Praxiteles

From today’s Daily Telegraph:

Religion Obituaries

Robert Potter
Robert Potter, who died on November 30 aged 101, was a conservation architect and pioneer of innovative church design; he was for several years the Surveyor to the Fabric of St Paul’s Cathedral and was also responsible for major work at Chichester and Chelmsford Cathedrals.

Robert James Potter was born in Guildford on October 6 1909 to Florence and Jack Potter. His father engraved printing blocks for Bank of England notes, and Robert inherited his eye for detail and design. On leaving school he secured a place at the Regents Street Polytechnic, where he studied Architecture, which became his lifelong passion.

In 1935 he moved to Salisbury, where he married and established a practice in New Street. Three years later, at the age of 29, he was commissioned to draw up plans for a new church in the shadow of Old Sarum, the site of Salisbury’s first cathedral. The church of St Francis, a red-brick building with a bold modern tower and high windows, has recently celebrated its 70th anniversary and the church now enjoys Grade II listed status.

War service took Potter to India, where he advanced to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Engineers. He was involved in creating road and rail transport networks in northern India to enable troops to join the war in the Far East. Earlier he had been based in England, responsible for setting out ack-ack gun positions.

In 1946 Potter returned to Salisbury, where he worked for 11 years in partnership with the distinguished ecclesiastical architect and conservator William Randoll Blacking. He then established his own firm in partnership with Richard Hare. They occupied De Vaux House at the entrance to Salisbury Close, the erstwhile site of De Vaux College, once associated with Oxford University. Later, in 1967, the practice extended to Southampton and was renamed the Brandt, Potter, Hare Partnership.

Potter’s work embraced domestic and military commissions (both houses and office space), but church architecture was his inspiration and ambition. In 1958 the people of Crownhill, Plymouth, celebrated the consecration of his Church of the Ascension. This (now listed) building became a benchmark for the liturgical movement with its central altar at the heart of the “gathered people of God”. The following year Potter embarked upon the comparably innovative St George’s Oakdale in Poole.

Potter was especially engaged with the synergy between art and architecture. He worked closely (1955-77) with Dean Walter Hussey on the renovation of Chichester Cathedral, where they engaged internationally acclaimed artists such as Graham Sutherland, Marc Chagall and the sculptor Geoffrey Clarke. He also encouraged the craft of medieval building by setting up a masons’ workshop attached to the cathedral. He then arranged for stone to be brought from the quarry in Caen, as local stone was more vulnerable to erosion by the sea winds.

He perfected his expertise in the subject by conducting experiments which saw the mantelpiece in his work room at home laden with jars in which pieces of stone were systematically marinated in erosive chemicals.

In the following years he was responsible for significant work on the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Along with his consultant engineer he introduced hinged metal “goalposts”, concealed internal supports to reinforce the building’s structure that were fashioned in a way that allowed for its necessary movement over the seasons and the years. He also worked on a number of London landmark churches, among them St Stephen’s Walbrook and All Souls Langham Place.

He became widely known for creating community rooms beneath the foundations of ancient churches. On becoming Surveyor to the Fabric of St Paul’s Cathedral in the mid-1970s, he created a Treasury in the vaults for the display of the cathedral’s valuable artefacts. Here again his fascination with new technology was revealed by his installation of a network of electronic strain gauges that monitored the gentle to and fro of the building on its site.

He was appointed OBE in 1993.

For recreation Robert Potter painted in watercolour and enjoyed sailing; he had a master mariner’s certificate.

He married, in 1935, Geraldine Buchanan; they divorced in the early 1960s. He is survived by his second wife, Margaret, and by three children of his first marriage and two stepchildren.

Authentic Urbanism and the Neighborhood Church
by Craig S. Lewis, appearing in Volume 18 of the Journal of Sacred Architecture

[14]

“Law 119. For the temple of the principal church, parish, or monastery, there shall be assigned specific lots; the first after the streets and plazas have been laid out, and these shall be a complete block so as to avoid having other buildings nearby, unless it were for practical or ornamental reasons.”

—The Laws of the Indies, 1573, by order of King Philip II of Spain

From our earliest beginnings as a country, we have always reserved the most important and prominent spaces for our civic buildings. The Laws of the Indies, as the first specific set of rules governing the settlement of a new town in the new world by Spanish colonists, decreed that three things must happen before any other: the identification of the highest and best location for the main plaza, the establishment of streets that were to radiate out from the plaza in ordinal directions, and the reservation of the first lots for the establishment of churches (specifically, the Catholic church). Numerous towns in the southeast and southwest United States were established according to these principles including Santa Fe and Albuquerque, NM, Fernandina, FL, and Tucson, AZ.

This high regard for the primacy of public spaces and civic buildings continued throughout much of the early years in American urban development. The New England town square was the Puritan’s form of Spanish plaza and was often flanked by a Protestant church. Cathedrals continued to be constructed in prime locations in views of the waterfronts to greet arriving visitors, or on hilltops so as to be seen by the entire village or city. In urban neighborhoods throughout the country, churches were constructed to serve the various ethnic immigrant populations that would settle in a particular area, becoming a spiritual, social, and—through parochial schools—educational anchor. Together with parks or plazas, churches formed the essential public realm of many a neighborhood throughout the county.

The church’s slide from architectural preeminence in neighborhoods and in cities occurred over a long period. Rather than a single cause, it is more likely that a series of gradual shifts—primarily demographic and economic—slowly amassed to conspire against what was once the norm. These shifts impacted the construction of other public buildings as well.

The last consideration of the importance of the public realm came during the “City Beautiful” movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and the parallel “Garden City” movement occurring in Great Britain). Advocates sought to clean up many of the country’s larger cities through the imposition of beautiful landscapes and monuments. While important as a design philosophy, its moral and social goals lacked the spiritual dimension. As a result, few churches were incorporated into plans, finally ceding their long-standing role as important neighborhood anchors to more humanist structures such as museums, libraries, and government buildings.

After the end of World War II, the explosion of the suburban development pattern and its focus on efficiency and privacy rang the final death knell. Public space and public buildings were no longer a component of development patterns and competed for land left over from private development. Because our suburbs, as the predominate development pattern across the United States (and exported worldwide) have sprawled in this low-density, auto-dependent landform, our civic facilities have been forced to build further away and bigger as a means to attract more students, parishioners, or congregants.

The overall decline in church attendance, coupled with the massive suburban migration that nearly emptied many urban neighborhoods, has left many sacred buildings today with declining or non-existent populations. Older urban areas like Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland, and Saint Louis have seen urban churches closing down at an alarming rate. Historically Catholic Saint Louis maintains a list of 111 parishes closed in recent history, and Buffalo has closed 77 parish churches and schools since 2005.1

Yet while churches are closing in some locations, they continue to grow in others. But unlike their urban, in-town counterparts, these campuses must accommodate exceptionally large facilities, classroom and office buildings, and occasionally a school. Perhaps, most important, these large sites must accommodate the fact that every single person that attends Mass will arrive by automobile, a fact that ensures that a large percentage of every capital dollar must be relegated to the construction of a parking lot rather than on the architecture of its buildings or the ministries that they provide.

[15]

New Urbanism and the Neighborhood Church

In October, 1993, approximately 170 designers and developers gathered in Alexandria, VA to discuss the travails of “the placelessness of the modern suburbs, the decline of central cities, the growing separation in communities by race and income, the challenges of raising children in an economy that requires two incomes for every family, and the environmental damage brought on by development that requires us to depend on the automobile for all daily activities.”2 Under the leadership of Peter Calthorpe, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Moule, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Stefanos Polyzoides, and Daniel Solomon—all architects—the Congress for the New Urbanism was formed and has quickly risen to the preeminent organization for addressing the “confluence of community, economics, and environment in our cities.”3

At its heart, New Urbanism is a movement about reclaiming the public realm–our streets, our parks, and our public buildings–and ordering the remainder of the land to complement these critical amenities. However, it is important to note that New Urbanism recognizes “that physical solutions by themselves will not solve social and economic problems, but neither can economic vitality, community stability, and environmental health be sustained without a coherent and supportive framework.”4

New urbanists have long asserted the need to reserve prominent locations within new neighborhoods for the erection of various civic buildings—town halls, fire stations, school, museums, and churches. The challenge until now has been for many to figure out a means by which the vertical infrastructure of the civic building can once again be integrated into the neighborhood after more than a half-century of moving away from it. Will congregations sacrifice the expansive greenfield campus with generous parking lots for a more urban location? And perhaps more importantly, can the re-insertion of the neighborhood church be more than a programmatic alternative to the community clubhouse and truly fulfill the spiritual needs of the neighborhood’s residents?

If You Build It, Will They Come?

