Praxiteles

[align=:shyyffl6]The Ecclesiological Society
Pews, benches & chairs:church seating in England from the fourteenth century to the present[/align:shyyffl6]The Society is preparing a book entitled Pews, benches & chairs: church seating in England from the fourteenth century to the present.
The likely (though not guaranteed) publication date is February 2010.

The book covers the history and archaeology of church seating, its use, and current pressures and trends. It provides viewpoints and guidance on process.
There are more than a dozen case studies.

Members will receive a free copy through the post.

If you are not a member and would like to be sent full details (without obligation) when the book is published,
send an email to info@ecclsoc.org putting ‘pews book’ in the subject line.
We will send you details when the time comes. We will not use your email address for any other purpose.

And here we have a useful compendium of documents put together by the Adoremus Bulletin on Church architecture which may be of help to those having to deal with wreckovations:

http://www.adoremus.org/ArchArticles.html

From the CIty Journal:

Theodore Dalrymple
The Vandals in Retreat
Britain rediscovers its architectural heritage.

During my childhood, we still had pea-soup fogs in London, so thick that you couldn’t see your hand when you held it more than a few inches from your face. The fogs were exclusive to November, so that I imagined that they were simply features of the climate, like snow in winter. I longed for them to come. They were exciting, these fogs. They were just as described at the beginning of Bleak House: “Fog everywhere. . . . Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets. . . . Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.”

Of course, it wasn’t gaslight that loomed through the fogs of my childhood, but electric light. The shape of a double-decker bus would slowly transform from the merest blur into something more definite only a few feet away, its headlights like the malign yellow eyes of some devouring beast. Before the bus, a man would walk, guiding the driver through a gloom far more impenetrable than the darkest night. The fog was not merely an absence of light; it was the opponent and scatterer of light, locked in mortal battle with it and almost triumphing. The fogs killed thousands, mainly old people with lungs weakened from decades of smoking. I didn’t know this at the time, and I don’t suppose it would have worried me much if I had known it. Childhood is not an age of enlarged views and philanthropic feeling.

The decline of smokestack industries, the abandonment of domestic coal fires, and the passing of a Clean Air Act soon made the fogs as remote in memory as manual typewriters are now. Within less than a decade, they came to be associated more with the London of Sherlock Holmes than with the city of a few years before. No child would again experience the excitement that I had felt because of them.

But this was genuine progress. The fogs were a manifestation of the pollution that did terrible damage not only to people’s lungs but to the buildings of the past, and therefore to something more intangible: people’s view of the past. Soot and grime covered almost every building in every British city; one looked at a building and thought, “How grim.” The country was like a vast Victorian funeral. This was one reason, no doubt, that Britain then undertook an orgy of urban destruction unparalleled in peacetime. The Luftwaffe had been bungling amateurs, it turned out, compared with the town and city fathers of Britain. The Germans managed to destroy a few cities—though none utterly beyond repair, if a will to repair had existed—but the local authorities ruined practically everything, with a thoroughness that would have been admirable in a good cause.

When they looked at a grimy building, the authorities, armed with new legal powers to plan and reconstruct towns and cities, saw only the grime and not the magnificence beneath. The authorities were not, on the whole, imaginative men, except when it came to imagining the fortunes that one could make from demolition and redevelopment. Advising them were architects and engineers who had converted en masse to modernism and who, even before the destruction brought by the war (which many of them welcomed), were groping toward Gropius. They agreed with Gropius’s view that “a breach has been made with the past, which allows us to envisage a new aspect of architecture corresponding to the technical civilization of the age we live in; the morphology of dead styles has been destroyed; and we are returning to honesty of thought and feeling.” On this understanding, any thought of preservation, of harmonizing the new with the old, let alone of new building in old styles, was a perversion.

The grime had become the sign of a past now hated with a lack of moral discrimination comparable to that once displayed by the jingoists, who had assumed that all was for the best in this, the best of all possible islands. Postwar Britain was a defeated power in everything but the military sense; its old industries, which had caused the grime, could not return it to prosperity; much better, then, to pull everything down and start again. The grime symbolized Gradgrind and Bounderby, and nothing else.

That the Soviet Union emerged triumphant from World War II would also prove a catastrophe for the British urban environment, for it supposedly showed the superiority of central planning over its absence. Intellectuals viewed British towns and cities as the antithesis of planning: like Topsy, they just growed. It didn’t occur to the intellectuals that these were places where successive generations, over many centuries, had produced an urban environment that had charm and was intensely social and livable, largely because those who built it had to live in what they built; or that where planning had taken place—in Bath, for example, or in the New Town section of Edinburgh—it was carried out by men of the highest possible caliber, for a population of refined and elegant taste. In fact, refinement and elegance were now ideologically suspect. As George Orwell pointed out before the war, our civilization (at least as it then was) ultimately rested on coal mining, a horrible industry that maimed people, blighted lives, and blotted landscapes. To live in elegance in such a society was like living in peace with an art collection stolen from Jewish families during the war.

Thus the towns and cities of Britain needed a new moral and physical beginning. And as rational men, the planners knew what people needed: roads and parking lots, so that they might conveniently get to and make use of their shopping and cultural centers. Many medieval lanes, and entire Georgian streets, were destroyed in the name of driving and parking—the appetite for which seemed only to grow with the feeding, and now less than ever has been met.

The planners and city fathers saw attachment to the city of the past as politically sinister. In 1947, the Labour-led city council of Bristol, which had been severely bombed during the war, laid plans to redevelop the city rather than restore it. When the local shopkeepers’ association polled 13,000 people to see whether they liked the council’s plans, and only 400 answered affirmatively, the council denounced the poll: “The so-called poll is without any official sanction and can carry no weight. The slipshod, inefficient and utterly un-democratic methods by which it is being conducted are reminiscent of Hitler’s early efforts in political demagoguery.”

