder”, Anne Sloman, who chairs the Church Buildings Council (CBC), has warned.

A judgment handed down on Wednesday of last week, in the Consistory Court, by the Diocesan Chancellor, the Worshipful Nigel Seed QC, granted a faculty to St Stephen’s, Walbrook, to sell the painting Devout Men Taking the Body of St Stephen, by Benjamin West.

The picture has been bought by an anonymous foundation for $2.85 million (£1.88 million), and will be loaned to the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, the website Art History News reported last Friday.

Judge Seed said that the painting compromised the integrity of Sir Christopher Wren’s design of the building, and that the painting had probably been introduced to the church in 1776 without a faculty.

The CBC was party opponent to the faculty. Its legal counsel and witnesses acted pro bono.

In a witness statement, Mrs Sloman said: “We understand the temptation for churches to sell off valuable works of art; but if such sales are given validity through success in even one or two instances, the parish churches of England could quickly be stripped of many of the treasures that make them unique.”

The sale of the West painting would “have serious repercussions, and create an unfortunate precedent for any one of our 16,000 churches seeking funding for repairs, sending a message that the way is now open for them to dispose of the treasures they have inherited to the highest bidder”, she said.

Speaking on Wednesday, Mrs Sloman said: “A lot of paintings were introduced in the 18th century without a faculty. Our concern is what is happening now, and in the future.”

The CBC had done “a huge amount”, she said, to help churches address financial shortfalls, such as persuading the Government to increase the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme from £12 million to £42 million. But it was important for PCCs to realise that they were “curators, not owners”.

Mrs Sloman said that the CBC would decide at a residential meeting later this month whether to seek leave to appeal against the ruling.

On Art History News last Friday, the art historian Bendor Grosvenor said: “If all paintings in British churches were subjected to judgments on the nationality of the artist, the quality of the work, and the compatibility with the architecture, we would have almost nothing left.”

The Priest-in-Charge of St Stephen’s, Walbrook, the Ven. Peter Delaney, declined to comment.