Seaside, FL, the traditional neighborhood often considered the epicenter for the New Urbanist movement, reserved a location for a chapel in its earliest plans. While the neighborhood grew up around this site since 1981, it wasn’t until October 20, 2001 that the Seaside Interfaith Chapel was dedicated. Envisioned by developers Robert and Daryl Davis to be “a place for all faiths to worship,” the 50 foot tall, traditionally-designed structure with its 68 foot tall bell tower anchors the northern terminus of Seaside’s central green. The multi-function building has been a home to a wide variety of activities including weddings, lectures, and faith-based services. For a number of years it was used extensively by an evangelical Christian congregation, although they have since moved on to another slightly larger location about a mile away. During the time that congregation was in residence, “the chapel was as alive as it has ever been,” according to Robert Davis. Since that time, the chapel has been shared by a few feeder churches from Birmingham, Atlanta, and elsewhere during the summer months to serve their congregants who vacation in the resort community.

The New Town at Saint Charles in Saint Charles, MO, a suburb of Saint Louis, similarly constructed a chapel to serve as their neighborhood’s centerpiece. Presently, the highly prominent classical structure is the mission of a nearby Lutheran congregation, and shares time with a heavily booked wedding schedule. It is the wedding business that funds the operations and maintenance of the building. The rest of the week, the building sits largely vacant and devoid of life.

[16]

As Eric Jacobson, a Presbyterian pastor and the author of Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith, noted in an article in New Urban News in April/May 2005, “When economies of scale allow and the developer is interested in including a religious building as an amenity, a multi-faith structure is often less than optimal. A generic religious building doesn’t enliven the space nearly as much as one in which a flesh-and-blood congregation makes a significant investment.”5 The experiences of the New Town Chapel and Saint Charles Christian Church certainly bear out his statement.

Since early experiments in multi-purpose chapels underperformed the original intentions to help authenticate “community,” a number of developers have now begun to reserve spaces for the purpose-built church by a specific faith community.

Forging a New Congregation

In the I’On neighborhood of Mount Pleasant, SC, developer Vince Graham long hoped to find a congregation to build within the celebrated new urbanist village. After an article in the local paper that noted that the neighborhood had a civic site reserved, members of the Orthodox Church in America approached Vince with a proposal to build a new home for their parish. Enamored with the rich architectural heritage that the Orthodox faith carries with it through each of their buildings, the proposal was quickly accepted.

land was donated to Holy Ascension Orthodox Church and in May, 2008, the 3,500 square foot, Byzantine structure was dedicated. Interestingly, the parish took up residence in the neighborhood long before the church’s dedication by maintaining a Christian bookstore, Ascension Books, in an adjacent storefront. It was through this early presence in the neighborhood that the parish built a connection with many of the neighbors and merchants. Those “friends of the parish” helped to build the church literally through such tasks as driving the nails into the floor. And the neighborhood continues to support the church through its attendance at various social and cultural gatherings held at the church. Father John Parker, the parish’s first and current pastor, believes that their unique and formal liturgy is as immediately attractive to the general population as a non-denominational format would be. “But,” he adds, “we feel that we are able to evangelize every day through the art and iconography of the building as they walk, bike, and drive by. In this manner we are able to serve their specific needs of an Orthodox faith if they are so inclined but we view our mission simply to invite people to be in the orbit of the church.”

Designed by Andrew Gould, the $1.3 million Holy Ascension Church has become a true neighborhood landmark replete with the onion-domes in the orthodox tradition and, according to Father John Parker, “a perfect orientation of the structure to the east.” The latter of these is a designer’s challenge when given a lot not much larger than a postage stamp in an urban neighborhood. In addition, the size of the lot precluded many of the suburban amenities that are commonplace with most churches, including large parking lots. On-street parking and parking in the nearby town center lots accommodate parishioners’ cars.

Today, everyone who comes into the church, whether as a guest, a patron of the many events that are hosted there, or for The Divine Liturgy, has two reactions upon entering the small building–“wow” and “wow.” While they are not a fast growing parish, Father John rests his faith in God in more subtle ways: “We hope that our building will be a beacon to those who might not otherwise come in for the liturgy… I believe that beauty will save the world.”

Finding a New Home

Saint Alban’s Episcopal Church in Davidson, NC and the Church of the Good Shepherd in Covington, GA found new life amidst the front porches and tree-lined streets of their traditional neighborhoods.

In Covington, the local Episcopal church was already looking to relocate from their current in-town location to a new site that could better accommodate their long-term needs. When they learned that a site had been reserved by the developers of Clark’s Grove approximately one mile from the church’s present location, they knew that it was their destiny. Interestingly, there was [17] no civic site available in the second phase of the neighborhood, but because they were still early in the process, the developers tweaked the lots to create a site that accommodated the needs of the church. Today the $2.6 million, 240 seat church and separate administration building sit prominently on the third tallest hill in town.

Unlike Holy Ascension, they have a small parking lot, but they still rely heavily on on-street parking to satisfy their needs. It’s a bit ironic since the primary reason for their initial decision to relocate was the absence of parking. “It’s a different mindset than the suburban megachurch,” observes its rector, Father Tim Graham. “We are much more connected because we are right here in the neighborhood.” A number of parishioners walk to the church today—in fact more than when they were located downtown—and they hope that as the 300 home neighborhood builds out over its over 90 acres that many more will be attracted to the church. Father Tim believes that many people across the country “are longing to know their neighbors. The neighborhood church can offer not only a place to worship but also a social network as well.”

Also unlike the very high-priced homes in I’On, which is relatively isolated from its neighbors, Clark’s Grove is a piece of the larger neighborhood. Frank Turner, who leads the development team, is quick to point out that “not too far from the upper middle class homes of Clark’s Grove are some of the poorest people in the entire country.” Accordingly to Father Tim, “the location in the middle of this diverse neighborhood affords the church the responsibility to reach out to everyone.”

And finally in Davidson, NC an infill neighborhood is home to Saint Alban’s Church, within walking distance of the downtown and Davidson College. What started as a land swap to better orient an entrance became a fabulous partnership between the local church and the developer to create a very prominent landmark. When Doug Boone began planning his “new neighborhood in old Davidson” (he intentionally didn’t name the neighborhood), he and his design team were able to negotiate a mutually beneficial land swap that would increase the church’s property from two acres to seven, and place them at the termination of the main entrance to the neighborhood. From this point on, as the then-rector of the parish, Gary Steber notes, “it was all providential.”

The then-150 person congregation was able to construct the 300 seat, $1.8 million church and bell tower and dedicate it on October 21, 2001; coincidentally a day after the dedication of the Seaside Interfaith Chapel. “Since that time,” says current rector Father David Buck, “the parish has grown to more than 500 regular attendees over two services and more than 1,000 people connected to the church.” Its current location is a fulfillment of the original members’ desire to be seen throughout the community. Formerly worshipping in a house located deep in a neighborhood not too far from their present location, Saint Alban’s is very much a center of activity for the entire community. Today they host a robust schedule of music that is open to the community, which included a recent concert by noted pianist, George Winston. They are also beginning a community garden as a way to further reach out to the surrounding neighborhood and host the neighborhood association meetings. And finally, in a measure that harkens back to the multi-faith chapels noted earlier, they provide use of their facility to Temple Beth Shalom of Lake Norman on a regular basis until its congregation can build a permanent home of their own.

The Canary in the Coalmine

Efforts to restore the neighborhood church are still more the exception than the norm. New churches in traditional, walkable neighborhoods are few in number compared to the total number of new church buildings. But in some very important ways, these early experiments are the canaries in the coalmine, indicating that the trend may be successful and sustainable. While housing, jobs, and shopping have long since returned, churches have heretofore been much more cautious.

What New Urbanism presents to the church is an opportunity. Very simply, it is an opportunity to override the pattern of auto-dependent, sprawling campuses in the greenfields in favor of returning to the neighborhoods, and once again become important social and spiritual anchors. In doing so, the neighborhood church provides visual beauty, physical prominence, and the restoration of authentic urbanism alongside a physical return of the sacred and the spiritual to our daily lives. Most importantly, the neighborhood church can begin to once again fulfill its role in proclaiming the word of God within walking distance of our front porch.

Craig S. Lewis is the Principal of Lawrence Group Town Planners and Architects in Davidson, NC. http://www.thelawrencegroup.com

1 For Saint Louis, see: http://www.archstl.org/archives/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=79&Itemid=1
For Buffalo, see: http://www.cleveland.com/religion/index.ssf/2010/02/buffalo_catholic_diocese_finds.html
2 Congress for the New Urbanism, Charter of the New Urbanism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000), 1.
3 Ibid., 2.
4 Ibid., v.
5 Eric Jacobson, “The Return of the Neighborhood Church,” New Urban News (April/May 2005): http://www.newurbannews.com/churchinsideapr05.html.