Of course, the poll likely was not scientific, according to the canons of academic political research; but the results were surely startling enough to merit serious consideration by the city council. The notion that one could disregard the poll because it lacked “official sanction” offers insight into where the councillors believed both power and wisdom properly lay: with themselves. The reference to Hitler was peculiar, for it suggested that the preservation of buildings was somehow a harbinger of Nazi revolution. It was ironic as well, for the councillors failed to see that their own desire to organize the old, higgledy-piggledy city into a “rational” plan that fulfilled an ideological ideal was very much like the Nazis’ radical architectural ambitions for German towns and cities.

But throughout Britain, many city engineers and architects proved only too willing to engage in that project. For instance, it was the hope of Sir Herbert Manzoni, the city engineer of Birmingham, to pull down every non-modernist building in the city center. Luckily, he died in 1963 before achieving his ambition, but he got quite far, and his spirit sputtered on after him, with the magnificent Victorian library of 1866 pulled down in 1974 and replaced with an inverted concrete ziggurat of such ugliness and (now) dilapidation that it defies description, at least by me. Its environs serve now as a giant pissoir and, at night, as a safe haven for drunks and rapists; and thus the Albert Speers of Britain have converted the Victorian dream of municipal munificence into the nightmare of administered anomie.

I find it difficult to write temperately on this subject. I have only to see an example of the mass desecration of Britain’s architectural heritage to start trembling with rage. No town or city in Britain has inherited so little in the way of beauty that officials did not think it worth destroying. Recently in Rotherham, a steel town near Sheffield, I saw the historic environs of a magnificent fifteenth-century church falling into ruins, while all around there was a concrete mess, aesthetically worthy of being the administrative capital of an autonomous region of Soviet Central Asia at the height, or the depth, of the Brezhnev era.

My wife tells me to calm down; as she rightly notes, I can do nothing about this disaster now. But it is not merely the physical ugliness of what has been done that affects me; it is the ugliness of soul that was necessary for it to be done. The men entrusted with planning and rebuilding Britain’s towns and cities, one cannot help but think, must have suffered from a deep sense of humiliation, an awareness that, in an age of the most startling technical progress, they were not equal to the most jobbing of jobbing provincial builders of two and a half centuries earlier. Destruction of the heritage was all that was open to them, then, and in this, at least, they excelled. They were like Satan, who, expelled from heaven, exclaimed:

Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.
They certainly produced a visual hell, all the more hellish because they allowed elements of what existed before to remain, so that the contrast was inescapable. In what was once the beautiful small city of Worcester, to take one more example, part of the graceful complex of ecclesiastical buildings next to the cathedral was destroyed in order to erect the Giffard Hotel, a concrete building in the style of Le Corbusier that would have gladdened the hearts of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu. The hotel now vies with the cathedral for one’s visual attention: it is impossible to screen it out.

Yet matters have improved greatly in the last few years. Acts of official vandalism are rarer, and when attempted cause a public outcry. Citizens have formed groups to protect what remains of their heritage and no longer stand by watching the destruction of whole townscapes. Old buildings are routinely adapted to new purposes (as civilized people have known how to do for centuries) instead of being treated as impediments to progress or to traffic. Victorian buildings are cleaned up instead of demolished, and the architectural detail beneath the grime has come as a revelation to many who previously might have held the Victorians in contempt. London’s remaining Victorian railway stations have been modernized, keeping their basic features, so that the elegance and beauty of the ironwork is obvious to all. St. Pancras station, a masterpiece of Victorian Gothic architecture, has been lovingly (and, admittedly, expensively) restored and made the terminus of the train to Paris. Fittingly, the concourse has a statue of the poet Sir John Betjeman, whose protests helped save the station from demolition and replacement—perhaps by something as ugly as the new Euston station, a few hundred yards up the road, which took the place of the magnificently neoclassical original Euston station. The open space around Euston, probably not coincidentally, is as dirty as anywhere in London: people vote with their litter.

Not only has the official vandalism been much reduced; architecture and urbanization have considerably improved. Cities such as Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester have undergone something of a revival, though it is too late to save the parts of them destroyed in the frenzy of self-hatred, utopianism, social engineering, and financial corruption that I have described.

Among other discoveries made by the town planners, architects, and general public is that cities with central residential districts are better places to live than those that relegate all domiciles to the outer fringes and leave the centers as ghost towns every evening. Birmingham and Manchester have also belatedly discovered an unsuspected asset that the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries bequeathed: they have more canals than Venice. Before the advent of railways, the portage of goods in industrial Britain was largely by canal, and Birmingham and Manchester were at the center of canal networks. The canals were beautifully constructed, but they were then left derelict for more than a century and became ditches where thistles grew and rubbish was dumped. The brick or iron bridges that span them are, despite the utilitarianism of their construction, of a surprising and moving elegance. The early industrialists were not quite as impervious to aesthetic considerations as Gradgrind and Bounderby might have led one to suppose.

These canals crisscrossed the cities’ hearts. As if by some operation of the zeitgeist, houses and flats began to rise in large numbers along the canals during the 1990s, and, in some cases, they were elegant places in which someone with an aesthetic sense might actually like to live. The raw concrete that during the worst years of destruction became a kind of phallic symbol for British architects was nowhere to be seen; walls were made of brick, or at least received a brick veneer. Many details could have been done better, doubtless, but one’s first impression was not horror.

The repeopling of city centers, largely with the young and educated middle class, brought other advantages. For many, cultural activities were now within easy reach—indeed, walking distance—rather than a tedious ride away. Such cultural amenities as already existed (and Birmingham and Manchester always had good orchestras) expanded, and new ones arrived. It astonishes me how well one can now eat in these cities, given their long, dismal record of bad food. In other words, the civilized pleasures and advantages of living in a city began to make themselves felt.