The lighting of the “faro” or beacon of Santa Tecla in the Cathedral of Milan:

The Basilica of San Nicola at Bari in Southern Italy

The High Altar underneath lie the relics of St. Nicholas of Myra, aka Santa Claus

And here is the same article without the photographs:

he following article appeared in the September 2008 issue of ‘New Blackfriars’, a journal edited by the English Dominicans. The text of the article is reproduced in full here for the NLM with kind permission from the author, Fr Aidan Nichols OP and the editor of the New Blackfriars, Fr Fergus Kerr OP. I have omitted the references which appeared in the original article and supplemented the text with photographs:

Introduction

Church architecture has joined the disputed issues of contemporary Western Catholicism. Indeed, one commentator, the American Michael Rose, does not scruple to speak about ‘architectural culture wars’ in progress today. That the same author can vary that phrase by introducing, in place of ‘architectural’, the neologism ‘archi-liturgical’ should alert us to a fairly obvious fact. The debate about architecture is as organically connected with dispute about the Liturgy as a Modernist church in the twentieth century International style is disconnected from the traditional modalities of Catholic worship.
The ‘Jubilee Church’, erected by the Roman diocese in the year 2000 to a plan suggested by the New York architect Richard Meier, might be not the worst place to open an enquiry. That is owing to the high profile nature of this scheme, which was intended as a pilot for the third millennium of the Church’s story. An external view of the building must mention first its combination of rectangular and curved surfaces with no obvious symbolic resonance; the appropriate adjectives would be ‘analytical’ and ‘cubist’. Inside, the professor of fine arts at the American University in Rome found a stark interior, raw in its geometry, its furniture banal. The altar is an uncovered block of travertine, the ambo a box. No one had provided for the sanctuary either crucifix or image of the Mother of God, so a borrowed version of the one, from a neighbouring parish, and a repository version of the other took their place, the crucifix disconcertingly de-centred in regard to the altar. Though this observer praised the tabernacle for its colour and surface, she implies what a photograph soon confirms: it is a box—another one, if a golden one—with a circle inscribed on the side that opens. She admits that the aspiration of the building to austerity of form impresses, but doubts whether it adds up to a church, exactly—as distinct from a public building of some other kind. Her ascription of ‘iconoclastic tendencies’ to its architect, a secular Jew, would not necessarily be denied by their object. Meier argued that, had the diocese of Rome wanted a traditional church, they would not have invited him in particular to enter the competition to design it. That is a perfectly reasonable point. A defining feature of the Modern movement in architecture is to sever, of set purpose, all nostalgic ties with the past of a tradition.

As the year 2000 came and went, so it happens, an English Jesuit was working on a comprehensive study of probably the greatest of the twentieth century’s liturgical architects, John Ninian Comper, whose vision and technique could hardly stand in sharper contrast to Meier’s. Father Anthony Symondson’s biography of Comper is still awaited, but his study of Comper’s approach to building a church has already appeared. It is not only a fastidiously researched, excellently written and superbly illustrated study (from black and white photographs, many of them early, of these buildings). It is also a declaration of war. For Symondson, architectural Modernism has resulted in a rash of mediocre churches and the ruination of many old ones which depress their congregations, starve them of transcendence in worship, and deprive them of a sense of place. The importance of Comper is that

more than any other English church architect of the twentieth century, [he] endeavoured with passionate conviction to penetrate to the very core of Western civilization by studying the church art and architecture of Europe to find there spiritual values applicable to his own time.The ‘ideological impasse in which modern church architecture sleeps’, could be overcome with no compromise of liturgical principle if Comper’s understanding not only of the ‘indispensability of beauty’ but, more specifically, of the ‘legacy of Christian tradition’ were renewed. If I say that the overall effect of text and photographs in this book comes as a revelation, I shall also be declaring an interest. What follows in this essay is an attempt to second Father Symondson’s plea, notably by bringing into consort some voices harmonious with his, mainly—but not exclusively—from the United States.

The ground of my partisanship lies in the history of the subject— namely, sacred space as envisaged in Church tradition. Any visit to that history, with a view to drawing out pertinent principles, will prove hard to reconcile with those radically innovatory twentieth century buildings that reject both structure and content as found in pre-twentieth century use.

Some principles

We can note first the importance of the church building for traditional Christendom. It is hardly to be overestimated. Vera Shevzov writes of Russian Christian attitudes:

Given the meanings ascribed to the temple [i.e. church building], it is not surprising that Orthodox writers and preachers considered it an essential aspect of the Christian life. Without the temple, they main¬tained, there could be no salvation, since only it could facilitate the formation of the inner spiritual temple. Insofar as believers strove toward union and communion with God, by their nature they needed the structure and stimulus of matter. The church building provided the primary source of nourishment and healing for the human soul in its journey toward God.That tells us of the vital place of the church building, albeit in an idiom somewhat uncertainly positioned between religious rhetoric and social anthropology. Shevzov’s statement needs supplementing by a more theological definition of what a church is. For any reality, after all, ontology underlies function. Preferably, such a definition should draw on both Western and Eastern emphases since although our interest, like the problem, is Occidental, the Church here as elsewhere cannot be healthful unless she also breathes with her Oriental ‘lung’.

Writing as an Anglo-Catholic with Rome-ward inclinations, Comper comes obligingly to our aid. His prose has late Edwardian lushness but the saturated quality of this particular passage turns on its richness of allusion to Bible and Tradition.

[A church] is a building which enshrines the altar of Him who dwelleth not in temples made with hands and who yet has made there His Covenanted Presence on earth. It is the centre of Worship in every community of men who recognize Christ as the Pantokrator, the Almighty, the Ruler and Creator of all things: at its altar is pleaded the daily Sacrifice in complete union with the Church Triumphant in Heaven, of which He is the one and only Head, the High Priest for ever after the order of Melchisedech.Comper goes on to emphasise the catholic—that is, the ecclesial and cosmic—character of the church building, to the point of arguing that ‘a Protestant church’ (as distinct from meeting-house for preaching) is a contradiction in terms. Only a high doctrine of the ecclesial mystery can explain the existence of the historic church building of traditional Christendom and the attention paid it by the community.

A church built with hands …is the outward expression here on earth of that spiritual Church built of living stones, the Bride of Christ, Urbs beata Jerusalem, which stretches back to the foundation of the world and onwards to all eternity. With her Lord she lays claim to the whole of His Creation …And so the temple here on earth, in different lands and in different shapes, in the East and in the West, has developed or added to itself fresh forms of beauty and, though it has suffered from iconoclasts and destroyers both within and without, …it has never broken with the past, it has never renounced its claims to continuity.
In his keynote essay ‘The Atmosphere of a Church’ from which I have been quoting, Comper infers from such a conception that ‘it must …reduce to folly the terms ‘self-expression’ and ‘the expression of the age’, and most notably so when they are ‘used to cover such incapacity and ugliness as every age has in turn rejected’. And he inquires, pointedly, ‘Is there such a supremacy of goodness, beauty and truth in the present age as to mark it as distinct from the past, and demand that we invent a new expression of it?’ A saint or mystic may pass directly to God without any need for the outward beauties of art, or nature for that matter. Most people cannot. Comper stresses the eschatological setting of worship.

The note of a church should be, not that of novelty, but of eternity. Like the Liturgy celebrated within it, the measure of its greatness will be the measure in which it succeeds in eliminating time and producing the atmosphere of heavenly worship. This is the characteristic of the earliest art of the Church, in liturgy, in architecture and in plastic decoration, and it is the tradition of all subsequent ages.This need exclude no genuinely ‘beautiful style’. But the basic layout must be ‘in accord with the requirements of the liturgy and the pastoral needs of those who worship within it’, while ‘the imagery [found within it] must express the balanced measure of the faith’. For these purposes it is necessary to ‘look to tradition’. It is no more satisfactory to suppose, so Comper argues, that one can properly interpret these needs without reference to tradition than were we to neglect tradition in interpreting the New Testament or the Creeds of the Church. Anti-traditionalists are, generally speaking, consistent since ‘modernism in art is the natural expression of modernism in doctrine, and it is quite true they are both the expression of the age, but of one side of it only’. And Comper goes on with frightening prescience: ‘Rome has condemned modernist doctrine, but has not yet condemned its expression in art. The attraction of the modernistic is still too strong’.

Contemporary difficulties

It would be hard to imagine a manifesto in more brutal contradiction to Comper’s principles than the United States Bishops’ Conference Committee on the Liturgy document Environment and Art in Catholic Worship, produced exactly thirty years after he wrote. The 1978 text declared the assembly of believers the most important ‘symbol with which the liturgy deals’. The document thus relegates all other elements of Catholic worship, not only the ordained ministry but the rites themselves, and so, inevitably, their artistic and architectural elaboration, to a secondary status. In due course, this text stimulated a robust counter-reaction in the American church.

Thus, for instance, the liturgical theologian Francis Mannion found behind its extraordinary choice of controlling option an attitude he called theological ‘experiential-expressivism’. That is his term for a situation where liturgical forms serve chiefly to express the inspirations of a group. The role of art in exploring, after the manner (we might add) of Comper, the ‘Christologically founded rites’ of the Church’s ‘sacramental order’ can only have the most precarious future, so Mannion opined, if such a view of the Church’s worship should come to prevail.

The most frequent visual embodiment of ‘experiential expressivism’, at least in North America, is probably the domestication of church interiors. The only ‘model’ appeal to group self-expression can readily find in the paradigm contemporary Western culture turns out to be the living room or, more institutionally, the doctor’s waiting room or, yet again, the hotel foyer. Comfortable or plush, these have it in common that they are always tame. Such accommodation to secular space is hardly unknown in Britain either. In the words of one English commentator (like Comper, an Anglo-Catholic, at least at the time of writing): ‘The sanctuary became less a place to worship God than the apotheosis of 1960s man’s homage to G-Plan furnishing and his own immanence’. Mannion’s critique was equally severe, if more soberly expressed.

The kind of hospitality appropriate to worship is not psychological intimacy in the ordinary cultural sense: it is theological intimacy, that is, the bonding of persons of all degrees of relationship by their par¬ticipation in the trinitarian life of God through sacramental initiation. By the same token, transcendence does not mean divine remoteness from the communal, but the embodiment of divine glory in communal events.An alternative organisation of space to the domestic could bear a closer resemblance to the garage. But, as the closing sentence of this citation indicates, the Bauhaus style of stripped down simplicity is scarcely more helpful than Biedermeier cosiness. In total if unwitting conformity with Comper’s essay, Mannion comments: ‘there exists considerable difficulty in reconciling the principles of aesthetic modernism and those of the sacramental tradition of Catholicism’.

That is the artifice of under-statement. How can they possibly be reconciled if architectural Modernism seeks, as it does, to expunge symbolism and memory whereas the sacramental sensibility of Catholicism is founded on precisely these things? Helpfully, Mannion points for guidance to the post-Conciliar rite for the Dedication of a Church and Altar and the relevant sections of the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church. Given the Second Vatican Council’s movement of ressourcement in matters of early Christian Liturgy, it was certainly extraordinary that the bishops and periti expressed so little interest in the recovery of the forms of ancient Christian architecture and art, forms which are the matrix of all the subsequently developed styles the Church has known. In the post-Conciliar period, some assistance was granted, however, to the recovery of sanity by these ceremonial and catechetical documents.

In the year 2000 the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in the United States approved a replacement set of guidelines for Environment and Art in Catholic Worship. Built of Living Stones, for such was its title, represents a considerable advance on its predecessor. It does so by conceiving the church building as chiefly in function of the Church’s rites. But there is a price to be paid in terms of devotional purposes, as distinct from liturgical goals strictly so defined. For the document did not do justice to a swingeing—but not wholly unjustified—judgment passed by the Swiss dogmatician Hans Urs von Balthasar on how we live now.

Only in an age when man gives up his personal prayer and contents himself with being simply a communal animal in the church can one design churches which are determined purely functionally by the services of the congregation.

The need for re-iconisation

Steven Schloeder is an American architect who takes as his points of reference the dedication rites and the Catechism, as well as texts from the Second Vatican Council and Pope John Paul II. What he terms Modernist ‘whitewashed barns’—examples such as the Fronleichnamkirche at Aachen, date from so early as the late 1920s—proved, he reports, influential models for re-ordered, as well as newly built, churches in the post-Conciliar epoch. The emphasis of the Modernist movement on ‘universal space’ tallied only too well with the anti-hierarchical communitarianism which was a temptation of the mid-twentieth century liturgical movement, just as aesthetic reductivism dovetailed into notions of liturgical simplicity. The ruling maxim became ‘assembly is all’. Emphasis on the meal-aspect of the Eucharist at the expense of its more primordial sacrificial dimension—the ‘meal’ is enjoyment of the fruits of the sacrifice— followed naturally. In their worst, i.e. their most consistent, examples, writes Schloeder:

[The Modernists’] buildings have been incapable of addressing the deeper, mystical knowledge of the faith, much less the human soul’s yearning for the mystery of transcendent beauty. Rather they have fallen into a reductionist mentality, stripping the churches of those elements, symbols, and images that speak to the human heart. Their buildings speak only of the immanent—even as their liturgies studiously avoid the transcendent to dwell on the ‘gathered assembly’—and thus have departed from the theological and anthropological underpinnings of the traditional understandin of Catholic church architecture.

By the early 1960s, some commentators were resigned to soulless churches as all that a supposedly inescapable architectural modernity could provide. ‘Apart from the community which gathers in these churches’, wrote R. Kevin Seasoltz with seeming equanimity, ‘the buildings have little meaning’.

For Schloeder, in striking contrast, the church building is an icon of the spiritual reality of the Church. Here he has, I believe, rightly identified the nodal issue. Schloeder outlines briefly how in East and West this ‘iconic’ character of the church-building worked out. Given the authoritative role of Church tradition in these matters, this is in fact an indispensable exercise.

For the East: drawing on such Fathers as Theodore of Mopsuestia, Maximus Confessor and Germanus of Constantinople as well as later divines like Nicholas of Andida, Nicholas Cabasilas and Symeon of Thessalonica, Schloeder produces an overall identikit Byzantine interpretation of the church building. At the church entrance, the narthex signifies the unredeemed world: here in early times the catechumens and penitents foregathered. By contrast, the naos or central space represents the redeemed world crowned by a dome whose primary task is to recall the heavens, where Christ the Pantokrator, figured there, sits in his risen humanity at the Father’s right, holding all things together in heaven and on earth. But, writes Schloeder:

the dome also gives a sense of immanence, and suggests that the naos is also the Womb of the Virgin, as well as the Holy Cave of Bethlehem and the Holy Cave of the Sepulchre. Thus the building evokes many images of places where the Spirit vivifies the Church, which is born into the world, and redeemed into the Glory of the Lord.

Continuing his analysis, Schloeder describes the developed icon screen of late medieval and modern Byzantine-Slav churches as veiling the sanctuary which is ‘the fulfilment of the Mercy Seat of the Mosaic tabernacle, …the perfection of [the] Holy of Holies, and …even the sacramental representation of the very Throne of God’. The multiple ‘layeredness’ or rich complexity of such symbolic interpretation of the church building, even at a comparatively early stage of Greek Christian reflection, is shown in Schloeder’s summary of three chapters from the Mystagogia of the seventh century doctor St Maximus:

The entire church is an image of the Universe, of the visible world, and of man; within it, the chancel represents man’s soul, the altar his spirit, the naos his body. The bishop’s Entrance into the church symbolizes Christ’s coming into the flesh, his Entrance into the bema [the sanctuary] Christ’s Ascension to heaven.

Turning now to the West, such high mediaeval treatises as the canon regular Hugh of St Victor’s Speculum de mysteriis Ecclesiae, the black monk Abbot Suger’s Libellus de consecratione Ecclesiae sancti Dionysii, and bishop William Durandus’s Rationale divinorum officiorum furnish an analogical treatment to that found further east. The themes of the Body of Christ and the Heavenly City bespeak divine order in its integrity and fullness, which buildings shaped for the celebration of the Liturgy should reflect.

As Schloeder points out, the most common schema in the Western Middle Ages is the cruciform church as representation of the Lord’s own body on the Cross. In, for example, a mediaeval English cathedral with a black monk chapter:

Christ’s Head is at the apse which is the seat of governance represented by the bishop’s cathedra; the choir is his throat from which the chants of the monks issue forth the praise of God; the transepts are his extended arms; his torso and legs form the nave since the gathered faithful are his body; the narthex represents his feet, where the faithful enter the church; and at the crossing is the altar, which is the heart of the church.

That is not without a biblical basis. St Paul had called Christ the cornerstone (Ephesians 2: 20), and Christians members of his body (Romans 12: 5; I Corinthians 12: 12), so it was natural for Christians to see the church building as an expression of the body of the Lord. There was here a kind of Gospel transfiguration of the ancient conviction, classically expressed in Vitruvius’s De architectura, that the wonderful proportions of the human body—confirming in the microcosm the macrocosmic harmony of nature—are architecture’s proper measure. On such an understanding, nothing is more natural than to cover church walls with frescoes of the saints, or punctuate them with statues, since these remind the faithful how they are indeed part of Christ’s ‘mystical’ body. A church is, in Schloeder’s phrase, ‘built theology’.