But to this I must now enter several caveats. The first is that much of the building, though more attractive than anything erected for many years, is not of high quality. With few exceptions, no contemporary British architect believes that he builds sub specie aeternitatis; on the contrary, he expects what he constructs to be pulled down soon and replaced. That a building should be sound enough to last perhaps 30 years is the city council’s main demand, which is conducive neither to solidity nor to fine workmanship. This explains why builders have used methods and materials that look well enough when new but will soon look tawdry.

The second caveat is that far more houses and flats were built than demand could absorb. This didn’t seem to matter much while prices were rising: a house by a canal, bought new in Birmingham for $300,000, was, within a few years, worth upward of $1 million. But, as we have since seen, the whole British economy was like Ophelia after she had fallen into the brook:

Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like a while they bore her up
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and endued
Unto that element; but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
This is the fate, it seems, of economies that base their prosperity upon asset inflation—often a deliberate government policy. When apartment blocks remain empty, as they now do, can dereliction be far behind?

The third, and potentially most serious, caveat relates to the behavior of the British population. Every Friday and Saturday night (and often other nights as well), thousands of young adults invade Britain’s towns and cities, intent on getting publicly drunk and making a nuisance of themselves in the name of self-expression. No one, apparently, has ever asked them not to, let alone told them; and by now, such activities as screaming at 2 am, hair pulling, vomiting in the gutter, smashing glasses, and climbing at random into passing vehicles are seen as inalienable rights—perhaps because they have yet to be alienated. Menace is never far away.

People have sometimes accused me of exaggerating the chaos of these street scenes, to which I can reply that one American journalist who harbored such a suspicion came to investigate for himself. I took him to central Birmingham at 10 pm one Saturday night, before the fun really began; in less than five minutes, he was convinced that I had not exaggerated.

No doubt some people exist who do not mind this behavior, but few will tolerate it for long, especially as they get older. It will surely alienate the old from the young and drive them away; and if civilization requires at least some understanding and sympathy between generations, and an ability to live together, this will ultimately prevent a lasting renaissance of the cities.

Still, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it is a considerable relief that the worst of the architectural vandalism and brutalism is now behind us. It was a nightmare, but we have almost woken up.

Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Some examples of the work of Patrick Pollen:

Christ Church, Dublin

The Cathedral of Christ the King, Johannesburg, South Africa

Drawing for St. Mary’s, Galway

WIndows from St Vincent de Paul’s, Solly Street, Sheffield, since demolished and its contents dispersed. This work was subsequently sold at Whytes in 2006. The unidentified nun in the panel is probably St Louise de Marriac, foundress of the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul.

The individual subjects of the window are as follows: St. Patrick With St. Brigid At His Feet; The Virgin Mary Trampling The Snake Above Ste. Catherine Labouré And Her Miraculous Medal; Christ With The Sacred Heart And Ste. Marguerite-Marie Alacoque Kneeling At His Feet; St. Vincent De Paul With A Charitable Vincentian Nun At His Feet Patrick Pollen, son of a sculptor whose uncle was J. Hungerford Pollen, the well-known Pre-Raphaelite painter and designer of Dublin’s University Church, was trained at the Slade School in London and, in 1951, in Paris at the Académie Julian. Such was the effect of Evie Hone’s great nine-light Eton College Chapel Crucifixion and Last Supper window (completed 1952) on him that Pollen resolved to go to Dublin to learn the art of stained glass with her. Since 1944, on the dissolution of An Túr Gloine cooperative in Dublin’s Upper Pembroke Street, Hone had been working prolifically but in increasingly poor health on her greatest masterpieces in stained glass from her small studio beside Marlay Grange, Rathfarnham. On her advice, in January 1953, Pollen rented a small area off the large studio from Catherine O’Brien, the An Túr artist who had bought up the studio and its contents, much of which were destroyed by fire in 1958. He worked from there aided by the studio glazier, Peter Connolly, until O’Brien’s death in 1963, sometimes taking on commissions Hone could not take on, cherishing the use of her brushes which she bequeathed to him on her death in 1955. Hone’s profound influence on Pollen, apparent in this early work by him, is seen in the superb quality of the deep, thick pieces of glowing ruby, blue, amber and green glass selected to capture the passing light, the bold, expressive painting with thick brushstrokes and loose washes to enhance the rich colours and ensure clear, graphic legibility from a considerable height, and the gentle compassion with which each figure is depicted. Each of the figures, which were given to the artist by the Irish Vincentian fathers in Sheffield, is identifiable by distinctive attributes: St. Patrick by his crossed-snake mitre, torc, green alb and shamrock; St. Brigid by her Cross and Abbey; Ste. Catherine Labouré, the devout 19th century French Vincentian nun who beheld a vision of the Virgin Mary poised on a globe on which a serpent was prostrated, and was bidden to have a medal struck with this living picture; kneeling Ste. Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, the aristocratic 17th century Burgundian nun of the Order of the Visitation, whose visionary and penitential devotion to the Sacred Heart led to its subsequent official adoption; St. Vincent de Paul, the 17th century charitable reformer of hospitals, galley slave conditions, nursing and parochial missions and founder of the Vincentians holds a crucifix and looks down on a saintly blue-clad Vincentian nun who cradles a baby in one of the foundling hospitals he systematized. Dr Nicola Gordon Bowe Dublin Whyte’s wish to thank the artist Patrick Pollen, Dr Nicola Gordon Bowe, Ken Ryan of Abbey Stained Glass, Mrs Muriel Hone and the late Oliver Hone for their concerted help in the cataloguing of this work.

From today’s Daily Telegraph:

Patrick Pollen

Patrick Pollen, who died on November 30 aged 82, was an artist in stained glass; having begun his career in Britain, where he was brought up, he devoted most of his career to churches in the Irish Republic.