Post-medieval churches continued to be designed to markedly symbolic plans. So Schloeder reminds us how Francesco Borromini, when remodelling the nave of St John Lateran, set up the twelve apostles in monumental statuary with the consecration crosses by their side, to bespeak the city of the Apocalypse which ‘stood on twelve foundation stones, each one of which bore the name of the one of the twelve apostles of the Lamb’ (Apocalypse 21: 4). Although St Charles Borromeo’s influential treatise Instructiones Fabricae et Supellectilis Ecclesiasticae which sought to summarise Catholic traditions of Church design shows a markedly practical bent, Borromeo began his work with the words:

This only has been our principle: that we have shown that the norm and form of building, ornamentation and ecclesiastical furnishing are precise and in agreement with the thinking of the Fathers … That could not but ratify patristic (and post-patristic) theological symbolism—not least for Borromini. The Instructiones were re-printed, largely unchanged, on at least nineteen occasions between 1577 and 1952.36 They remain pertinent to post-Conciliar Catholicism, since, in a passage from the Constitution on the Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council highlighted by Schloeder,

in any aspect of liturgical life: care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing.
That passage furnishes the leit-motif of his comprehensive 1998 study Architecture as Communion, just as it does for a more general study of liturgical principles which appeared a few years later, Alcuin Reid’s The Organic Development of the Liturgy.

Schloeder’s exposition itself indicates that the tradition of symbolic interpretation was not uniform. It had variants, stemming from differences in both architectural style and theological background. Comper had increasingly sought to maximise the advantages of such pluralism by a policy of ‘unity by inclusion’: Gothic and Classical styles, for instance, are not, in Christian use, opposites. Enough is in common to call this, in broad terms, the Tradition (of iconic interpretation of architecture, q.v.).

It is a tradition which requires reinstatement in our own time, above all through the construction of buildings that actually call for a reading along some such lines. Indeed, the post-Conciliar rite of Dedication of a Church and Altar demands it, explicitly calling the church building a representation of the heavenly Jerusalem. If that rite bears any authority, then the shapes and volumes of sacred space need relating to ecclesial functions within an organic composition, and both massing and decoration allowed to recover their full symbolic valency. This in turn will permit the personal, devotional inhabiting of space as well as its corporate liturgical equivalent.

Architecture and devotion

Mannion, writing in 1999, shortly after Schloeder, and on the eve both of Built of Living Stones and Meier’s Jubilee church, was not especially sanguine as to prospects. In the secular realm, architectural Postmodernism and New Classicism were in full-scale reaction against the shortcomings of the twentieth century Modernist movement, and not least, its canonising of its own practices over against all earlier historical models. Among ‘liturgical-architectural theorists’, however, and by implication the practitioners who drew on their writings in constructing or ‘re-ordering’ church buildings, there seemed no lessening in the ‘hostility toward the past and the radical distance from traditional church styles sought by architects and designers after Vatican II’. The minimalism and chilling frugality of iconography in most modern or recently re-ordered Western Catholic churches was impossible to square with the sort of historically accurate rules-of-thumb Comper had laid down. The largely aniconic interiors of Modernist Latin-rite churches were increasingly out of kilter with the major place still given to images in domestic Catholic life and devotion. In his courageous editiorial Mannion wrote:

The functionalist principles of modern architecture and their inability to handle the ambiguity and polyvalence of Catholic devotionalism have conspired to render church architecture since Vatican II exceedingly anti-devotional. Many have lamented the removal from Catholic churches of popularly revered elements, as well as the disappearance of important conditions for the devotional life. The alienation from modern church architecture that exists on the part of many ordinary Catholic worshipers derives in great part from the rejection by the newer styles of traditional elements conducive to the devotional.
That has reference to a wide variety of devotional objects, as well as to the overall ‘atmosphere of a church’ (Comper’s phrase). The most important issues it raises are, however, those of altar and tabernacle, for which a comparatively full treatment seems, consequently, justified.

(i) The altar

In particular, the chief devotional focus of the Church gathered for the Holy Sacrifice, its principal rite, is, as Comper so forcefully realised, the altar, which is the symbol of Christ and the place where his paschal sacrifice is renewed. The altar is also the place from which, in holy Communion, the faithful are fed by the Bread of his body and the Wine of his precious blood. In a wider symbolic cosmology, the altar holds a central place as well. Their name coming from the word altus, a high place, the altar-steps bring to mind the ascent to the Temple of Jerusalem, the climb up the sacred mountain on which Zion was built. As the holy ‘mountain’, the altar remains the heart of the church. This makes treatment of the altar especially crucial.

First of all, there is the issue of orientation. In traditional usage, the altar is where possible placed at the east, on the solar axis. Facing the altar, one faces the rising sun, which overcomes cosmic darkness as Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension overcame spiritual. Orientation is a particularly neuralgic topic in contemporary Catholicism. The now widespread desire for a general return to versus apsidem celebration for the Liturgy of the Sacrifice (as distinct from that of the Word) constitutes an inescapable ‘head-on’ challenge to ‘Modernism’—understanding by that term a stance that is at once architectural, liturgical, ecclesial, sacramental and—by implication at least—eschatological.

‘The custom of orientation is biblical and it expresses the eschaton.’ This simple statement sums it up. In a more complex presentation of the Judaic and early patristic materials, the Oratorian scholar Uwe Michael Lang has shown that sacred direction—specifically to the East—was the most important spatial consideration in early Christian prayer. Its significance was primarily eschatological (the East was the direction of the Christ of the Parousia, cf especially Matthew 24: 27 and 30) and, naturally, it applied to all the faithful, including their ministers. Archaeological evidence shows the great majority of ancient churches to have an oriented apse. Granted that the altar was the most honoured object in such buildings, the only safe inference is that the celebrant stood at the people’s side, facing East, for the Anaphora. In the minority of buildings (notably at Rome and in North Africa) that have, by contrast, an oriented entrance, the position is less clear, but Lang argues persuasively that the celebrant in such a case prayed facing the doors (and thus the people) but did so with hands and eyes alike raised to the ceiling of the apse or arch where the decorative schemes of early Christian art are focussed. For Lang—who stresses that even when ‘orientation’ is not the geographical East but only a conventional ‘liturgical East’—common direction is theologically important. Celebration versus populum in the modern (eyeball-to-eyeball) sense was unknown to Christian antiquity. Not for them the situation where:

The sight-lines stop at [the celebrant], centre on his person, competence, visage, voice, mannerisms, personality—uplifting or unbearable alike. At its most objectionable, such a practice ‘elevates the priest above the Sacrament, the servant above the Master, the man above the Messiah’. The late Louis Bouyer remarked with disarming frankness:

Either you look at somebody doing something for you, instead of you, or you do it with him. You can’t do both at the same time.
The historian of the Western Liturgy Klaus Gamber put it more theologically:

The person who is doing the offering is facing the one who is receiving the offering; thus he stands before the altar, positioned ad Dominum, facing the Lord.
From the English experience Lang makes the powerful point that the adoption of the eastward position by the Oxford Movement clergy was key to their efforts to give a Catholic character to the Church of England, precisely because that position was taken (by opponents as well as allies) to express the sacrificial nature of the Eucharistic rite as a Godward act.

To the issue of the oriented altar may be added the issue of veiling which covers such topics as not only veils of fabric, as in the side-curtains of the ‘English’ or ‘Sarum’ altar revived by Anglo-Catholics like Comper in the early twentieth century, but also, in paint, wood, and stone, the iconostasis of the East and the rood screen and cancelli or communion rails of the West. The Writer to the Hebrews addresses his readers:

Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way which he opened for us through the curtain [veil], that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart. (10: 19–22)
The American Dominican Michael Carey, recalling how cancelli or ‘rails’ where the faithful receive the Lord’s body and blood have historically given this access to the sanctuary architectural expression, comments:

If the sanctuary [of the church building] is that sacred place which holds in a special way the Real Presence of the Lord on the altar and in the tabernacle; and if the veil or veiling structure around the sanctuary represents the humanity of Christ, as the Epistle to the Hebrews teaches; and, further, if we can only enter into God’s Presence through the humanity of Christ: then, that veiling structure is necessary …Some veiling structure, then, continues to be of utmost importance for a proper liturgical spirituality. Its removal would symbolically eliminate the necessity of Christ’s Humanity, as if we could enter into the presence of the Divinity without it.
For Carey this is crucial to, in the title of Comper’s essay, ‘the atmosphere of a church’. The sense of, in Romano Guardini’s words, ‘the altar as threshold’, sets up an isomorphism between the movement of the Incarnation and the spatial inter-relation of sanctuary and nave. In both cases God stoops down to encounter us, from there to assist us, not without difficulty, across the barrier into his own realm of burning holiness and light. Here, as with the Byzantine icon-screen, threshold is not only borderline. It is also crossing over.