Patrick Laprimaudaye Pollen was born in London on January 12 1928, the son of Arthur Pollen, a sculptor of religious works, and a great-grandson of John Hungerford Pollen, an Anglican priest who converted to Roman Catholicism and became — at the request of Cardinal Newman — professor of fine arts at the Catholic University of Ireland.

His mother, Daphne (neé Baring), was a daughter of the 3rd Lord Revelstoke, who had bought Lambay Island, off the coast of Co Dublin, in 1904 and employed Edwin Lutyens to restore its castle — Lutyens created one of the most remarkable houses in Ireland. Daphne was herself a gifted painter of religious subjects; among her works was a large mural depicting the English Catholic martyrs.

Patrick was sent to the Roman Catholic public school Ampleforth, and, after national service in the Army, spent two years studying painting at the Slade. He then worked at the Académie Julian, the art school in Paris, and was particularly struck by the famous stained glass in the cathedral at Chartres.

But the crucial experience came in 1952, when his father took him to see Evie Hone’s nine-light Crucifixion and Last Supper window in Eton College chapel shortly after its installation. He declared: “That’s what I want to do.”

He immediately travelled to Dublin to learn from Evie Hone, who worked from An Tur Gloinne (The Tower of Glass), a co-operative run by Catherine O’Brien, who was to become his principal mentor. When Catherine O’Brien died in 1955, she left him her brushes.

In 1963 Pollen married the sculptor Nell Murphy, and two years later they bought a house in Dublin where he established his own studio. Nell Murphy worked in stone, plaster and clay, and her work often appears in churches alongside that of her husband.

Many of Pollen’s early commissions in the 1950s were on the British mainland. They included a window in a private chapel in the London Oratory; three windows for a chapel at Whitchurch, near Chester; and the crypt window for Rosslyn chapel in Midlothian, which has enjoyed a spurious celebrity since being featured in Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code.

In 1957 Pollen embarked on a two-year project to create the 32 windows for the new Cathedral of Christ the King in Johannesburg. The windows were made in Dublin, then shipped to South Africa to be assembled.

Later he created windows in Galway Cathedral, where he also made the mosaic of St Joseph the Worker; six windows in Ballinteer Roman Catholic Church, Dublin; and, in 1964, the memorial window to Catherine O’Brien in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral. Among his other important works are the windows for the new church at Murlog, Lifford, in Co Donegal (1962), where the Stations of the Cross were created by his wife.

Pollen was a firm traditionalist in his religious life, and was much distressed when the Tridentine Mass was replaced in the 1960s following the Second Vatican Council; he liked to attend a Latin Mass wherever it was reintroduced.

Another consequence of Vatican II was that the architecture of churches changed, with less stained glass in demand to enhance the buildings. Pollen found that he was receiving fewer commissions, and in 1981 he and his wife moved to the United States; they also felt that America offered better opportunities for their children.

The family settled at Winston-Salem, North Carolina, but Pollen could find little work there, and in 1997 they returned to Ireland. He spent his last years in Co Wexford.

Patrick Pollen is survived by his wife and by their four sons and one daughter.

Total Lunar Eclipse of December 21, 2010

All of North America and Europe has the opportunity to witness the Earth’s shadow passing over the moon on the winter solstice.

The last eclipse of 2010 is a total lunar eclipse that sweeps across North America and Europe in the middle of the night for most observers. Those in the eastern half of North America can view the total phase of the lunar eclipse after midnight on December 21, and observers in the west will be able to see the eclipse begin in the late evening on December 20.

Timing of the December 2010 Lunar Eclipse

The times of the lunar eclipse are generally given in GMT. The umbral phase of the eclipse, when Earth’s shadow first begins to darken to moon and create a partial lunar eclipse, starts at 6:32 GMT December 21. The total phase lasts from 7:40 to 8:53 GMT, and the partial phase ends at 10:01 GMT.

What to Look For During the Lunar Eclipse

If you are up in the middle of the night watching the eclipse, note the color of the moon. As the moon enters the partial phase, it changes from a full, white moon to a yellowish or sandy hue as it darkens. Then as totality occurs, the moon often takens on a reddish glow. This red color comes from a little bit of sunlight shining on either side of Earth, casting the glow of sunrise and sunset onto the moon. Look for a quartet of bright stars surrounding the moon. Capella will lie to the north, Pollux will lie to the east, Betelgeuse is a bit closer in the south, and Aldebaran will be to the west of the eclipsed moon.

More information from the NASA webpage:

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/OH2010.html#LE2010Dec21T

A snow bound Praxiteles has begun to dip into the Christmas presants and was delighted to have received a copy of Peter Seewald’s interview with Benedict XVI, conducted last summer at Caselgandolfo and published under the title of Licht der Welt: Der Papst, die Kriche und die Zeichen er Zeit. Ein Gespreach mit Peter Sewald.. Among the more interesting parts of the book are those on the nature of liturgy and its role and function in the Church. It woud be useful were the Cloyne HACK to obtain copies of the same and have a read -or if they cannot now afford that then it should still be possible to have a free read at any good book-shop.

Here are some excerpts:
Question:
… nobody disputes that the Church is in need of purification and renewal…the question is: what exactly is real renewal, the right kind of renewal? You have used dramatic words to show clelarly that the destiny of the faith and the is decided “solely” “in the context of the liturgy”……

Answer:

The Church becomes visible for people in amny ways, in charitable activities or in missionary projects, but the place where the Church is actually experienced most of all as Church is the liturgy. …the point of the Church is to turn us towards God and to enable God to enter into the world. The liturgy is the act in which we believe that He enters our lives and that we touch Him. It is the act in which what is really essential happens: we come into contact with God. he comes to us – and we are illumined by Him. …it cannot be invented everytime by the community. It is not a quastion….of self production.