In that Byzantine tradition, indeed, the earlier low railed screen of the cancelli into which occasional images might be fixed, had developed by the sixteenth century into the full, floor to ceiling, wall-like iconostasis of first Russian and subsequently Greek and other churches. The role of the iconostasis is subtle, as the early twentieth century Russian Orthodox philosopher Pavel Florensky explains.

[T]he iconostasis is a boundary between the visible and invisible worlds, and it functions as a boundary by being an obstacle to our seeing the altar, thereby making it accessible to our consciousness by means of its unified row of saints (i.e. by its cloud of witnesses) that surround the altar where God is, the sphere where heavenly glory dwells, thus proclaiming the Mystery. Iconostasis is vision.
In other words, veiling at one level permits unveiling at another. The iconostasis does not only carry images of the saints but evokes the inter-related mysteries of Incarnation and Atonement. As a sympathetic English interpreter explains:

In front of the altar, the Royal Gates with Gabriel’s message and the Virgin’s answer open the way to God’s historical gift of Himself, still present with us. And on the two sides of the gates the double significance of Bethlehem and Olivet is revealed: on the north, the Virgin and the Child; on the south, Christ Pantokrator – the All-Emperor: the kenosis is answered by the Kingdom. Behind the veil, the altar speaks of Calvary, but Easter at once is all around us. The altar is also the life-bringing Tomb, the Fountain of the Resurrection.
The Western rood screen performs the same function of theologically significant veiling, with its painted or carved saints running along the line demarcating nave and sanctuary, surmounted by the Cross of the Lord. It does not represent an obscuring of the altar but its visibility through a ‘window’ framed by the saints and other motifs of Catholic doctrine. It is strange that, although the 1970 General Instruction of the Roman Missal deemed that the sanctuary should be ‘marked off from the nave either by a higher floor level or by a distinctive structure and decor’, its promulgation was followed by a rash of ‘removalitis’: the demolition of screens and even communion rails in many—if not most—Latin-rite church-buildings. For Durandus, the rail between altar and choir had taught specifically ‘the separation of things celestial from things terrestrial’. Awaiting communion kneeling at the rail encourages a moment of concentrated recollection before the altar which is less easy to reproduce when standing behind other communicants in a line.

Can one regard the addition of a ciborium (civory) or tester (painted canopy) as veiling? Though altars with civories—a columned structure above the altar made in stone, wood, or metal—often had curtains enabling the altar itself to be veiled between the beginning of the Preface and the end of the priest’s communion (missals from the first half of the sixteenth century still refer to this), the civory’s function was, rather, to honour the altar. They were favoured features of Comper’s buildings. The Anglican liturgist Bishop David Stancliffe writes:

To give [the altar] emphasis, and to combine physical proximity with a sense of transcendence, a ciborium adds dignity and colour. It also gives it a defined place within the undefined space of the church. Comper is familiar with the early Roman basilicas, and uses their syntax, if not their vocabulary.

The ‘tester’ is an alternative way of making the same gracious point. A feature of Comper’s earlier work, and presuming the ‘English’ altar, this canopy, suspended from the ceiling, was a lighter structure than the civory. Characteristically, Comper decorated the tester with a painted Christ in majesty comparable – he hoped—to the great mediaeval Sicilian mosaic majesties of Cefalu and Monreale. From the civory or tester would hang (if Comper could persuade the patrons) the reserved Sacrament in a pyx, of which Stancliffe remarks:

Where this has been done, there is a remarkable sense of the presence of Christ filling the building – something the more locked-away methods of reservation fail to communicate.
(ii) The tabernacle

The question of the the Eucharistic tabernacle (the normal Roman Rite equivalent to Comper’s hanging pyx), and its adornment and placing, is inescapable here. The history of tabernacle design is more interesting than cupboards like the box at the Roman Jubilee church might lead once to suspect. In early modern Catholicism, Eucharistic tabernacles were most frequently constructed on the model of the Ark of the Covenant in the Solomonic Temple: that is why they were veiled with a fabric covering usually changed according to the liturgical colour of the season or day. Fairly commonly, adoring angels appear in the iconography on tabernacle doors or adjacent areas, again evoking the Israelite Ark which had its own figures of attendant cherubim (Exodus 25: 18–22). In earlier epochs, animals, fruits or flowers could be incorporated into tabernacle design, to signify how the entire world is en route to transfiguration via the Eucharistic Lord. Tabernacles have also been designed as churches in miniature, since the Eucharistic sacrament which they house ‘unifies the person of Christ and his living body, the Church’. Again, the tabernacle has taken the form of a treasure-chest, because the entire spiritual treasury of salvation is present in Christ, or, in another format, of a tower reaching up toward heaven: an obvious symbolism for the earthly tabernacle qua prefiguring the heavenly. So much iconological effort implies the existence of a powerful theological rationale.

The sense of distance that Catholics have traditionally kept from the Eucharistic tabernacle, often venerating it from afar, is not so much a pagan devotional remnant, but rather a statement that the earthly worshipper remain at some distance from the heavenly tabernacle. The Eucharist will only be received in all its fullness in the eternal banquet of heaven, while on earth the fullness of Eucharistic reality remains literally and spiritually ‘reserved’ for the future.
Whatever sculptural form the tabernacle takes, both popular feeling and the general Tendenz of Roman documents since the immediate aftermath of the post-Conciliar reform militate against the marginalisation it has suffered in many new or re-ordered churches. The 1967 Instruction Eucharisticum Mysterium of the Congregation of Rites appeared to lack a proper theology of the distinct but inter-related modes of relation to the Paschal Mystery of Christ enjoyed by the tabernacle on the one hand, the consecrated Elements on the altar on the other. Yielding to a pervasive contemporary temptation, it foreshortened the eschatological orientation which was itself the main theological advance, vis-a-vis earlier magisterial statements on the Liturgy, of Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium. Once again, it is an American voice that sounds the alert.

As permanent signs of Christ and His Pasch, the reserved Eucharist and the Church do not conflict with the unfolding of the paschal sacrifice in the liturgy when they are present prior to the consecration, rather they are signs formed in previous liturgies which draw us back to the eternal Pasch present anew in the contemporary celebrations …Because the consecration, the Host on the altar, the assembled Church, and the tabernacle have distinct relations to the Pasch, they do not detract from each other when simultaneously present.
By 1980, when John Paul II’s Congregation for the Sacraments and Divine Worship issued its Instruction Inaestimabile donum, it seemed plain that ‘problems had arisen with a diminution of devotion to the Eucharist, not disassociated from inadequate attention to the place of reservation in new or renovated churches’. Hence the Instruction’s insistence that the tabernacle be located in ‘a distinguished place …, conspicuous, suitably adorned and conducive to prayer’. The same note is struck in Benedict XVI’s Post-Synodal Exhortation Sacramentum caritatis. Without a prominent tabernacle (or hanging pyx – why not?) there is no possibility – special supernatural graces aside—of what Stancliffe terms a sense of the presence of Christ filling a building. In The Spirit of the Liturgy Joseph Ratzinger maintained:

The Eucharistic Presence in the tabernacle does not set another view of the Eucharist alongside or against the Eucharistic celebration, but simply signifies its complete fulfilment. For this Presence has the effect, of course, of keeping the Eucharist forever in church. The church never becomes a lifeless space but is always filled with the presence of the Lord, which comes out of the celebration, leads us into it, and always makes us participants in the cosmic Eucharist. [And he asks rhetorically,] ‘What man of faith has not experienced this?’
Conclusion

Francis Mannion relaxed his characteristic iron discipline of understatement when he wrote:

[A] future generation of historians will make a stronger connection than we do today between the early iconoclastic movement, the Reformation ‘stripping of altars’, and the post-Vatican II treatment of the historic heritage of Catholic art.
Three years previously, in the unlikely context of the London Tablet, the stained glass artist Patrick Reyntiens had entered a similar plea.

t begins to become more and more obvious that the exact ambience and cultural context of the visible elements in the interiors of modern churches should be thought out and acted upon in far greater seriousness and depth than hitherto … [T]he sacred space has been violated since Vatican II very much as it was first at the time of the Reformation, and this must be rectified for the health of the Church.And so, Quo vadis? As if with prophetic insight into the ravages of architectural Modernism, the American Neo-Gothic builder Ralph Adams Cram wrote in the opening year of the twentieth century:

We must return for the fire of life to other centuries, since a night intervened between our fathers’ time and ours wherein the light was not.
That was Comper’s message too, but in his case, it came to entail a comprehensive openness to all the great stylistic epochs of the Church as builder. That was possible owing to both the ontological character of beauty as a transcendental determination of being and the fundamental internal coherence or organicity of the Church’s tradition. The unifying element in any particular building comes from the architect’s contribution. A church must be not only a rationally designed liturgical space but a unified work of art.

John Henry Newman, in the nineteenth of the Parochial and Plain Sermons took as his text Psalm 78: 69, which in the Authorised Version reads, ‘He built His sanctuary like high palaces, like the earth which He hath established for ever’. Newman used the homiletic opportunity to argue against the opinion that Jesus’s prediction to the Woman of Samaria—future worshippers ‘shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth’ (John 4: 23)—nullifies the psalm in question (and in so doing renders trivial the topic of this essay).

Our Saviour did not say to the Samaritan woman that there should be no places and buildings for worship under the Gospel, because He has not brought it to pass, because such ever have been, at all times and in all countries, and amid all differences of faith. And the same reasons which lead us to believe that religious edifices are a Christian ordinance, though so very little is said about them in Scripture, will also show that it is right and pious to make them enduring, and stately, and magnificent, and ornamental; so that our Saviour’s declaration, when He foretold the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, was not that there should never be any other house built to His honour, but rather that there should be many houses; that they should be built, not merely at Jerusalem, or at Gerizim, but every where; what was under the Law a local ordinance, being henceforth a Catholic privilege, allowed not here and there, but wherever was the Spirit and the Truth. The glory of the Gospel is not the abolition of rites, but their dissemination; not their absence, but their living and efficacious presence through the grace of Christ.A church-building, says Newman, represents

the beauty, the loftiness, the calmness, the mystery, and the sanctity of religion …and that in many ways; still, I will say, more than all these, it represents to us its eternity. It is the witness of Him who is the first and the last; it is the token and emblem of ‘Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and for ever’ …That is why they are: happy …who, when they enter within their holy limits, enter in heart into the court of heaven. And most unhappy, who, while they have eyes to admire, admire them only for their beauty’s sake, and the skill they exhibit; who regard them as works of art, not fruits of grace; bow down before their material forms, instead of worshipping ‘in spirit and in truth’; count their stones, and measure their spaces, but discern in them no tokens of the invisible, no canons of truth, no lessons of wisdom, to guide them forward in the way heavenward!
We enter these iconic buildings aright if, as we do so, we contemplate the mystery of the Church and, through the Church, the Kingdom. Go to the greatest of Comper’s churches – to St Mary’s Wellingborough (Northamptonshire), or St Cyprian’s, Clarence Gate (London)—and you will learn how.

Viallard de Honnecourt

A critical bibliography from 1600:

http://www.villardman.net/bibliography/bibliog.html

[align=:23yz4btk]Villard de Honnecourt[/align:23yz4btk]

From Wikipedia:

Villard de Honnecourt (Wilars dehonecort, fol. 1v; Vilars de Honecourt, fol. 15v) was a 13th-century artist from Picardy in northern France. He is known to history only through a surviving portfolio of 33 sheets of parchment containing about 250 drawings dating from the 1220s/1240s, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (MS Fr 19093). The great variety of subjects (religious and secular figures suitable for sculpture, and architectural plans, elevations and details, ecclesiastical objects and mechanical devices, some with annotations), makes it difficult to determine its purpose. Other subjects such as animals and human figures also appear.

The traditional view, since the discovery of the portfolio in the mid-19th century, is that Villard was an itinerant architect/mason/builder, but there is no evidence of him ever working as an architect or in any other identifiable profession. None the less, it is clear from his drawings that he was interested in architecture and that he traveled to some of the major ecclesiastical building sites of his day to record details of these buildings. His drawing of one of the west facade towers of Laon Laon Cathedral cathedral and those of a radiating chapels and main vessel bay, interior and exterior, of Reims Reims Cathedral are of particular interest.

Villard tells us, with pride, that he had been in many lands (Jai este en mlt de tieres) and that he made a trip to Hungary where he remained many days (maint ior), but he does not say why he went there or who sent him. It has recently been proposed that he may have been a lay agent or representative of the cathedral chapter of Cambrai Cathedral to obtain a relic of St. Elizabeth of Hungary who had made a donation to the cathedral chapter and to whom the chapter dedicated one of the radiating chapels in their new cathedral chevet.

Among the mechanical devices Villard sketched are a perpetual-motion machine, a water-driven saw, a number of automata, lifting devices, war engines (a trebuchet) as well as a number of anatomical and geometric sketches for portraiture and architecture. The claim that he drew a simple escapement mechanism, the first known in the West, is now questioned.

Villard’s vast diversity in his sketchbook has caused him to be compared to such great minds as Leonardo Da Vinci, who also specialized in many different categories of art and science.

http://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Villard_de_Honnecourt.djvu&page=65

Index to the Carnet of Villard de Honnecourt:

http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Carnet_(Villard_de_Honnecourt)/Codex

The European Policy Network for Historic Places of Worship

http://www.placesofworshipeu.org/forum-2010/

Background information
A group of organisations concerned with the future of historic places of worship from a number of European countries met in the UK in 2009 to discuss the need for and possibility of greater collaboration within similar organisations across Europe on key policy issues. A steering group has been formed to investigate the level of need, interest and options for developing a new policy network. It is hosted by the Churches Conservation Trust (England) in partnership with a range of organisations across Europe whose logos below link to their websites.

Aims of the network:
■raise the profile and protect Europe’s historic places of worship
â– provide a means of communication, through this website and a Forum event
â– share common problems and solutions
â– identify areas where a Europe-wide response is appropriate
â– work with and build on existing and past initiatives on historic churches, including the Report to the Council of Europe 1989 and the Montreal Forum on future uses for churches in 2005

And on architectural salvage:

http://www.traditional-building.com/814.htm

An article on modernist church architecture by Duncan Stroik:

The church has not adopted any particular style of art as her own . . . The art of our own times from every race and country shall also be given free scope in the Church, provided it bring to the task the reverence and honor due to the sacred buildings and rites.
-Sacrosanctum Concilium, no. 123
If you wish to see great Modernist architecture you must have plenty of time and your own Lear jet.
-Robert Krier
To many educated observers it would seem that the reductivist buildings commissioned for Roman Catholic worship today are the direct correlary of Church teaching, modern liturgical studies and contemporary theology. Of course, if that were so, Modernist architecture would be the officially sanctioned style of the Church and difficult to criticise. Indeed, in the 1960’s after the Vatican Council, there was a great surge of construction of churches which were austere and often resembling commercial or factory buildings, bearing out the belief that they were mandated by the spirit of Vatican II. But these concrete boxes, barnlike shelters and sculptural masses all had precedent in the pre-Conciliar era. In fact, radical new church configurations had been experimented with since the dawn of Modernism in the late 19th century. The idea to model churches on auditoria, Greek theaters, large houses, or theaters in the round grew out of low-church Protestant worship, whereas the reductivism of post-Conciliar churches grew out of the Modernist architectural movement in Europe.

This is to say that current church architecture is not merely the child of modern theology, it is also a child of the “masters” of Modernism: Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and others. The Church willingly accepted and even adopted the architecture of the secular realm for its sacred buildings. Yet in promoting this “International Style,” did the Church unknowingly adopt the philosophy of Modernism and unwittingly undercut its own theological agenda?

First of all, it is well understood that the philosophical basis for Modernist architecture can be discovered, like her theological cousin, in the French Enlightenment and German rationalism. What is also of note is the parallel between the architecture of the Protestant Reformation and the iconoclastic architecture at the end of our century. In the Reformation, Catholic churches were stripped of statuary, paintings and traditional symbols. New churches were designed as “meeting-houses,” as if going back to early Christianity when believers met in each others’ homes. Architecture, having lost its ability to signify the sacred, became seen as merely providing for the assembly’s material or functional needs. The concepts of the church as auditorium and theater in the round derive from early Calvinist buildings which were designed to enable people to see and hear the preacher, such as at Charenton, France. Modernism was particularly attracted to the auditorium and theater types because of their scientific claims to acoustical and visual correctness, as well as the belief that the form of a building should be determined by its function. In the Reformation, destruction of altar, tabernacle and sanctuary were commonplace, and often a pulpit or baptismal font replaced the altar as a focal point. The theological proscriptions against images and symbols in the Reformation were taken up by the Modernists in the 20th century, becoming a minimalist aesthetic requiring austerity and the absence of image.