Liturgy is not about our doing something about our demonstrating our creativity, in other words, about displaying everything we can do. Liturgy is precisely not a show, a piece of theatre, a spectacle. Rather it draws life from the Other.

A book review from the Journal of Sacred Architecture, vol 18:

The Future of the Past: A Conservation Ethic for Architecture, Urbanism and Historic Preservation,by Steven W. Semes
2009 W. W. Norton & Co., 272 pages, $37.80

The Ethics of Preservation
by John Cluver

Just like our most revered religious practices, our best buildings are imbued with a deep sense of history and tradition. Any historic building, however, needs to be periodically updated in order to remain useful and relevant, which leads to the fundamental question of how to do so in a manner that is both meaningful today and respectful of its past. Author Steven W. Semes, a practicing architect, educator, and former architect for the National Park Service, addresses this question in his thoughtful and thought-provoking treatise, The Future of the Past. Organized loosely into three general areas of consideration, each of the book’s twelve chapters builds upon each other to champion the idea of continuing traditional design principles when working within the context of our historic buildings, and putting much needed emphasis on creating new work that is “of its place,” instead of the more commonly considered “of its time”.

The Church of Saint Bartholomew in New York, NY

Semes introduces the book by exploring the issues faced in the integration of new and old architecture, such as our attitudes toward the past, the definition of progress, the meaning of conservation / preservation, and the role that past and present building cultures play in how we approach historic buildings. He then explains the seven principles that unite all classical and traditional design, and how they work together to create elements, buildings, neighborhoods, and cities. These are contrasted against modernist attitudes toward these principles, showing how these approaches typically are diametrically opposed to those of traditional design.

Having laid this groundwork, Semes moves from design to preservation philosophy. He provides a concise primer on the history of the preservation movement and how the standards that are used today came to be. He offers a very sage and key observation that whereas the traditional architect views the past as part of a living continuum into the present and as a guide for the future, the preservationist and modernist architect tend to see a building of the past as a piece of historical record which must be preserved as an artifact of an earlier time and contrasted against today’s designs. As Semes explains, it is this historicist attitude, the belief that there is an “architecture of our time,” that emphasizes differentiation and creates the underlying conflict with the more traditional and time-tested approach to design that is contextually sensitive.

How contemporary and past architects have addressed this balance of differentiation and compatibility is the focus of the final third of the book. Semes explores four distinct approaches to this issue, which he identifies as: Literal Replication, Invention Within a Style, Abstract Reference, and Intentional Opposition. He provides both well-known and more obscure examples for each of these, very consciously pulling them from a wide sampling of eras. Religious architecture plays an important role in these and other sections by using churches that have been built in campaigns that have lasted generations, had facades added centuries after the rest of the church was built, or been rebuilt for a variety of reasons to illustrate his points. For example, the façade of Santa Maria Novella, completed by Leon Battista Alberti three centuries after being started, demonstrates how a design can be innovative while being entirely compatible with its historic context. The seamlessness with which this transition between the two eras is made runs counter to modern preservation practice, and was made possible because Alberti understood, respected, and upheld the intentions of the original designer.

The Jerusalem Church, Bruges, Belgium

Semes’ concluding chapter brings all of these ideas, and others, together with the goal of outlining a new conservation ethic, namely, “to retain whatever we deem valuable from the past that does not obstruct necessary change.” Alterations to our historic buildings need to find the balance between preserving their ability to convey their history and allowing them to fully participate in modern life. Recognizing their need to change in order to continue to have meaning, they should neither be preserved in amber, nor casually altered without regard for the intent behind their original design. In this way, Semes’ book takes a very moderate tone, as it does not strongly advocate for a particular style or design methodology. Instead, his emphasis is on the primacy of context in guiding additions, whether the work is in the historic center of Rome or at the modernist campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology. It is the rarity of this attitude today, however, that makes this book so radical and controversial within preservation circles, and a must-read for those who care for and care about our architectural heritage.

John Cluver practices archicture and historic preservation in Philadelphia, PA as a partner in the firm Voith & Mactavish Architects LLP.

And a more familiar work on which he worked – the inside-side-out Centre Georges Pompidour in Paris:

A prototype for the upside-down church at San Giovanni Rotondo?

Lost Between Sea and Sky
Looking for Padre Pio in Renzo Piano’s Pilgrimage Church
by Matthew Alderman, appearing in Volume 18 of the Journal of Sacred Architecture

[8]

It is a perilous thing to ask the saints for design advice. The apostle Thomas earned his patronage of the architectural profession by giving away most of his construction budget to the poor and was nearly martyred for his trouble. And while legend says the former doubter was hired by the Indian king Gundoferus on account of his knowledge of ornate Roman classicism, St. Bernard, that great micro-manager of monasteries, had very little time for the fancies of Romanesque ornamentation, railing against its distractingly frivolous capitals and grotesques.1 Ultimately, each church building is not about the earthly taste of its titular but a reflection of the glorious entirety of the heavenly Jerusalem. Yet the gulf between St. Pio of Pietrelcina, thaumaturge, stigmatist, and occasional flying friar, and the new shrine recently raised over his tomb by his countryman, world-famous Italian architect Renzo Piano, is a chasm difficult to cross, even by a saint occasionally known to levitate.

The entrance of the shrine (Photo by Antonio Fragassi)

The Capuchin friar St. Pio of Pietrelcina (1887-1968), better known to his filial devotees as Padre Pio, lived a life marked by mystical phenomena: ecstasies, diabolical persecutions, bilocation, prophesies, the ability to read men’s hearts, and most extraordinarily, the impression of the stigmata, the wounds of Christ’s passion. In spite of all these wild spiritual gifts—and the thousands who came to pray or just to watch—the saint remained humble and level-headed, devoted to the simple ministries of a parish priest, the public celebration of the Mass and the constant hearing of confessions. In the end his sanctity lay not just in miracles but in his life of prayer and sacrifice. He was canonized in 2002 by John Paul II, who many years earlier had asked the friar to hear his confession.

The front doors (Photo by Francesco Tagliomonte)

Piano describes the new pilgrimage church in Padre Pio’s Puglian hometown of San Giovanni Rotondo as a “portrait” of the saint. His conception of the saint’s simplicity led him to reject the traditional basilican model of church-planning as smacking too much of “power” and “grandiloquence,” opting for a centralized plan executed in simple wood and local stone.2 Architectural critic Edwin Heathcote, in a glowing Financial Times article on the new building, describes the shrine’s interior as an “embracing shell like a slightly squashed armadillo.”3 Until recently, Padre Pio’s mortal remains rested in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, a large but plain basilican-style church in a lightly-modernized Romanesque style, sparingly ornamented with touches of marble and mosaic. This more conventional structure was built during the saint’s lifetime to accommodate pilgrims visiting the famous wonderworker.

The Padre Pio Pilgrimage Shrine seats 8,000, with room for 30,000 standing on the parvis outside. It has been described as the second-largest in the world after St. Peter’s.4 Dedicated in 2004 after more than a decade of planning and with a budget of $51 million, the shrine returned to the media spotlight after Pope Benedict XVI officially opened the church’s crypt, a golden-walled underground chamber housing the saint’s silver sarcophagus.5 The Architectural Record describes the shrine [9] as “an attempt to rationalise and dignify this public urge to venerate a remarkable individual.”6 While referring primarily to the medieval zoo of souvenir-hawkers and pilgrim hotels that now rings San Giovanni Rotondo, journalistic coverage hints at a dissonance at the heart of the project. Most commentators seem more interested in discussing the building’s relationship with the landscape than its status as a religious shrine. Piano has remarked, “I have tried to arrange the vast spaces and surfaces in such a way that the gaze of visitors can be lost between the sky, the sea and the earth.”7

The low arches give one a crowded and earthbound feeling. (Photo by Antonio Fragassi)

Piano expresses his own religious opinions less dramatically than his sweeping design proclivities. In an interview with the Catholic news service Zenit, he describes himself as a “Catholic by formation and conviction,” though he adds, somewhat cryptically, “not bigoted.”8 Piano sought to enter deeply into Padre Pio’s own religious experience. “I […] became a bit of a Capuchin,”9 he comments, also studying the history of liturgy and religion in the process. Piano’s tutor in the ways of liturgy was Crispino Valenziano, a professor of liturgical anthropology and spirituality at the St. Anselm Pontifical Liturgical Institute in Rome, and sometime deputy of former papal master of ceremonies Piero Marini.

The nataloid plan of the shrine and site (from Contemporary Church Architecture)

The building reflects the low, scrubby, rolling terrain all around it, but it does not appear to be nestled in the landscape so much as lie flaccidly upon it. Rather than primitively edenic, the effect is ramshackle and faintly industrial. The shrine’s most obvious feature is its broad, nearly flat roof, an irregular and jagged armor of immense pre-patinated copper plates. Beneath the low, bowed roofline, the structure seems not so much built as assembled, a sagging bricolage of precariously-balanced stone, wood, glass, metal, and stucco. The self-conscious geometric twists feel, at some level, far more ostentatious and alien than the triumphalist ornaments Piano took great pains to avoid. Indeed, lacking the sense of scale brought by ornament and detail, the long, low structure has a lumpen, looming quality.

There are few obvious symbols, save a very large freestanding cross placed off to one side of the church interior. The main entrance consists of two squat bronze doors covered with spare, pseudo-primitive modernistic sculpture set into a façade of green metal slats. The low campanile, built into one of the piazza’s retaining walls, is handsome in a stripped-classical way, although ultimately peripheral to the overall design.

The interior is a greatly-enlarged variation on the same semi-circular plan that has become ubiquitous in suburban parishes everywhere. [10] Piano’s version is generated by a roughly spiral geometry reminiscent of a nautilus or snail shell. For a shrine dedicated to a priest who lived his vocation of alter Christus in the stimata, this departure from a cruciform plan is idiosyncratic in the least. The architect was deeply concerned that the enormous interior retain a focus on the altar while creating within it the smallness and intimacy necessary for prayer and recollection. Piano’s solution was to divide the interior into a collection of smaller spaces, each like a separate church seating around 400, opening onto the altar at the nexus of the nautiloid curve, creating a sense of prayerful privacy in the midst of a low, open space. This is an interesting response to the contemporary trend towards ecclesial giganticism that has led to such buildings as the Los Angeles Cathedral and the new church at Fatima.

While intriguing in the abstract, the reality of the plan presents serious physical and metaphysical difficulties. The building’s skeleton of twenty-one spoke-like stone arches radiates, in two roughly concentric rings, from a funnel-like central hub placed above the saint’s crypt-level tomb. The altar, set atop a lofty, if narrow, open sanctuary, stands directly in front of this nexus. Piano explains the arches were an attempt to create “the modern equivalent of a Gothic [sic] cathedral, but to make the arches fly within the space.”10 However, the effect is impersonal and uncomfortably vast, while between the arches it feels more than a little claustrophobic. The predominant note is earthbound, linked not with the upward movement of man towards God, or God towards man, but toward the unseen body of the holy man in the basement, who is treated more like Merlin than a Christian saint

The nearly flat roof is formed by an irregular shell of giant pre-patinated copper plates.

There is little ornament and less sacred art. A fabric screen depicting scenes from the Apocalypse by Robert Rauschenberg covers the interior of the front façade’s broad parabolic window. Faintly cartoonish, it is loosely traditional in its composition and adds a bit of welcome color to the interior, as does a gradated splash of faded blue on the vault over the altar.11 For all Piano’s conscientious pursuit of the Franciscan spirit, one is glad that Giotto did not respond to the same impulse at Assisi when St. Francis was still within the reach of living memory. Despite Piano’s concerns about Franciscan simplicity, his conception of humility might seem myopic to Padre Pio himself, who wore the simple robes of a Capuchin in daily life but at the altar obediently clothed himself in the colorful silk vestments of a priest of Jesus Christ. It is not a coincidence that the first notable act of St. Francis after his conversion was to restore a little church, San Damiano, to its former glory. Just as splendor does not automatically entail waste, conversely—as any architect knows—plainness can be surprisingly expensive and may suggest not humility but elite faddishness.

Reinforcing this impression, the small sanctuary platform is almost crushed by the low curve of the vault overhead. On the other hand, the altar cross by Arnaldo Pomodoro is certainly futuristic, a chunky block of metal hanging perilously over the altar and resembling a mass of burnished, half-melted machine parts. It also lacks the figure of Christ.

Nestled cleverly in one of the outer curves of the nautiloid, the Blessed Sacrament Chapel is one of the more intriguing and truly intimate portions of the interior. Unlike the centralized arrangement of the main church, it is oriented longitudinally on a trapezoidal plan. The chapel walls narrow subtly, moving the eye towards the tabernacle shrine, set atop a low octagonal plinth of three steps. The overall effect is minimalistic, but the warmth and texture of the mottled beige walls breathe some life back into the space.

Piano commissioned the late Roy Lichtenstein—famous for the deliberately cartoonish painting entitled Whaam! [11] among many other things—to decorate the shrine’s Eucharistic chapel. Lichtenstein was working on an image of the Last Supper before his death; Piano elected not to have another hand complete or replace the painting.

The Tabernacle (Photo by Antonio Fragassi)

The tabernacle is an imposing and even startling object: a pillar of volcanic Mount Etna stone standing alone at the far end of the chapel beneath a round skylight high above. 3.5 meters in height, it rises smoothly from a square base to a faceted octagonal top. Two rows of silver plates representing Old Testament types of the Eucharist or incidents from the life of Christ flank the sides of the pillar to form a roughly cruciform shape, with the central door in the form of a silver pelican. When opened, the tabernacle doors reveal a pair of beautiful, faintly Asiatic representations of the ichthys sculpted into the interior. The reliefs, while exaggeratedly pseudo-archaic in some details, are for the most part well-executed and compare with some of the more interesting Art Deco work of the Liturgical Movement period. The use of Biblical parallelism and typology also adds an unexpected dose of sophistication to the sequence.
Yet the overall effect is strangely uncommunicative. The faceless black stela of the tabernacle hints at some powerful Presence within, but fails to reveal it. The shiny stone the color of death seems a peculiarly inapt color for a tabernacle. There are no other furnishings save the squat, geometric pews in light-colored wood. Unrelieved by the gleam of hammered silver presence lamps (or even a pop art Last Supper), it remains alien and even sinister. Admittedly, it is not without a sense of otherworldly power, but at best it is an altar to the Unknown God, incongruous with the Gospels’ revelation. As St. Paul once said, “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.”12

The gilded crypt has garnered much criticism. (Photo by Antonio Fragassi)

Passing from the upper church into the crypt—which holds, somewhat illogically, high-traffic areas like the shrine and the confessionals—one enters a shiny, glittery realm of recognizable iconography and haloed saints. Marko Ivan Rupnik, the Jesuit artist responsible for the Redemptoris Mater Chapel in the Vatican, contributed 2,000 square meters of mosaics showing eighteen scenes from the life of Christ, eighteen from the life of St. Francis and a final eighteen from Padre Pio’s life. The comprehensive quality and parallelism of such a cycle is worthy of much applause. Rupnik’s use of color is refreshing, with rich golds, reds, and intense chemical blues predominating. After the beige upper church, this wealth of gold, serpentine, jade, and rose quartz comes as a distinct relief.

The mosaics are not without their own shortcomings. The recent opening of the church’s lower level has unleashed an outcry in some quarters, with accusations that the lavishly decorated crypt is wasteful glitter.13 However, the real problem here lies not in the opulence of its materials—Said Judas to Mary now what will you do/With your ointment so rich and so rare?—but the content and shape of its ornamentation and iconography. One is reminded of the caviar-filled ice swan in Brideshead Revisited—the problem is not the caviar, but the shape.

While ultimately Byzantine in inspiration and straightforward in its use of traditional symbolism, Rupnik’s signature style lacks the sense of detail and scale necessary for such large compositions. The effect is somewhat superficial in its recollection of the traditions of the East, and the figures are too self-consciously abstracted. The mosaicist might have made a good miniaturist with his economical sense of form, but here everything looks like quick studies inflated to poster-size. And while the glitter is somewhat of a welcome change from above, the mass [12] of gold in this low, over-lit space, can seem oppressively unvarying.

The tomb of Saint Pio is behind the curved wall. (Photo by Antonio Fragassi)

The saint’s tomb itself is precious in its materials yet rather unprepossessing in shape and setting. The tomb is scarcely above eye-level, more an elaborate item on display than an object of veneration. If the mosaics are excessive yet undeveloped, the tomb is opulent though underwhelming. Even on the saint’s sarcophagus—so often an opportunity for a complex web of personified virtues, patron saints, and scenes of Biblical parallelism—there is nothing but a pattern of abstract forms of a mildly Romanesque nature. And while Padre Pio’s body has been exposed to the faithful in the quite recent past, all images of the shrine have so far shown the sarcophagus closed. While some may find this decorous, it seems a regrettable capitulation to squeamishness for a saint who had Christ’s sacrifice written upon his hands and side.

Overall, the fact of modernism’s muteness in the face of traditional religion is inescapable here. There is little in the church’s structure and details to distinguish it from a high-profile concert hall, while definite moments bring to mind a cutting-edge airport terminal or a lavishly bleak spa; but nothing overwhelms the soul with the blinding particularity of the Christian message.14

It is easy to decry the kitsch that fills the shops of San Giovanni Rotondo like the money-changers in the temple, or scoff at pilgrims who are more entranced by Padre Pio than Christ. Yet for all the desire to create a humble church for this people’s saint, this vast new shrine has been shaped less by folk piety than the by high-profile dictums of a design culture that is not entirely certain what to do with religion. At most the church can attempt a sort of fashionable plainness, not without a degree of appeal from some angles, but which is often more costly and momentarily modish than actual symbolic ornament, and which, being contemporary, will swiftly grow old.

This is not to say that, had it been deemed necessary to forgo the timeless route of the classical (or even the humility of the Romanesque), the architect could not have built a church in a simple but lofty manner. Freed from engineering gimmicks and fashionable nature-worship, it could have been clothed in noble materials and enlivened with dignified, if monastically severe, iconography. Piano’s instincts, moderated by the formative humility of historic precedent, might have led to something truly new.

Even if Piano found a cruciform tomb too much for the cruciform saint of Puglia, he could have raised a rectilinear hypostyle hall, broad but majestic. A fine model could have been the cathedral at Cordova, one of the few fully horizontal buildings where stone arches soar. If it were necessary to keep it airy and transparent so the faithful outside might participate, he could have looked to the open-sided chapels of early Spanish Mexico, with Franciscan roots of its own.15 Even Rupnik’s mosaics might have found a rich modern precedent in the decoration of the modernistic but dignified shrine of Our Lady of the Snows in Belleville, Missouri, and other works of the late pre-Conciliar era. Unfortunately, the Padre Pio shrine remains oblivious to both the recent, as well as the more distant, past.

One of the more extraordinary miracles attributed to Padre Pio describes a squadron of Allied bombers sighting the mystic floating high in the air, accompanied, in one account, by the Virgin and St. Michael. The flyboys returned to base, muddled and dazed, unable to drop their payload on the town of San Giovanni Rotondo.16 Renzo Piano has said that he hopes the pilgrim’s gaze will be “lost between the sky, the sea and the earth.”17 In the shrine, it is perhaps Padre Pio’s very physical brand of holiness that is lost; the saint is too potent for an age that prefers its spirituality safely disembodied.

Matthew Alderman is the founder of Matthew Alderman Studios, which specializes in liturgical furnishing design and design consulting. He writes and lectures on ecclesiastical art and design. http://www.matthewalderman.com

1 For the legend of St. Thomas, see Bl. Jacobus de Jacobus’s The Golden Legend: Reading on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), vol I, 27-35. Bernard’s views on architecture can be found in his Apology to William of St. Thierry.
2 “Padre Pio’s Shrine as the Architect Sees It: Renzo Piano Talks of Monumental Church in San Giovanni Rotondo.” July 23, 2004. Accessed on April 25, 2010. Available online at: http://www.zenit.org/article-10700?l=english.
3 Edwin Heathcote, “On the Fast Track to the Middle of Nowhere: Architect Renzo Piano Talks to Edwin Heathcote about How and Why He is Building the Largest Modern Church in Europe,” Financial Times, June 16, 2001 [London Edition], 8.
4 “Renzo Piano Building Workshop: Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church,” http://www.arcspace.com. No date. Available online at: http://www.arcspace.com/architects/piano/padre_pio/padre_pio.html. Accessed on April 25, 2010.
A 2001 article says 7,500. See also Heathcote, 8.
5 Jason Horowitz, “Awe (And Maybe Acolytes) from Bold Architecture,” New York Times, August 19, 2004, Section E, 3. The Gold Coast Bulletin reports it as $51 million; see “Good Faith, Popular Padre,” The Gold Coast Bulletin, July 3, 2004, See also Michael Day, “Spinning in his Grave? Fury at Glitzy Tomb for Revered Saint,” The Independent, April 21, 2010. Accessed on April 25, 2010. Available online at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/spinning-in-his-grave-fury-at-glitzy-new-tomb-for-revered-saint-1949629.html.
6 Catherine Slessor, “Divine Intervention: Renzo Piano’s Huge New Basilica [sic] in Southern Italy Reconciles the Spiritual and Practical Needs of Pilgrims,” Architectural Record, September 2004.
7 Quoted in “Renzo Piano Building Workshop: Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church.” arcspace.com. No date. Available online at: http://www.arcspace.com/architects/piano/padre_pio/padre_pio.html. Accessed on April 25, 2010.
8 “Padre Pio’s Shrine as the Architect Sees It.”
9 Ibid.
10 Heathcote, 8.
11 Ibid, 8. Horowitz himself says it resembles a cartoon.
12 Acts 17:23.
13 See “Worshippers Outraged at Glitzy New Tomb for ‘Miracle-Worker’ Padre Pio,” The Daily Mail, April 21, 2010. Accessed April 29, 2010. Available online at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1267679/Worshippers-outraged-glitzy-new-tomb-miracle-worker-Saint-Padre-Pio.html.
14 Horowitz, 3.
15 See Jaime Lara, Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008); and City, Temple, Stage: Eschatological Architecture and Liturgical Theatrics in New Spain (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004).
16 There are several conflicting versions of this story, though Padre Pio biographer Bernard Ruffin thinks it likely there is a historical basis to it. See Padre Pio: The True Story (Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor, 1991), 253; 324-5.
17 Quoted in “Renzo Piano Building Workshop: Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church.” arcspace.com. No date. Available online at: http://www.arcspace.com/architects/piano/padre_pio/padre_pio.html. Accessed on April 25, 2010.