An essential tenet of Modernism at the turn of the century was the need to break with the past, in order to find a national architecture or an “architecture of our time.” Inspired by Hegel, buildings were seen as a reflection of the spirit of the particular age in which they were built, and therefore distinct from previous epochs and styles. This was confirmed by the “modern man” who because of his uniqueness in history required a unique architecture, preferably abstract, progressive, and scientific. It was made clear by the early promoters of Modernism, such as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Otto Wagner, that any semblance of historical elements or styles was not of our time and must be rejected. At first this rejection of tradition took the form of subtracting or abstracting traditional motifs in buildings. Later, being inspired by non-objective paintings and sculpture, Modernist architecture sought to end the distinction between floor and ceiling, interior and exterior, window and wall, and sacred and profane, which architecture has historically gloried in.

Aesthetically, Modernist architecture was inspired by works of engineering including bridges, industrial buildings, and temporary exposition halls which were large, economical and built fast. An essential paradigm was the machine: Swiss architect Le Corbusier claimed the plane, the boat, and the car were models for a functional architecture. Just as a plane was designed efficiently for flight, so a house was a machine for living in. Just as the anthropological, spiritual, and traditional aspects of domus for dwelling and raising a family were stripped away in the “house as a machine for living in,” so would ritual, icon and sacrament be purged from the “church as machine for assembling in.”

Drawing on the writings of Viollet Le Duc and John Ruskin, it was alleged by the historian Nicholas Pevsner and others that the modern age required the use of modern materials such as steel, glass, and reinforced concrete, whereas morality required that they be expressed in the building. It was also argued that a modern style grew out of the use of modern materials and that these materials lent themselves inherently to a reductivist aesthetic. This was partially a critique of the ongoing construction of masonry buildings such as St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the National Cathedral, being built in the 20th century, as well as many chapels and churches built by architects in Classical or Medieval modes. In fact at the same time Auguste Perret built a Modernist hall church in concrete in Paris, Ralph Adams Cram and others were building Gothic and Renaissance churches in reinforced concrete (at West Point and California) complete with ornament, moldings and sculpture. Not unlike the ancient Romans who used concrete hidden within the walls and domes of Classical buildings, early 20th century traditionalist architects brilliantly used the most current technology of construction, heating and plumbing all within a humanistic aesthetic.

While the majority of Catholic churches built in the U.S. before 1940 were in traditional styles, many Protestant, Unitarian and Christian Scientist congregations experimented with industrial building forms. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple of 1904 is a cubic auditorium with geometric and floral ornament, while “der liebe meister” Louis Sullivan designed St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in 1914 as an abstracted Roman theater. In Germany in the late 1920’s, Otto Bartning designed Evangelical churches in the round out of glass and steel and concrete with little iconography or delineation. Dominikus Bohm followed his lead by designing a number of expressionistic Catholic churches including St. Engelbert, a circular building complete with parabolic shaped ceilings. Rudolf Schwarz also designed Catholic churches in abstracted rectangles and the flowing space of the “International Style.” Schwarz and Bohm were both associated with the liturgical movement in Germany and produced abstract spaces for Catholic worship long before Vatican II.

After World War II, the Modernist movement was embraced as an expression of technological triumph of the war. Many pastors followed the lead of government and big business by building abstract, asymmetrical and futuristic churches in modern materials. In France, for the rustic church of Notre Dame at Assy, Dominican Father Piere Marie-Alan Couturier commissioned fifteen of the best known Modernist artists to make murals, tapestries, mosaics, and stained glass. Also under the patronage of Couturier, the architect Le Corbusier designed perhaps the two best-known churches of this century: the pilgrimage church at Ronchamp and the Dominican Monastery at La Tourette. Le Corbusier made it very clear from the beginning that he was not a religious man and undertook the projects because he was given the freedom to express his ideas within an open landscape. Ronchamp is the epitome of the church as abstract sculpture and was likened by Le Corbusier to a temple of the sun. La Tourette, on the other hand, is a severely orthogonal building with a tomb-like concrete chapel and a cloister that can not be used. The monastery had many problems, including a high incidence of depression due to its prisonlike cells and oppressive spaces which forced it to close (for a time it became a retreat center for Modernist architects). Fr. Couturier, believing that all “true art” is “sacred art,” argued that it was better to have a talented atheist making Christian art or designing churches than to have a pious artist who was mediocre. This premise was the opposite of the historic view of the church as a “sermon stone,” a work of faith by architect, parish and artisans. For Couturier, the church building was no longer seen as a teacher, minister, or evangelist but rather as a space for functional assembly. Likewise, the architect was no longer an inspired co-creator but a conduit for his own personal expression and the “spirit of the age.”

Interestingly, other than Wright in the U.S. and Aalto in Finland, few of the Modernist “masters” were interested in designing churches or synagogues (Le Corbusier refused other commissions). Part of the belief in “modern man” was that religion was something unscientific, and hence churches were irrelevant to contemporary needs. While most of the Modernists came from Protestant backgrounds, the majority were known atheists or agnostics. Mies van der Rohe and Aero Saarinen designed churches which were seen as sublime objects, yet when imitated by others the originals lost their iconic power, which came from being a unique expression of the architect. The Benedictines in the U.S. were the equivalent of the Dominicans in France, being great patrons of Modernist art and architecture, as well as being liturgically progressive. At Collegeville, Minnesota they hired Marcel Breuer, originally of the Bauhaus, and at St. Louis Airport, for new abbeys. These buildings were sleek, non-traditional and critically acclaimed by the architectural establishment.

Contemporary with these buildings, the documents of Vatican II were being developed. While short in length, the chapters pertaining to the arts are poetic, inspiring and alive to the artistic tradition of Catholicism. However, in spite of the intention by the Council to reform and recover liturgy, particularly early Christian liturgy, there was little interest shown by architects in the recovery of early Christian architecture. The Council’s acceptance of styles of the time and rejection of any particular style can be seen as a careful opening of the window to Modernism. The architectural establishment, by this time thoroughly cut off from its historical tradition, opened up the “window wall” and came in like a flood. At this point a few architects and designers such as Anders Sovik, Frank Kaczmarcik and Robert Hovda made an effort, following Schwartz and Couturier, to argue for a modern architecture imbued with a Christian theology. Partially based on the studies of Jungmann, Bouyer and other scholars they promoted a “non-church” building emphasizing the assembly, without hierarchical orientation, fixed elements, or traditional architectural language. These architects’ rejection of most of Christianity’s architectural and liturgical development, coupled with their promotion of an abstract aesthetic, seems to baptize, confirm and marry Modernism and the Church. These principles of modern liturgical “spaces,” later embodied in the Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy document of 1978 (Environment and Art in Catholic Worship), are essentially the iconoclastic tenets of 1920’s Modernism.

Interestingly, at the same time the Catholic Church was reconciling Herself with Modernism in the early 1960’s, the architectural profession witnessed the beginning of a serious critique of heroic Modernism. Architects Robert Venturi, Louis Kahn, and Charles Moore in their buildings and writing proposed a new old architecture of memory, symbol, and meaning, spawning what became known as the “Post-modern” movement. They also inspired the work of numerous other architects including John Burgee, Michael Graves, Allan Greenberg, Philip Johnson, Thomas Gordon Smith, and Robert Stern who willingly embraced humanistic urban planning and a variety of architectural styles.

While there still continues to be allegiance to the Modernist style, many of its philosophical beliefs have been questioned and criticized during the past thirty years. The preservation movement, repentant Modernist architects, architectural historians, and structural disasters all have exposed the limitations and failures of Modernism. The liturgical design establishment on the other hand has barely acknowledged the critique of Modernism and continues to promote Modernist revival or even “deconstructivist” church buildings as witnessed in two recent international competitions for a church in Rome and the Los Angeles Cathedral.

And while most architects trained since World War II do not know how to design Classically there is an ever increasing number of architects practicing in traditional languages all over the world as well as a number of architecture schools teaching humanistic alternatives to Modernism. Of great inspiration to architects, pastors and laity alike are the chapters in the Catechism of the Catholic Church devoted to the Universal Church’s teaching on sign, image and the church as a visible symbol of the Father’s house. In recent decades we have seen new or renovated Catholic churches which express these aims and those of Vatican II through a restoration of sign, symbol and typology. These include the renovated St. Mary’s church in New Haven, the renovated Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City, parish of San Juan Capistrano in California, the church of the Immaculate Conception in New Jersey, the church of St. Agnes in New York, and Brentwood Cathedral in England. These and other buildings indicate that the future of Catholic architecture will go beyond the narrow confines of the Modernist aesthetic to the broad and vital tradition of sacred architecture.

Duncan Stroik, A.I.A. is an architect and an associate professor of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame