Praxiteles

An interesting book on Victorian architecture:

Although more than a century has passed since the Victorian era ended, the great achievements of the period 1837-1901 are still grossly undervalued. Phrases such as ‘Victorian monstrosity’ are bandied about by many who ought to know better. Professor Curl’s robustly argued and magnificently illustrated book reveals much confident, colourful, rumbustiously eclectic architecture, and shows that the Victorians went further than anyone since Roman times to potty-train Urban Man.

He describes the palette of styles available to the Victorians (who were not afraid to experiment by mixing them); unprecedented building types; new materials; ecclesiastical buildings that, arguably, were superior to mediaeval exemplars; the responses of a vital society to contemporary challenges; and the built fabric set within the context of intellectual complexities of the age. Wearing his learning lightly, he presents his case with grace, gusto, and elegance, weaving a marvellous kaleidoscope of themes and impressions to bring the Victorian period to life in a work which will give readers much to ponder, savour, and enjoy.

This superb volume is brought alive by hundreds of top-quality illustrations, many of them historic photographs.

The pre-Victorian background, with the profound meanings of architectural style; the rise of Gothic; legislative changes; Secularism; Urbanisation; the Sublime; and Eclecticism.
The Palace of Westminster; Pugin; Ecclesiology; the Round-arched styles; Italian and other influences; Classicism; ‘Greek’ Thomson; Tudor, Jacobethan, the Egyptian Revival, and other styles.
Iron, glass, colour, and the new materials; ‘Go’, ‘Roguery’, and ‘muscularity’; the French connection; the progress of Gothic; church-building in the religious contexts; Ultramontanism; Anglo-Catholicism; and late-Victorian Gothic.
The Domestic Revival; ‘Queen Anne’; Free Eclecticism; Classicism and Baroque Revivals; domestic architecture, including philanthropic housing and model villages; Arts and Crafts; the Ruskin problem.
Traffic and communications; hygiene; disposal of the dead; theatres; pubs; hotels; commercial buildings; civic architecture; monuments and memorials.
Extensive references, Bibliography and comprehensive Index.

Emeritus Professor James Stevens Curl is a distinguished architectural historian with many books and articles to his credit, including The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape, The Egyptian Revival: Ancient Egypt as the Inspiration for Design Motifs in the West; Classical Architecture: An Introduction to its Vocabulary and Essentials, with a Select Glossary of Terms; Piety Proclaimed: An Introduction to Places of Worship in Victorian England; Georgian Architecture; The Victorian Celebration of Death; The Honourable The Irish Society and the Plantation of Ulster, 1608-2000; and The Art and Architecture of Freemasonry (1991 and 2002 – which won the coveted Sir Banister Fletcher Award for Best Book of the Year in 1992). He has acquired an enviable international reputation for thoroughness of research, impeccable scholarship, and lucidity of style, and has not been afraid to venture forth on paths unfrequented by those of a more timid disposition. Now, in his eighth decade, his acerbic wit, intellectual curiosity, and fluency of expression remain undiminished.

St Bartholomew’s, Brighton, henry Wilson 1898

Another case:

Monday, June 07, 2010
One woman’s fight to save a Syracuse church

“If this weren’t the 21st century, I’d be burned at the stake,” Anna Giannantonio is saying.

Anna might have reason to worry.

She’s fighting the Roman Catholic Diocese of Syracuse over Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church, at 503 Park St.

The diocese closed Holy Trinity Feb.14 after 119 years.

The congregation was urged to attend Mass at St. John the Baptist Church, several blocks to the north.

Anna, and a handful of former Holy Trinity parishioners, are campaigning to have the church declared a protected site by the city of Syracuse. The city Planning Commission takes up the issue at 6 p.m. Monday.

She’s also put in the paperwork to have Holy Trinity made a national landmark. And there’s are papers in the channel to ask the Vatican to reverse the Syracuse diocese because the closing is contrary to church law.

“She has a lot of support,” according to Katie Walker Scott, of Holy Trinity’s organization of Concerned Parishioners. Katie had been a church member 55 years. Her mother was there before her.

“This has kept us together,” she explained.

Anna is a petite, white-haired North Side neighbor of Holy Trinity who had been a member there 30 years. She’s 81 and works as a page at the Onondaga County Library downtown. She was in the accounting department of Dey Bros. Department store downtown when it closed.

She came to Syracuse from Italy in 1949.

“I was born in Italy,” she tells me. “I’m an American by choice and a citizen of the universe.”

Still, Anna explains that it troubles her to stand up to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. She says she took on the fight “for the neighborhood, for the people. That church belongs to the congregation. The diocese is assuming it’s theirs. They’ve taken away a stable place. The diocese has disassembled us. We are dispersed souls.”

The Catholic diocese opposes Anna’s petition. They’ve filed an objection with the Planning Commission.

Kate Elliot Auwaerter, of the Landmark Preservation Board, said there is nothing in the local preservation ordinance to stop Anna’s application from moving ahead. However, that issue may prove tricky if the application moves to the Common Council.

Federal law kills such an application if the owner does not approve, according to Tony Opalka, of the state Historic Preservation office in Albany.

“This is a universal problem,” with church closings all over, he explained. “Syracuse is but one example.”

He said Anna’s application for state and national recognition is on hold until the issue is resolved. The state has not moved on other applications for Catholic churches, Tony said.

Ownership was not an issue for the Roman Catholic cathedral downtown, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, but that’s because it’s part of a historic district.

Designation as a Syracuse protected site has been approved by the Landmark Preservation Board. Its next stop is the Syracuse Planning Commission Monday. If that board approves, it will be sent to the Common Council.

Protected status has been granted other Catholic churches in the past, including Assumption, Sacred Heart and St. John the Baptist. Other churches with city protected status include United Baptist on Beech Street, 2nd A.M.E. Zion on East Fayette Street, Plymouth Congregational and St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Anna explains her main concern at the moment is preserving the Holy Trinity building, with its murals and stained-glass windows she says are worth at least a million dollars.

The church was put up by a group of German families who were attending Assumption Church on North Salina Street.

Early Masses were in German and the church minutes were kept in the German language.

The church, designed by architect Charles William Eldridge, was built to hold 950 worshippers.

The former school building next door is rented to the Syracuse City School District as an immigrant education center.

Anna lives in a house on Woodruff Avenue she’s had about 57 years. Her sister lives across the street.

She carries a cloth bag stuffed with the papers of her campaign, including a copy of a deed she found at the county courthouse. It deeds the church from the “Holy Trinity Society” to “Holy Trinity Church.”

There are also a sheath of plastic-covered pictures of Holy Trinity’s stained-glass windows and its murals.

Anna argues with the Catholic diocese’s contention it owns the church, saying it belongs to the people who worshipped there. “We were not consulted about closing it,” she says.

The diocese cited costs and shortages of priests in closing several Catholic parishes in Syracuse, including St. John the Evangelist on North State Street, the original cathedral of the diocese, which shuts down at the end of this month.

Danielle Cummings, spokesperson for the diocese, said she was unable to obtain a copy of the letter written to the city on a historic designation for the church.

In general, she explained diocesan leaders have opposed historic designation of its churches. Any sale of a church must be approved by the bishop.

I ask Anna where she goes to Mass. “Sometimes, I go with my sister to Our Lady of Pompeii (also on the North Side). But just now, I don’t want to join.”

She said she has joined a small Sedgwick Rosary Group that meets in a back room at Holy Trinity, “just to keep up,” she explains.

Anna worries about the spiritual damage closing does to a church.

“Spiritually,” she says, “this has knocked a lot of people out.”

From the City Journal, Winter 2007

The Houses of Worship That Hallow New York

by David Garrard Lowe

A tour through three centuries of history and architecture

A city without significant places of worship is like a garden devoid of flowers. Images immediately spring to mind: Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s, its majestic dome looming above London like a guardian angel; Notre Dame of Paris, perfectly expressing, in the words of Victor Hugo, “variety and eternity”; Amsterdam’s severe but noble seventeenth-century Spanish-Portuguese synagogue; and Antonio Gaudí’s breathtaking, unfinished Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, forever growing like a tree whose final height is incalculable. Yet to be significant, a place of worship does not have to be of great scale but only to possess something of beauty and something of memory.

Many American cities—Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles, for instance—have downtowns almost swept clean of places of worship. Either they never existed, or they followed the faithful to the suburbs. Two old cities, Boston and Philadelphia, do indeed possess notable churches at their core, but no American city approaches New York in the richness and variety of its churches and synagogues. Part of what makes the metropolis great, they are wondrous depositories of architecture and art, of history and urban memory.

There is no better spot to illustrate this than St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery, which is a perpetual image of civility in the hurly-burly neighborhood of Second Avenue and 10th Street. Though the fieldstone Georgian structure dates from 1799, the site is the oldest place of continual worship in the city, for it was on this spot that Peter Stuyvesant in 1660 built a chapel on his farm, his “bouwerie.” By turns irascible and generous, bigoted and brave, the one-legged Dutchman, when he became the fifth governor of New Amsterdam in 1646, found it an impoverished, quarreling little colony. When he surrendered it to the British in 1664, he had set it on a course toward lasting prosperity. Stuyvesant is still at St. Mark’s, just to the right of the church, lying in the vault he built. His bust above it was a gift from Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. There is a spooky coincidence attached to that vault, for when, in 1953, it was opened to receive the body of the last of Stuyvesant’s direct descendants, Augustus Van Horn Stuyvesant, it was found that there was but one empty place left among some 80 already filled, as if the governor had foreseen three centuries earlier exactly how many descendants he would have.

By the late eighteenth century, Stuyvesant’s old Dutch Reformed chapel was derelict, and in 1793 his great-great-grandson deeded the land to Trinity Church. The lawyer for the incorporation of the new Episcopal parish was none other than Alexander Hamilton. The facade of St. Mark’s dramatically exhibits a half-century of changing taste. Atop the reticent Georgian sanctuary is a belfry and steeple designed by Ithiel Town, the noted architect of some of the finest houses on the north side of Washington Square. It is a simply detailed Greek Revival composition, one of the most beautiful steeples in the city. The church’s elegant Anglo-Italianate cast-iron portico, from the famed Cornel Foundry, was added in 1854.

St. Mark’s has always played an important part in New York’s cultural life. Among the founders of the parish was Clement Clark Moore, long credited with the authorship of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” New York mayor and famed diarist Philip Hone lies in the churchyard. Washington Irving was a constant visitor, finding inspiration at St. Mark’s for his History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker. In the twentieth century, Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Robert Frost read their poetry in the old sanctuary, while Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and Ruth St. Denis enlivened the place with their dancing. Reports of the dancing led the Episcopal bishop of New York to keep a sharp eye on the rector, Dr. William Guthrie, particularly after the good doctor began leading eurhythmic liturgical processions through Greenwich Village.

Peter Stuyvesant also played a role in another of New York’s precious places of worship, Congregation Shearith Israel (Remnant of Israel), also known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, on Central Park West at 70th Street. It is the oldest Jewish congregation in the city, with a history reaching back to 1654, when 23 Sephardic Jews, mostly Spanish and Portuguese, fleeing the Inquisition in Brazil, landed in New Amsterdam. Governor Stuyvesant did not welcome them, fearing that they would undermine the established Dutch Reformed Church. “To give liberty to the Jews will be very detrimental,” he opined, “because giving them liberty, we cannot refuse the Lutherans and Papists.”

But the Dutch West India Company, with an eye to expanding trade, let them remain in the colony. The congregation’s first synagogue was on Mill Street, now South William Street, and over the years, it followed the migration of New York uptown, first to Crosby Street, then to 19th Street, and then to its present location in 1897.

Arnold Brunner gave Shearith Israel a magnificent classical Beaux-Arts exterior of white marble. With its four tall fluted Corinthian columns, arched entrances, and decorated pediment, the synagogue is intended to recall the synagogues in Palestine at the time of the Roman occupation. Brunner’s Beaux-Arts opulence continues in the interior, where the main sanctuary is a dazzling amalgam of red and yellow marbles, of bronze and gold, and of splendid art-glass windows in the manner of Louis Tiffany.

But it is in “The Little Synagogue,” or chapel, that the history of the congregation comes alive. Essentially a replica of the Georgian Mill Street synagogue, it is a white and gold chamber very similar in feeling to the famed Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island. At its center is a crimson-damask-covered reading desk of 1730, surrounded by an elegant railing, upon which stand four fifteenth-century Spanish candlesticks. The white pews with mahogany trim are of the eighteenth century, as is the silver Sabbath lamp, while in the ark rest two Torah scrolls damaged during the British occupation of New York in the American Revolution.

New York’s places of worship are hardy plants with long taproots. They flourish in unlikely places. On East 60th Street between Park and Lexington avenues, a block filled with state-of-the-art hairdressers, health-food restaurants, and bars catering to various tastes, is a simple three-story red-brick building that gives no hint that it is a church. But for half a century, it has been home to one of Gotham’s most historic congregations, “L’Eglise Française du Saint-Esprit,” the French Huguenot church.

Persecution of Protestants in France was endemic throughout most of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. There had been a respite when, in 1598, Henry IV promulgated the Edict of Nantes, giving non–Roman Catholic Christians the right to worship freely, hold public office, and have access to education. But thousands had already fled to neighboring nations ruled by their co-religionists, particularly Holland. Word spread among these religious refugees of the richness of the new lands across the Atlantic, and in early March, 1623, the ship New Netherland set sail from Holland with some 30 families, most of them French Protestants. In May, they reached the mouth of the Hudson River. Some settled on what is now Governor’s Island, and others became, in all probability, the first European settlers on Manhattan Island.

Over the years, the French Protestants got along well with the Dutch, whose Calvinist faith was very similar to their own, and they even shared a place of worship. But the Huguenots wanted their own sanctuary, where they could have services in French. “It is one thing to get along well with one’s Dutch neighbors,” a Huguenot wrote to a friend in England, “but it is quite another thing to listen to a long sermon in Dutch.” In 1688, a small chapel rose on Petticoat Lane, now Marketfield Street, near the Bowery.

The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 led to a vast new wave of French Protestants fleeing to America. They would carry names that would become famous in the annals of the United States: Boudouin (which became Bowdoin), Rivoire (which became Revere), Dana, Vassar, Collier, Leroy, Delano, Durand, Delancey, Thoreau. To accommodate these new arrivals, the congregation built a much larger place of worship at what is now Pine and Nassau streets. The name they chose for the edifice was “Le Temple du Saint-Esprit.” (French Protestants traditionally call their houses of worship temples, not churches.) But, as the years passed, the Huguenots, like the Spanish and Portuguese Jews, followed the trek of New Yorkers northward, first in 1831 to Church and Franklin streets, where “Le Temple” became “L’Eglise,” next to East 22nd Street, and then at the end of the nineteenth century to a grand Gothic Revival structure on East 27th Street. But by the 1920s, this cavernous sanctuary was far too large for the shrinking Francophone congregation, and in 1926 it sold the property. After worshiping for a number of years in rented spaces, the congregation in 1941 purchased an empty school building on East 60th Street and remodelled the ground floor into a chapel seating some 70 people.

Saint-Esprit may be small, but on Sunday the congregation still worships in French, still uses the old silver chalice it has carried with it, still reads from its ancient Bible, and still lustily sings those Protestant hymns, the singing of which once would have condemned their ancestors to be galley slaves. And on the Sunday nearest April 15, the day the king promulgated the Edict of Nantes, Huguenots from all over the New York metropolitan region gather to celebrate religious liberty. Looking down from the walls surrounding them are the coats of arms of Huguenot families. Some are renowned, such as Jay, and some are surprising, such as Runyon.

It would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between the tiny Huguenot chapel and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, just a few blocks to the south. The grand cathedral, stretching 328 feet from Fifth Avenue to Madison Avenue, its twin spires majestically rising 330 feet into the air, seems to have been predestined to be on its superb site at the heart of midtown Manhattan. But there was no predestination about it; rather, determination and a bit of luck.

The story begins at another St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on Mulberry Street, just below Houston. The simple brown facade of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, as it is now called, was not always so simple, for it was given delightful Gothic Revival decoration by its architect, Joseph François Magnin, a Frenchman who was one of the architects of City Hall. That decoration was lost in a disastrous 1866 fire. Perhaps the cathedral’s most distinctive feature now is the high brick wall surrounding its tree-shaded churchyard, where lie the noted merchant, Stephen Jumel; Andrew Morris, the first Roman Catholic to hold public office in New York; and Captain Pierre Landais, second in command to the father of the United States Navy, John Paul Jones. The wall gives the cathedral an evocative old-world charm.

In the years when Old St. Patrick’s was being constructed, between 1809 and 1815, there were barely 13,000 Roman Catholics in New York State and only three churches—two in New York City and one in Albany. The first three bishops of the diocese may have been men of faith, but they were not memorable. The fourth, John Joseph Hughes, who had been born in Ireland in 1797, was both memorable and the father of the St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue. He was made bishop of New York in 1842 and, in 1850, New York’s first archbishop. Known as “Dagger John” to his enemies, John Hughes was a powerful orator and debater, an effective advocate of Catholic education—he founded Fordham—and a fiery defender of Catholic rights. When in the spring of 1844 anti-Catholic Nativists threatened to attack and burn Old St. Patrick’s, Hughes surrounded it with armed members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and warned Mayor James Harper that if harm came to any Catholic or any Catholic church, New York would burn.

Hughes understood perfectly the importance in a city of great places of worship and wanted a cathedral far grander than Old St. Patrick’s to express in stone the demographic, political, and religious reality of the thousands of Irish and German Catholics pouring into the city. (Shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century, 40 percent of New Yorkers were Roman Catholic.) The diocese originally acquired the land where the cathedral now stands with the idea of using it for a much-needed Catholic cemetery. But the solid stone lying just below the surface made that impractical. When in 1850 Hughes proposed building a new cathedral, he selected this stony spot for its site. Far from the center of New York, in an area of unpaved, muddy streets and squatters’ shacks, this choice was quickly dubbed “Hughes’s Folly.”

To design his new cathedral, Hughes turned to the perfect architect for the project, James Renwick. He was not an obvious choice. Renwick was an Episcopalian, closely allied to the city’s Protestant aristocracy: his mother was a Brevoort, his wife an Aspinwall. But he had designed what is arguably New York’s most beautiful Gothic Revival church, Grace Episcopal on Broadway at 10th Street. Completed in 1846, Grace Church’s light-colored Tuckahoe marble sanctuary, with its striking tower, pinnacles, and tall pointed windows, is to this day one of the most aesthetically pleasing sights in New York. In addition, Hughes and Renwick got on well. Both wanted a cathedral that would dazzle the city, and Hughes, as far as possible, was willing to pay the price. Renwick used the effectiveness of the light stone of Grace Church to persuade his patron to employ gray granite and white marble for St. Patrick’s rather than the much cheaper brownstone, the material of which Trinity Church and many of New York’s most prominent sanctuaries were constructed. Though it added thousands to the cost of the cathedral, Hughes agreed.

On August 15, 1858, before a crowd estimated at more than 100,000, the archbishop laid the cornerstone for his new cathedral. But because of the Civil War and constant problems with financing the ambitious project, the cathedral was not ready for services until 1879. Hughes had died in 1864, and his successor, John McCloskey, the first American Cardinal, presided over the dedicatory mass. Fate had placed the cathedral on a stretch of Fifth Avenue that was no longer a region of shacks but a grand boulevard where some of the richest men in America lived: Whitneys, Goulds, Vanderbilts.

If Renwick and Hughes were happy colleagues on the great project, no such camaraderie existed between Renwick and McCloskey. Whereas Hughes would not flinch at daring to spend money for the best in building materials, McCloskey was more than ready to cut corners to save dollars. He quickly altered Renwick’s plan to have true stone vaulting for the nave ceiling, insisting instead on the use of cheaper plaster painted to look like stone. (New York would have to wait more than half a century for Ralph Adams Cram to show in his stupendous nave for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine the matchless aesthetic power of true stone vaulting.) He also vetoed Renwick’s proposal to have as seating individual chairs in the manner of European cathedrals. Instead McCloskey opted for pews, on the grounds that they could be rented to the highest bidder; some indeed did go for over $2,000. Yet Renwick’s interior, an unforgettable array of clustered columns, soaring pointed arches, and glittering stained glass, magnificently fulfills Archbishop Hughes’s dream that the cathedral would be “worthy of God, worthy of the Catholic religion, and an honor to this great City.”

Delightfully, Renwick had the last word in his battles with McCloskey. When St. Patrick’s was almost complete, he offered to present a window. It is there in the south transept and is dedicated, not surprisingly, to Patrick, apostle of Ireland. The upper part of the window does indeed portray the saint attired as a bishop; the lower part, however, depicts Renwick himself showing the cathedral plans to a seated, sympathetically portrayed Hughes. But standing, an unmistakable glare of disapproval upon his face, is Cardinal McCloskey, in his hand a paper with his proposed alterations to Renwick’s original plan. The story goes that the window had been put into place before McCloskey saw it, and no one dared remove a window dedicated to St. Patrick in his own cathedral.

Not all of New York’s places of worship have their roots in Europe. An outstanding example is the First Church of Christ, Scientist at Central Park West and 96th Street, designed in 1899 by Carrère & Hastings, the architects of the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. Its lofty limestone exterior presents an unexpected combination of classical elements, including Ionic columns, deep cornices, and arched windows. The First Church terminates in a stone spire rising from a square tower embellished with urns and pediments, dramatically recalling the eighteenth-century London churches designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. The vast interior, with seats for 2,400, reflects the flourishing state of this American denomination founded in Boston in 1879 by the remarkable Mary Baker Eddy. The most striking features of the interior—flooded with light, as Mrs. Eddy said that churches should be—are its powerful arches: great bent beams of steel sheathed with plaster and embellished with robust rosettes, garlands, and elegant curved molding. The combination of raw architectural power and delicate beauty makes this one of the city’s supreme Beaux-Arts chambers. In recent years, its once-thriving congregation has dwindled, and the amazing First Church has been sold to an evangelical Protestant congregation that promises to be a worthy guardian of this masterpiece.

One of the gifts of New York’s places of worship is that they provide infinite surprise. Walking down a narrow street or turning into a square, one is sometimes forced to stop and ask, “What is this?” and “How has this survived?” Just such a feeling strikes one on John Street near Nassau, in lower Manhattan. There among the behemoths of the financial district sits an unassuming structure that pays simple tribute to the Greek Revival with a Palladian window above its entrance, a fine cornice, and a crisp pediment. This is the John Street Methodist Church, and it resembles nothing so much as those Dissenter chapels that dot Wales and parts of Ireland. And this is appropriate, for though the sanctuary dates only from 1841, its lineage goes back to 1768, when it was organized by an Irish preacher, Philip Embury. John Street is the oldest Methodist congregation in North America. In the little museum beneath the sanctuary are a number of significant Methodist relics, including a clock given in 1769 by John Wesley, the illustrious chief founder of the denomination. As one stands in the John Street Church, it is interesting to speculate how from such small beginnings grew those magnificent Methodist institutions, among them Northwestern University outside Chicago, Southern Methodist in Dallas, Vanderbilt in Nashville, and Boston University.

Stuyvesant Square evokes a similar experience. There stands the plain Fifteenth Street Friends Meeting House, constructed in 1860. Flanking it are two very different places of worship. To the right rises the imperious brownstone Romanesque Revival St. George’s Episcopal Church, designed in the mid-nineteenth century by Leopold Eidlitz and Otto Blesch. St. George’s aura of grandeur is appropriate for a parish whose most famous member was J. P. Morgan. To the left of the Fifteenth Street Meeting House holds forth the mad 1960s concrete modernism of St. Mary’s Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite. Standing between its two voluble neighbors, the Meeting House offers a welcome diffident architectural dignity. Its designer, Charles T. Bunting, made it beautiful by making it simple: red brick, a white wooden Doric portico, large windows of clear glass, all composed beneath a broad gable. The architecture perfectly expresses the Quaker faith, a faith that eschews ostentation and begins its services with silence.

For sheer surprise, though, it would be hard to beat the Church of the Transfiguration, just off Fifth Avenue on East 29th Street. On a block of lofts and high-rise apartment buildings, a garden filled with shrubs, trees, and (in season) flowers flourishes, as though it were in rural England, or at least in Westchester. The entrance to the garden is through one of the rarest architectural features in New York City, a tile-roofed pavilion, known as a lych-gate, modeled on those in English churchyards, under which a coffin could rest before the burial service began. (“Lych” in early English is the word for “body.”) Stepping into the garden, one sees a low church structure of such engagingly picturesque variety—towers, dormer windows, high-peaked roofs—that it could pass for a stage set in a Disney movie. Though the date when the structure was begun—1850—is known, the name of no architect has been attached to it. So peculiar is the church’s almost natural growth that it is affectionately dubbed “The Holy Cucumber Vine.”

But the Church of Transfiguration has another nickname: “The Little Church Around the Corner.” How it got that appellation is a well-known story. In 1870, the noted actor George Holland died, and when his friend Joseph Jefferson, the leading comic actor of the day, went to a grand church on Madison Avenue to arrange for his funeral, the pastor icily dismissed him: the church did not conduct funerals for those in that “morally questionable” profession. But, the pastor added, “I believe there is a little church around the corner where they do that sort of thing.” “If that be so, sir,” Jefferson replied, “God bless the little church around the corner.” Holland’s funeral indeed took place at the Church of the Transfiguration. The event made the church beloved by those in the acting profession.

Stepping into the cottage-like sanctuary, one comes face-to-face with an amazing panoply of memorials to actors and actresses and writers. There in brilliant stained glass is Joseph Jefferson himself, portrayed in his famous role as Rip Van Winkle, supporting the shroud-wrapped body of his friend George Holland. There is a window by John LaFarge showing Edwin Booth, the great tragedian (and brother of John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln), dressed as Hamlet. Additional windows and memorial tablets honor, among others, John Drew, Cornelia Otis Skinner, Stephen Vincent Benét, Will Rogers, Gertrude Lawrence, and P. G. Wodehouse.

There is also a memorial to the matchless short-story writer O. Henry. His funeral at the little church had a sardonic twist that would have fit perfectly into one of his tales. The funeral was scheduled for 11 am on a June day in 1910. Unfortunately, a wedding had been scheduled for the same day at the same hour. As the bride and groom approached the church, the groom saw the hearse and was able to whisk his future bride away for an hour to the nearby Holland House Hotel. When at noon they were married, the only thing the bride found amiss were the numerous flower petals in the aisle from what she thought was another wedding.

Not only do New York’s churches and synagogues provide inspiration and surprise; their towers are often significant urban landmarks that speak eloquently of the multiple cultures that built this city. A number immediately come to mind. There is the Brick Presbyterian Church on Park Avenue at 91st Street, a dignified colonial revival edifice of 1938 by York & Sawyer, which looks as though it had been lifted bodily from a New England village green. The restraint of the Brick Church’s three-tier red-brick and white-wood steeple perfectly proclaims the congregation’s Calvinist faith. Another example is Trinity, at the head of Wall Street, Richard Upjohn’s 1846 brownstone Gothic-revival masterwork. Its 280-foot spire—the equivalent of 24 stories—is like some ecclesiastical spaceship ready to whisk Trinity’s Anglophile Episcopalians back to the mother country. There are the twin minarets with copper onion domes with which Henry Fernbach crowned his 1872 Central Synagogue. Their exotic Moorish form is a constant reminder to all who pass the corner of Lexington Avenue and 55th Street of that time when, before their expulsion in 1492, Jews flourished in Spain.

But no New York house of worship has a more spectacular site for a spectacular tower than Riverside Church, perched high on a bluff above the Hudson River between 120th and 122nd streets. Constructed between 1926 and 1930 under the patronage of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the majestic Baptist sanctuary designed by Allen & Collens is a glorious sheath of thirteenth-century French Gothic ornament hung upon a steel frame. Riverside’s 392-foot tower—the most notable landmark between midtown and the George Washington Bridge—houses the 74-bell Laura Spellman Rockefeller Carillon, a memorial to John D. Jr.’s mother. That Riverside is Gothic should come as no surprise, for John D. Jr. wanted that style for Rockefeller Center, begun shortly after the completion of his awesome church.

Rockefeller Center was built, not Gothic, but in the French moderne style known as art deco, popular in the 1920s and 1930s. A number of New York sanctuaries of the period embrace deco totally or in part. Among them is St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue between 50th and 51st streets, designed by the great architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. Opened for worship in 1919, St. Bartholomew’s, crowned by a high dome, is essentially Romanesque Revival with touches of the Byzantine. But the church was not completed until 1927, and in the 1920s it was given furnishings that include spectacular examples of art-deco religious imagery. Among the most beautiful is the pulpit of golden Siena marble that incorporates a standing cubist Isaiah, while the newel at the base of its steps is in the form of a deco angel garbed as an English judge wearing a glorious full-bottomed wig. The pulpit is the work of Lee Lawrie, the sculptor responsible for the powerful Atlas before Rockefeller Center’s International Building.

Goodhue died in 1924, and his successor firm, Mayers, Murray & Philip, designed the imposing Church of the Heavenly Rest on Fifth Avenue at 90th Street. Completed in 1929, Heavenly Rest is a striking example of stripped-down Gothic Revival transmogrifying into art deco. Its massive, austere interior, a composition of geometric cubist planes, owes as much to the French moderne style as to the architecture of the Middle Ages. Dominating its Fifth Avenue facade are two massive limestone piers, from whose base, flanking the church’s entrance, sprout two winged deco angels by Ulrich Ellerhausen, and whose upper elevations resemble the tops of skyscrapers.

Undoubtedly, though, New York’s most complete example of an art-deco religious structure is the Salvation Army’s combined Territorial Headquarters and Centennial Memorial Temple of 1930 on West 14th Street. Its architects, Voorhees, Gamelin & Walker, were responsible for some of New York’s most magnificent art-deco skyscrapers, including the Irving Trust, now the Bank of New York, at One Wall Street.

Evangeline Booth, daughter of the Salvation Army’s founder, William Booth, supervised every detail of its Centennial Temple; it is the only place of worship in New York with special seats for the overweight. Its entrance, a high arch of triumph in a ziggurat moderne style—with metal gates whose primary motif is a rising sun, appropriate for an organization dedicated to bringing hope to the hopeless—leads to a wall flanked by doorways, upon which is emblazoned the Salvation Army’s battle cry, “Blood and Fire.” The temple’s entrance is one of Manhattan’s supreme art-deco monuments.

Marvelous architecture and magnificent history come together in an unforgettable ensemble on lower Broad- way. There, between Fulton and Vesey streets, stands a structure so different from the surrounding stone, glass, and steel office buildings that it brings to mind a grace- ful wooden sailing ship caught among hulking aircraft carriers.

St. Paul’s Chapel, Manhattan’s only intact pre-Revolutionary edifice, reverberates with memories that go back to the founding of the republic and beyond. Its elegant Georgian proportions, its deep portico of four fluted Ionic columns, and its immense Palladian window recall the eighteenth-century London churches of James Gibbs, such as Saint-Martin’s-in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Square.

This is precisely what its architect, Thomas McBean, intended when he designed this chapel of Trinity Church in 1764. New York was English, and the style was intended to make Englishmen feel at home when they worshiped a God whom they were certain spoke in the stately phrases of the King James Bible. St. Paul’s tall, elegant steeple, rising in stages to a gilded weather vane, is an architectural minuet. St. Paul’s interior, a palette of white, gold, and soft pastels, and Waterford crystal chandeliers that catch the sunlight pouring through the small-paned clear glass windows, magically transports the visitor from a world of boom-box cacophony to one of Haydn’s quartets.

The chapel possesses two precious objects that speak of the beginnings of the nation. The reredos behind the altar, a carved wooden depiction of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, was designed by Pierre L’Enfant, the architect who planned Washington, D.C. On the left aisle is the handsome mahogany armchair in which, on April 30, 1789, following his inauguration as the first president of the United States at the nearby City Hall, George Washington sat when he prayed at St. Paul’s.

On September 11, 2001, the ancient chapel, barely six blocks north of the World Trade Center, came through the ordeal virtually unscathed. Its fragile steeple survived intact; not one of its windows, filled with thin, old glass, shattered. Afterward, New York’s mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, remarked from the chapel’s reading desk: “When the towers fell, more than a dozen modern buildings were destroyed or damaged. Yet somehow amid all the destruction and devastation, St. Paul’s chapel still stands—without as much as a broken window. It’s a small miracle.”

But then it is not too much to say that innumerable New York places of worship, with their surprising beauty, the extraordinary lives that have touched them, and the visual record they provide of the multitude of creeds that make up this city, are truly small miracles and also big miracles.

And also from the City Journal, Spring 2000:

After Modernism
Roger Scruton

Architectural modernism rejected the principles that had guided those who built the great cities of Europe. It rejected all attempts to adapt the language of the past, whether Greek, Roman, or Gothic: it rejected the classical orders, columns, architraves, and moldings; it rejected the street as the primary public space and the facade as the public aspect of a building. Modernism rejected all this not because it had any well-thought-out alternative but because it was intent on overthrowing the social order that these things represented—the order of the bourgeois city as a place of commerce, domesticity, ambition, and the common pursuit of style.

Modernism in architecture was more a social than an aesthetic project. Le Corbusier, the Russian constructivists, and Hannes Meyer when director of the Bauhaus claimed to be architectural thinkers: but the paltriness of what they said about architecture (compared with what had been said by the Gothic and classical revivalists, for example) reveals this claim to be empty. They were social and political activists who wished to squeeze the disorderly human material that constitutes a city into a socialist straitjacket. Architecture, for them, was one part of a new and all-comprehending system of control.

Of course, they didn’t call it control: socialists never do. Le Corbusier’s project to demolish all of Paris north of the Seine and replace it with high-rise towers of glass was supposed to be an emancipation, a liberation from the old constraints of urban living. Those dirty, promiscuous streets were to give way to grass and trees—open spaces where the New Socialist Man, released from the hygienic glass bottle where he was stored by night, could walk in the sunshine and be alone with himself. Le Corbusier never asked himself whether people wanted to live like this, nor did he care what method would transport them to their new utopia. History (as understood by the modernist project) required them to be there, and that was that.

Classical and Gothic buildings spoke of another age, in which glory, honor, and authority stood proudly and without self-mockery in the street.

We could no longer use their styles and materials sincerely, the modernists argued, since nobody believed in those old ideals. The modern age was an age without heroes, without glory, without public tribute to anything higher or more dignified than the common man.

It needed an architecture that would reflect its moral vision of an equal and classless society from which hierarchies had disappeared. Hence it needed an architecture without ornament or any other pretense to a grandeur that no living human being could emulate, an architecture that used modern materials to create a modern world. The key words of this new architecture were “honesty” and “function.” By being honest, modern architects implied, buildings could help us to become so. The new city of glass, concrete, and parkland would be a city without social pretense, where people would live in exemplary uniformity and be rewarded with equal respect.

This social agenda meant that architectural modernism was not an experiment but a crusade. It regarded those opposed to it as enemies, members of a priesthood of pretense to be removed as soon as possible from positions of influence and power. When the German art historian Niklaus Pevsner and the Russian constructivist architect Berthold Lubetkin brought the crusade to London, they set up shop as legislators, condemning everything that was not conceived as a radical break with the past. Both were traveling as refugees from modernism of the political variety—Nazism in Pevsner’s case, communism in Lubetkin’s—creeds that, like modernism in architecture, preferred elites to people and social control to spontaneous order. These two brought with them the censorious dreariness of the regimes they fled. Nothing was more loathsome in their eyes than the would-be enchantment of a Victorian Gothic bank or a neoclassical school. To Pevsner, Arthur Street’s great Gothic law courts—the centerpiece of London’s legal quarter and a fitting symbol of common-law justice and its daily work of reconciliation—were mediocre buildings of no consequence, whose fairy-tale pinnacles and marble columns were neither uplifting nor cheerful but merely insincere. By contrast, the Underground station at Arnos Grove, with its plain wrapped brickwork and its grim metal-frame windows, was a portent of a better future world, in which modern life would be honestly portrayed and openly accepted.

For many people, the best thing about modernist music is that you don’t have to listen to it, just as you don’t have to read modernist literature or go to exhibitions of modernist painting. Architecture, however, is unavoidable. It is not a transaction between consenting adults in private, but a public display. The modernists nevertheless conceived design in terms appropriate to the intimate arts of music, literature, and painting. Their buildings were to be individual creative acts, which would challenge the old order of architecture and defy the tired imperatives of worn-out styles. Modernism’s egalitarian mission could be accomplished only by a daring elite, who built without respect for the tradition of popular taste—indeed, without respect for anything save their own redeeming genius. The paradox here is exactly that of revolutionary politics: human equality is to be achieved by an elite to whom all is permitted, including the coercion of the rest of us.

Most users of a building are not clients of the architect. They are passersby, neighbors: those whose horizon is invaded and whose sense of home is affected by this new intrusion. The failure of modernism lies not in the fact that it produced no great or beautiful buildings—Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp and the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright prove the opposite. It lies in the absence of any reliable patterns or types that can harmonize spontaneously with the existing urban decor, retaining the essence of the street as a common home.

The degradation of our cities is the result of a “modernist vernacular,” whose principal device is the stack of horizontal layers, with jutting and obtrusive corners, built without consideration for the street, without a coherent facade, and without intelligible relation to its neighbors. Although this vernacular has repeatable components, they are not conceived as parts of a grammar, each part answerable to each and subject to the overarching discipline of the townscape. The components are items in a brochure rather than words in a dictionary.

The old architectural pattern books did not offer gadgets and structures. They offered matching shapes, moldings, and ornaments: forms that had pleased and harmonized, and that could be relied upon not to spoil or degrade the streets in which they were placed. New York used them to great effect, and even now they could be used to restore the civility of damaged neighborhoods. The only obstacle is the vast machine of patronage that puts architects, rather than the public, at the head of every building scheme.

Although history can show great architectural projects and great architects who have succeeded in them, both are exceptions. We build because we need to, and for a purpose. Most builders have no special talent and no high artistic ideals. Aesthetic values are important to them not because they have something special or entrancing to communicate but because they need to fit their buildings into a preexisting fabric. Hence modesty, repeatability, and rule-guidedness are vital architectural resources. Style ought to be defined so that anyone, however uninspired, can make good use of it and add thereby to the public dwelling space that is our common possession. That is why the most successful period of urban architecture—the period that envisaged and developed real and lasting towns of great size—was the period of the classical vernacular, when pattern books guided people who had not fallen prey to the illusion of their own genius. Routine styles and standardized parts perpetuate the gestures that have won general approval and help us to employ them again without offense.

In American cities, we can still witness the effect of the pattern books (such as that published by Asher Benjamin in Boston around 1800). Whole areas of agreeable and unpretentious dwellings, whose architects are no longer remembered and perhaps no longer even identifiable, have escaped demolition on grounds of the charm imparted by their syntax: Beacon Hill and the Back Bay area of Boston, Greenwich Village, the Upper East Side, much of Brooklyn, and the terraced streets of Harlem are well-known examples. Pattern-book housing of this kind bears the mark of civilization, even when it has degenerated into a slum. It needs only private ownership and the prospect of social and economic security for the population to respond to the call of their surroundings and once again to take pride in them. Hence these neighborhoods can rise again, like the fragments of London’s East End and docklands that were not demolished after the war and are now islands of civility in a sea of arrogance. The modernist housing project, built on the model recommended by Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus, never rises from its inevitable decline. When the high-rises and their barren surroundings become areas of “social deprivation”—and it usually happens within 20 years—there is no solution to the problem except dynamite.

This is not to argue that creativity and imagination have no place in architecture. On the contrary. Pattern-book architecture is possible only because of the intellectual and artistic labor that made the patterns. Some of this labor was collective—a far-reaching activity of trial and error, leading to easily managed designs. But just as important as this collective labor has been the individual inspiration that conjures up new and living details, transforming our perception of form. Stylistic breakthroughs create a vocabulary of dignifying details: Gothic moldings, the classical orders, Palladian windows, Vignola-esque cornices. These great artistic triumphs become types and patterns for the ordinary builder, and the vernacular architecture of New York displays all of them. Our best bet in architecture is that the artistic geniuses should invest their energy, as Palladio did, in patterns that can be reproduced at will by the rest of us. For the fact remains that most of the architecture that surrounds us is bound to be second-rate, uninspired, and unspiring, and that its most important virtue will be that of good manners.

That this is wholly unlike the situation in the other arts should be obvious. In music, literature, and painting, there are works of lasting value and others of merely mundane appeal. The mundane examples quickly disappear from the canon and remain interesting only to the scholars. In architecture, however, everything stays where it is, troubling our perception and obstructing our view until something else replaces it. In making innovation and experiment into the norm, while waging war against ornament, detail, and the old vernaculars, modernism led to a spectacular loss of knowledge among ordinary builders and to a pretension to originality in a sphere where originality, except in the rare hands of genius, is a serious threat to the surrounding order.

Because architecture is a practice dominated by talentless people, manifestos and theories of the kind the modernists proliferated are especially dangerous, for they excite people to be bold and radical in circumstances where they should be modest and discreet. The modernists discarded millennia of slowly accumulating common sense for the sake of shallow prescriptions and totalitarian schemes. When architects began to dislike the result, they ceased to be modernists and called themselves postmodernists instead. But there is no evidence that they drew the right conclusion from the collapse of modernism—namely, that modernism was a mistake. Postmodernism is not an attempt to avoid mistakes, but an attempt to build in such a way that the very concept of a mistake has no application.

Modernism was severe—it had to be, since it was taking a stand against popular taste, hunting down kitsch and cliché in their fetid lairs and dousing them with the cultural equivalent of carbolic acid. Postmodernism announces itself as a liberation; its aim is not to take the side of high culture against kitsch but to play with both of them. Postmodernist art is nonjudgmental: at home with affluence, advertising, and mass production, as tolerant of popular taste as of the modernist contempt for it. We are living beyond judgment, beyond value, beyond objectivity—so the postmodernist movement tells us. We are not in the business of forbidding things but rather of permitting them.

It turns out, however, that everything is permitted except the thing we most need: a return to the centuries-old conception of architecture as a practice bound by publicly accepted rules. The postmodernists ruled this out of court as much as their censorious modernist predecessors did. Any return to the values of the classical vernacular, with its emphasis on the street and the facade, is branded a betrayal of history, a retreat into “nostalgia,” and in any case no better than pastiche.

That argument, more or less diluted by fashionable relativism, is the reigning orthodoxy of the schools of architecture and the machine of public patronage. Hence the way to win commissions is not to propose a building that will fit into its place as though it had always stood there and be as unnoticeable as good manners require but rather to invent something outrageous, insolent, and unignorable.

Following the stern cast-concrete forms of modernism, therefore, has appeared a new kind of flamboyant building: brightly colored girders exposed to view, tubes and wires rioting over the surface, ornaments stuck anyhow onto surfaces of transparent Lucite or shimmering tiles. The effect shows a freedom from constraint that reminds you why constraints are a good idea. At its most aggressive—and it is usually aggressive—it may involve the deliberate “deconstruction” of the forms and values of the classical tradition, in the manner of Bernard Tschumi’s student center at Columbia or of the monstrous yet culpably vague designs by Peter Eisenman for the redevelopment of the West Side of New York. If a justification is required, then the project will be backed up with pretentious gobbledygook in the style of Eisenman, offering concepts and theories and abstract ideas in the place of visual logic.

Britain’s reigning postmodernist panjandrum is Richard Rogers (now Lord Rogers)—the architect who, together with the modernist Norman Foster (now Lord Foster), receives all the important commissions and sits on all the important committees. Rogers belongs to the generation of postwar architects trained in modernist rhetoric, who were taught very little about style and everything about public relations. Recognizing the public hostility to modernism, many of these architects have hastened to declare modernism officially dead and to welcome the new era of freedom of which they are the champions.

Rogers made his reputation in partnership with Renzo Piano at the Centre Beaubourg in Paris. This cultural center and exhibition hall is like a demented child’s model of a spaceship, dumped inexplicably in the city. True to the postmodernist spirit, it is decorated with functionless tubes and scaffolding, whose decorative effect depends upon being perceived as functional, like the chrome-plated exhaust of a racing car. Its colors are not those of the materials used to build it but of the paints that disguise them. Its joints and load-bearing parts are concealed, and nothing is really visible that is not surface. It is a slap in the face to the modernist principles of honesty, truth to materials, and functional transparency. In this respect, you might very well be taken in by Rogers’s claim that modernism is a thing of the past.

In fact, however, the Centre Beaubourg is the first real triumph in Paris of the modernist idea. It is a step toward achieving Le Corbusier’s goal of razing the city to the ground. The Centre Beaubourg required the demolition of a vast and beautiful tract of stone-built classical vernacular and the imposition of a recreational purpose on what had previously been a living quartier of the city. The project was guided by a social vision—namely, to exchange the quiet, self-sustaining life of bourgeois Paris for a fast-moving, multimedia “happening” that would be maximally offensive to bourgeois values. Its loud colors and in-your-face externals, its shape, size, and materials—above all, its windowless and doorless sides, which warn you away with metallic imperviousness—all these are signs of a profoundly motivated effrontery, a desire to uproot and disenchant the domestic life of one of the world’s greatest cities and to replace both work and home with an undisciplined playground.

This is not the socialist project, and we are in one sense a long way from the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. The modernist program focused on work, discipline, and the regimented life of the new proletariat: Le Corbusier’s definition of a house as a “machine for living” says more about his conception of life than his ideal of architecture. Life, for the modernists, was all work and no play, with just an occasional stroll outside for hygienic reasons. The Centre Beaubourg is a celebration of play, randomness, and indiscipline. It is a machine for playing, and the machinery is part of the joke.

Nevertheless, there is a sense in which we are in the same aesthetic territory as the modernists. For this architectural enterprise has no meaning apart from the social experiment of which it is the vehicle. The assumption of originality is the perfect and ready-made excuse for an insolence that is socially and politically motivated. Although Le Corbusier could have designed his fantasy city for some green-field site, he expressly insisted on Paris. Revolutionary projects aim at the destruction of existing things, and the future “alternative” is always as vague as a drawing by Peter Eisenman. Likewise, the Centre Beaubourg could have been built anywhere, but in that case it would have lost its point. The real goal was to wipe away the history of the city and to plant in the midst of bourgeois Paris the seeds of the anti-bourgeois revolution. The Centre was President Pompidou’s idea, and he conceived it as a way of announcing to the world that he was, in the last analysis, on the side of history and a friend of the anti-culture of 1968. This was the message that motivated him in choosing the outrageous designs of Piano and Rogers.

The postmodernist project has also visited London with the same effect. Perhaps the most impressive symbol of the old city of London and its institutions was the insurance company of Lloyd’s. This began life in 1668, among the club of merchants who were in the habit of meeting at the Edward Lloyd Coffee House and who decided to establish an institution with which to protect one another from bankruptcy. English commercial enterprise relied upon bonds of honor that fell critically short of intimacy and could therefore be extended far and wide through the world of strangers. Hence institutions like Lloyd’s could appeal for capital from outside the community of city traders. The “names” who provided this capital to the underwriters were people of wealth and standing, who implicitly trusted this institution run by gentlemen, and who thought nothing of placing their entire possessions in the hands of a discreet and well-spoken stranger.

The underwriters treated the solid, well-furnished building of Lloyd’s as a clubhouse; they shrouded its routines in mystery like the rituals of a church; and the old bell of the frigate Lutine, captured from the French in 1793, sounded eerily through its hallway to announce the loss or arrival of a strategic merchant vessel. It was the very image of the safety that the English associated with their homeland, and its well-bred investors somnolently assumed that such an institution would last forever, an unsinkable rock amid the tides of misfortune that afflicted lesser men. When a new board of directors decided to demolish the Victorian clubhouse and erect a grotesque piece of postmodernist kitsch by Rogers in its place, the “names” continued to dream in their country houses, unaware that the bottom had fallen out of their world and that the proof of this was standing now on top of it.

One glance at Rogers’s building, constructed at vast expense and functioning so badly that it is the subject of continuous, expensive repair, ought to have awakened the “names” to what had happened. This tower, ridiculous as architecture, is manifestly part of a social project: it is an affront to the old conception of the city and a harbinger of the new world of corporate finance—a vertical playground, with the childish metalwork and intergalactic shapes familiar from the Centre Beaubourg and transparent external elevators carrying the new breed of whiz kids high above the streets of old London. It is a sign that seriousness and probity are things of the past; from now on, everything is fun. And part of the fun will be to deprive those trusting old gentlemen of their family fortunes.

Shortly after the erection of this building, Lloyd’s collapsed, the English squirearchy—heavily invested in Lloyd’s—faced ruin, and the city institutions joined the Church of England and the Tory Party as things of the past. Richard Rogers, meanwhile, was knighted and subsequently raised to the peerage by a Labour Party grateful for his assaults on the old establishment and eager for his support in Parliament. In this spirit, Prime Minister Blair’s first attempt to confront the problem of the inner cities, devastated by centrifugal development and modernist housing schemes, was to appoint a commission on urban renewal, with Lord Rogers at the head of it.

Perhaps the culminating postmodernist project has been the Millennium Dome, the Babylonian temple to Nothingness that Rogers built down the river from London in Greenwich—again, nugatory as architecture and eloquent as the expression of a social idea. Until very recently, great public projects were designed to last. In the nineteenth century, for instance, promoters of exhibition architecture, such as the Grand Palais and Petit Palais in Paris, gave their buildings ceremonial and permanent exteriors and conceived of them as celebrations of the city and its achievements and contributions to the public life that would be lived in their shadow. By contrast, the Millennium Dome’s promoters conceived of it from the beginning as temporary—a vast tent whose purpose would expire when sufficient numbers had bought their tickets and wandered in baffled lines around its exhibits. Void of all architectural signifiers, impressive, if at all, only as a work of engineering, this fleeting visitor from another planet is part of the same broad social program as the Centre Beaubourg—the program of disestablishing the old culture of our cities and putting a fun-filled playground in its place.

Hence its very temporariness is integral to its effect. Nothing endures, it tells us; nothing has meaning beyond the moment. The exhibits match the architecture: the past of the country, its institutions, monarchy, and religion, its imperial triumphs, its achievements in war, and its leading role in the spread of law and democracy—these are either reduced to insignificance or ignored. All is fun—but fun with a vengeance. Visitors wander through a video arcade, as buskers and steel bands try to whip up an excitement the exhibits could never inspire on their own, glimpsing the very same images that they could obtain by twirling the knobs on their televisions. Even the crowning exhibit—the body zone, in which two humanoid creatures tower to the roof—finds nothing meaningful to say about the human figure. All you are given is a lesson in pop physiology, with a tour through the inner organs of a faceless ape, entering through the nether regions, past pubic hair infested with lice.

The prime minister often refers to the Dome as if he had ways of making us enjoy it; he has dismissed its critics as lacking in patriotism, and he has piled more and more public money into servicing the debt of a project that has so far attracted little attention. Nor should we mistake the social agenda. The politically correct exhibits have one overriding purpose: to flatten out the landscape of our national culture and to put a bland, “inclusive” multiculture in its place. The project’s greatest box-office success to date was “Domosexual Day,” when the dome was packed with London’s homosexuals, flooded with pink light from outside, and filled with giggles within. In order to revive its flagging fortunes, the Dome company has employed Pierre-Yves Gerbeau, former executive of Disneyland Paris, to draw in the crowds. What was to have been a celebration of Britain and its people for the millennium is now a Franco-American fun palace, complete with ushers disguised as Coggsley and Sprinx—comic-strip characters in supermarket colors—professional lowerers of the tone, who will perform the function of Goofy and Donald Duck in Disneyland.

In the temple of the Dome, we encounter what Joyce would call God’s funferall. Many Englishmen view the sight with revulsion. They recognize that cities are built, and civilizations sustained, from the human need for permanence. The postmodernist project is an attempt to deny that need—to deny it collectively, like the dance of the Israelites around the Golden Calf. The frivolity of postmodernist architecture is of a piece with its spiritual idolatry—its worship of the moment and its refusal to be bound by any law. In the face of this, it seems not only that modernism was a mistake but that postmodernism compounds the mistake, by removing the one thing that might rectify it: the desire for permanence.

You could undo the work of modernism tomorrow by a simple expedient: by abolishing all architects, equipping builders with the pattern books that created Beacon Hill or Lower Manhattan, and laying down regulations governing heights, depths, and street lines—in other words, by returning to what was once standard practice. In this respect, the message of the postmodernists is the old one: that we must always be new. If modernism has failed, then the answer is not to retrace our steps, like architects Quinlan Terry or Léon Krier, but to press on still further into the anti-architecture of Eisenman or Tschumi or the kitsch monumentality of Rogers.

It is one of the marvels of the modern world that human beings, having proceeded along a path that leads manifestly to error, can yet not turn back but must always exhort themselves to go further in the same direction. It is with modern architecture as it has been with socialism, sexual liberation, and a thousand other modern fads: those who defend them draw no other lesson from their failure than the thought that they have not yet gone far enough. Our present need is not for the uncoordinated and dislocated architecture that the postmodernists would wish on us but for an architectural grammar that would permit talentless people once again to build inoffensively. That is what the classical pattern books taught, and that is why there was such a thing, before modernism came on the scene, as a serious architectural education that could prepare ordinary human beings for the enormous responsibilities involved in building the environment of strangers.

What is needed, in short, is not a postmodernist but a premodernist architecture. And here and there this architecture is beginning to emerge: Allan Greenberg’s neoclassical court building in Manchester, Connecticut (converted from a derelict modernist supermarket); Greenberg’s proposed new addition to the Decoration and Design Building on Manhattan’s Third Avenue; the Harold Washington Library in Chicago by Hammond, Beeby and Babka; Robert Stern’s Brooklyn Law School tower, which revives the cheerfulness of the vernacular skyscraper—these and many other attempts point us in the right direction, not forward but backward, to what had been lost.

Moreover, architects and critics are now finding the words, and the confidence, to express the once-forbidden thought that you can be modern without being modernist—that there can be an architecture for our time that derives from permanent values rather than ephemeral social projects, that gives new life to the grammar, and the search for harmony and decorum, of the architecture of the past. Modernism is dead; but classicism survived, as it has always survived. Last month there took place in Bologna, sponsored by the city, the latest in a series of traveling conferences devoted to classical architecture, showcasing modern but premodernist buildings and allowing their architects to explain them to the world. The purpose was to show that modernism was a mere ideology, as dead as the totalitarian political projects whose inspiration it shared. And first among the concerns of the architects who explained their work was to show how we might undo the work of the modernists, encasing their buildings in classical shells as Greenberg has done, veneering them with facades in the same spirit as we veneer ourselves with politeness.

Maybe these are small beginnings. But small beginnings are much to be preferred to enormous dead ends.

Here is the lady on a related subject which illustrates the methology which which she approaches her subject. It appeared in Sacred Architecture:

The Eschatological Dimension of Church Architecture
The Biblical Roots of Church Orientation
by Helen Dietz, appearing in Volume 10

Although on this side of the Atlantic there has been considerable laxity in orienting churches, in Europe great care was taken in seeing that churches were oriented. By the sixth century, the sanctuary within the church was regularly placed at the east end, the direction which throughout history has symbolized the eschaton: the second coming of Christ in kingly glory. The ancient custom of orienting churches alludes not only to Matthew 24.27, “As the lightening cometh out from the east … so also will the coming of the Son of Man be,” but more importantly to the direction the Jewish high priest faced in the Jerusalem Temple when offering sacrifice on Yom Kippur, the “day of atonement,” the most important and essential feast of the Jewish year.

Because the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews identifies Jesus with the Temple high priest, the Church always envisioned the risen and glorified Jesus as facing east when offering the Eucharistic sacrifice to the Father through the actions of the earthly priest. Thus the direction towards which the earthly priest, the alter Christus, faced while offering the Mass indicated for Christians the symbolic direction of the heavenly New Jerusalem which is the abode of the eternal Father.

But, as is well known, the sanctuary has not always and everywhere been located in the east end of the Christian church. Quite on the contrary, when Christians in fourth-century Rome could first freely begin to build churches, they customarily located the sanctuary towards the west end of the building in imitation of the sanctuary of the Jerusalem Temple. Although in the days of the Jerusalem Temple the high priest indeed faced east when sacrificing on Yom Kippur, the sanctuary within which he stood was located at the west end of the Temple. The Christian replication of the layout and the orientation of the Jerusalem Temple helped to dramatize the eschatological meaning attached to the sacrificial death of Jesus the High Priest in the Epistle to the Hebrews.

The custom of orienting the earliest places of Christian worship came not directly from Scripture, however, but from contemporary Jewish synagogue custom. Archaeological and other evidence tells us that in the early Christian era there existed within Palestine two traditions of orienting synagogues.1 According to one tradition, the synagogue was to be positioned in such a way that its sanctuary faced the Jerusalem Temple. Thus, depending on where it was situated in relation to the Temple, the synagogue might face any point of the compass. But according to an alternate tradition, the synagogue was to be positioned in such a way that its sanctuary faced west, and west only, in emulation of the Temple sanctuary. Whereas modern Jews follow the first of these two Palestinian traditions, the fourth-century Christian basilica builders followed the second tradition.

Msgr. Klaus Gamber has pointed out that although in these early west-facing Roman basilicas the people stood in the side naves and faced the centrally located altar for the first portion of the service, nevertheless at the approach of the consecration they all turned to face east towards the open church doors, the same direction the priest faced throughout the Eucharistic liturgy.2 Because the sanctuary with its veiled altar occupied the portion of the church west of the main entrance the people could face east, the direction of the imminent eschaton of Christ, only by turning.

As we have noted, churches came in time to be built with their sanctuaries no longer towards their west end but instead towards their east end so that now the people no longer needed to turn but could face east throughout the Mass.3 (A similar switch in orientation took place in the Jewish synagogue about the same time and still may be seen in today’s synagogue.)4 Quite obviously, the importance of the people’s facing east in the Christian church was that this posture signified they were “the priesthood of the faithful,” who in this way showed that they joined in the sacrifice offered by the ministerial priest in his and their collective name.

In these east-facing churches it became common to place an “east window” high on the sanctuary wall to admit the light of the rising sun. The gaze of the “priesthood of the faithful” was thus directed beyond the immediate assembly and beyond the veiled altar of the church sanctuary. Christ indeed returned at the words of the consecration, but this invisible return at the consecration was above all a foreshadowing and sign of his imminent visible return at the eschaton, hence the congregation’s expectant gazing towards the rising sun which shone through the east window. At the moment of the consecration one did not look at the Eucharistic host. One would not see Christ there. The actual moment of the consecration was in fact concealed from the eyes of the faithful by altar curtains.

Two things in particular stand out in the developments we have discussed: that the custom of orientation is biblical and that it expresses the eschaton. The Oriens, being the direction of the dawn which is the sign of the expected return of Christ, symbolically expresses the creedal words recited by Christians down through the ages: “He will come again in glory … and of His kingdom there will be no end.” In our own day, the Novus Ordo liturgy introduced after Vatican Council II has in fact re-emphasized these creedal words and underscored their relation to the Eucharistic consecration by restoring the Eucharistic acclamation: Mortem tuam annuntiamus, Domine, et tuam resurrectionem confitemus, donec venias, today loosely translated into English as “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”5

Although the builders of the fourth-century Christian basilica had indeed borrowed a contemporary type of secular Roman architecture, they deliberately reworked this architecture in order to express a specifically Judaic temple tradition. One has only to look at the type of changes they introduced into the architecture. For one thing, the builders of the fourth-century Christian basilica eliminated the multiple apses, one at either end, which one would have seen in such pagan basilicas as the Basilica Ulpia in Rome. The Christian builders instead kept only a single apse at the far end of their basilica. Towards this west end of the basilica they housed a sanctuary in the manner of a Semitic Middle Eastern temple,6 sometimes taking up much of the west half of the basilica. The Christian builders furthermore re-located the main door of the Roman basilica from its former position on the long side of the immense rectangular building to the short end of the building thereby creating a long, pillar- lined interior vista which served to emphasize and dramatize the sanctuary apse at the opposite end from the door of entry.

Furthermore, a low openwork stone parapet or “chancel” marked off the sanctuary with its veiled altar where the priest entered to celebrate the liturgy, just as a low stone parapet had marked off the sanctuary of the priests in the Jerusalem Temple.7 (It was not until the time of the Counter Reformation that this parapet or chancel acquired the name “communion rail.”) In this Christian replication of the Temple, however, the sanctuary now stood not merely for the earthly sanctuary at Jerusalem, but above all for the prototypal heavenly sanctuary extolled in the Epistle to the Hebrews as having been the model given to Moses for the Jerusalem sanctuary. This heavenly sanctuary was the eternal realm of the risen and glorified high priest Jesus who sits at the right hand of the throne of God the Father.8

The low, lattice-like sanctuary chancel of the Christian church thus stood for the barrier of death through which each Christian must pass before entering the actual heavenly sanctuary. Only the priest, insofar as he alone enacted the role of the Christus, was allowed to pass beyond this sanctuary chancel which stood for death and into the sanctuary itself which stood for life beyond death. And only he could bring the Bread of Life from the “heavenly realm” of the sanctuary to the people, who waited on the “earthly” side of the chancel for this mystical foretaste of the Messianic banquet of the life to come.

Therefore, to dwell on the Roman meanings of the fourth-century basilica to the neglect of these Judaic, Middle Eastern, and New Testament meanings is to mislead. To mention that the Christian priest “now sat in the basilica where the Roman emperor had previously sat” and other tangential similarities to the pagan basilica but fail to mention the deliberate continuities with Judaic temple tradition is to distort history.

The changes fourth-century Christians wrought in Roman basilica architecture marked the beginning of a new era. The Christians re-ordered the basilica architecture to express a Judaic vision of time as linear and processive. That is to say, time was now to be viewed as a process in which change could take place. The changes which took place could be good, bad, or indifferent. Moreover, time would eventually come to an end, a concept unknown to the Romans. (This processive view of time should not be confused with the progressive view of time which dominated nineteenth- century thought and according to which it was the nature of human society to inevitably improve with the passage of time.)

Discarded was the pagan Roman cyclical sense of time as going nowhere except around and around as reflected in their architecture. For in the pagan Roman basilica, one would have approached through the main entrance on the broader side of the immense rectangular building, stared at least momentarily at the Emperor’s column to be viewed through the doorway opposite the entrance, and then, while conducting one’s business, perhaps perambulated the great pillar-surrounded room, passing by first the apse at one end and then the other apse at the opposite end until one arrived back where one had set out but with no more sense of procession than if one had ridden a merry-go-round.

In the new Christian basilica, however, as soon as one entered from the open-air atrium at the near end of the rectangular building and passed through a shallow narthex, one would have visually experienced the apse at the far opposite end as a climactic conclusion to the long narrow vista of receding pillars, a vista which invited the foot of the viewer to step in a definite direction and which pulled his eye toward a single focal point. By creating an expectancy this climactic arrangement powerfully expressed the unique biblical concept of time as linear, processive, and moving toward a conclusion. The Christian basilica announced, “Yes, there was a beginning which you have left behind, there is a now in which you presently exist, and afterwards when time itself ends there will be something quite different.”

The priest, or anyone else, who stood towards the sanctuary end of the basilica and looked east, must have experienced a similar expectancy in reverse with the open eastern doors becoming the climactic focal point. Thus the interior of the fourth-century basilica conceivably could be read from west to east as well as from east to west depending upon the liturgical context. It is likely, however, that in the liturgical act of looking east the priest and people were merely anticipating the east to west progress of Christ the King and Bridegroom towards the sanctuary area.

The new Christian basilica architecture of fourth-century Rome shows the Christian Church, very much in the Judaic mold, rejecting the eschatonless and cyclical view of time of pagan Rome. With a modicum of judicious changes the Christian basilica builders subtly de-paganized the basilica and succeeded in Judaizing it. What remained was an architectural interior superficially Roman but essentially Judaic.

This enculturation of the Judaic concept of linear time into the architectural language of imperial Rome signals one of the great turning points of Western history, namely, the Judaizing of Western culture and the triumph of the Judaic worldview over the Roman Empire, which had destroyed the Jerusalem Temple but which could not destroy the manner of thinking which lay behind the Temple. This Judaic thinking, which survived the Temple and which, through Christianity, has put its imprint on Western civilization, contrasts sharply with the cyclical pantheisms of the fourth-century pagan world. This thinking also contrasts sharply with the more recent pseudo-scientific pantheisms of Emanuel Swedenborg, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Jung, and Teilhard de Chardin. Such latter day pantheisms are freighted with the myth of progress which locates within the natural world the summit of human expectations. Such pantheisms are incompatible with the biblical concept of the eschaton at the end of time, a concept which plays so prominent a part in the liturgy and the architecture of the Church.

One thing above all stands out in the directional symbolism of the new architecture first introduced in Rome by the Christian basilica builders and subsequently adopted throughout Europe: its biblical roots. This architecture by its very structure creates a sense of expectancy which is biblical. Thus today, even when the actual direction of a classically-designed church is other than east, one still may speak of the direction of the sanctuary within the church as “liturgical east” and one still feels the sense of expectancy which is incorporated into the architecture.

In classic church architecture, whether it be Romanesque, Gothic, or Baroque, the four directions of the interior are of unequal value. One direction, the direction of the apse, reinforced by its symmetrical location on the axis of the building, stands out and draws the eye from a distance provided by the elongated nave. In classic church architecture, orientation continues to express the eschaton.

In this regard, the directional symbolism of classical Christian architecture is distinct from the practice contrived by certain modern liturgists who have promoted a semi-circular seating arrangement in which the various members of the congregation face various points of the compass during the Eucharistic liturgy. This practice of orienting the church interior by means of an axial reredos and altar while at the same time disorienting the members of the congregation by facing them in various directions puts the seating arrangement at cross purposes with the altar-and-reredos arrangement. Such a seating arrangement suggests that no point of the compass has any more symbolic value than any other.

By disorienting the congregation and thereby devaluing the scripture-based symbolism of the Oriens, such semi-circular seating arrangements radically de-biblicize Christian worship. Such de-biblicized forms of worship fail to express adequately the eschatological dimension of the liturgy. And in failing to express this eschatological dimension, these forms emasculate the teachings of Vatican Council II which, especially as expressed in the Novus Ordo Mass, clearly intended to re-emphasize the eschatological dimension of the liturgy and to restore this dimension to the prominence it had in the earlier Church.9

Helen Dietz, PhD, who lives in the Chicago area, is currently completing a book on fifteenth-century Flemish liturgical painting.

1. Franz Landsberger, A History of Jewish Art, 1946. Union of American Hebrew Congregations. Re-issued by Kennikat Press, 1973. Port Washington, New York, 141. See also Zeev Weiss, “The Sepphoris Synagogue Mosaic,” Biblical Archaeology Review. September/October 2000, Vol. 26, No. 5, 51; 70, f. 5.

2. The Reform of the Roman Liturgy: Its Problems and Background by Klaus Gamber. 1989. Translated from the original German by Klaus D. Grimm. Co-published by Una Voce Press, San Juan Capistrano and The Foundation for Catholic Reform,. Harrison , New York. English translation © 1993, 79 ff.

3 .Landsberger, 169.

4 .Landsberger, 142.

5. Cf. Vagaggini, Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota, 1976, 170; 171, n.8.

6.“The striking thing is that the ground plan [of the ancient Sumerian Te m p l e ] … antici – pates the layout of the Early Christian sanctuary: narthex, nave, transept and a central apse flanked by two rooms, a diaconicon and a prothesis.” André Parrot, Sumer: The Dawn of Art. Translated by Stuart Gilbert and James Emmons. Golden Press, Inc. New York. 1961, 61.

7. Joan R. Branham, “Sacred Space Under Erasure in Ancient Synagogues and Early Churches,” The Art Bulletin, LXXIV, 3, 1992, 376-383.

8. “We have such a high priest, who has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of Majesty in the heavens, a minister of the Holies, and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord has erected and not man. For every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices; therefore it is necessary that this one also should have something to offer. If then he were on earth, he would not even be a priest, since there are already others to offer gifts according to the Law. The worship they offer is a mere copy and shadow of things heavenly, even as Moses was warned when he was completing the tabernacle: ‘See,’ God said, ‘that thou make all things according to the pattern that was shown thee on the mount.’ ” Hebrews 8.1-5.

9. “As often as they eat the Supper of the Lord they proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes;” “At the Last Supper … our Savior instituted the eucharistic sacrifice … in order to perpetuate the sacrifice of the Cross throughout the ages until he should come again.” Vatican Council II, Constitution on the Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium,) ed. Flannery, 1975, 6, 47.

Helen Dietz, PhD, who lives in the Chicago area, is currently completing a book on fifteenth-century Flemish liturgical painting.

The Ciborium

by Shawn Tribe

Architect and Yale lecturer, Dino Marcantonio, continues his series on the “Parts of the Church Building” turning his attention now to an important and, I believe, under-utilized architectural feature, that of the ciborium.

When one thinks of the great basilica churches of Italy, be it St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s, San Clemente, or if we turn northward to the likes of the great Ambrosian basilica of St. Ambrose in Milan, while there are many elements that attract one’s eye in these great churches, speaking personally, I find myself particularly drawn to their ciboria, and thus, to the very altar itself which it enshrines and upon which and around which solemn, liturgical worship is offered to God the Father, through Christ the Son, in the Holy Spirit. Aside from historical examples, we can also find many modern examples. Indeed, looking through journals like Liturgical Arts Quarterly, or through other like periodicals coming out of the bosom of the Liturgical Movement — particularly in its earlier manifestations — one notes an evident move toward the restored use of ciboria in a number of churches. Generally speaking, this was a most worthwhile and laudable initiative, though, sadly, we also discover a number of examples where this was quickly lost just a few decades later, either by their destruction or where the ciboria now sit as mere backdrops to altars which themselves sit uncovered, thus detached from their proper purpose; a rather unsatisfactory situation in either regard. (Watch for more on this subject in the coming days.)

I say this was a most worthwhile initiative because the ciborium, in its forms and in its substantiality, helps to emphasize the importance, substantiality and centrality of the altar within our churches; the altar which, as the catechism makes note, “is the center of the church” and on which “the sacrifice of the Cross is made present” (CCC, para. 1182).

Thankfully, through the architectural work of the like of Duncan Stroik and others, we continue to see at least some ciboria erected in new church building today. Indeed, some of the grandest examples of new church building today include ciboria — the new chapel of the FSSP seminary in Denton, the chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas College, the Shrine in La Crosse, Wisconsin, all present themselves as contemporary examples. Occasionally as well, we see existing churches employ ciboria in their renovation projects — a feature which could certainly be considered more by pastors and parishioners in such projects. There is much potential here; potential which also works well in accord with present liturgical law and which would be well suited to both forms of the Roman liturgy.

That preface aside, let us turn to Dino Marcantonio who takes us through a theological consideration of the ciboria. Here is an excerpt.

St. Germanus states regarding the ciborium:

“The ciborium represents here the place where Christ was crucified; for the place where he was buried was nearby and raised on a base. It is placed in the church in order to represent concisely the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Christ.

“It similarly corresponds to the ark of the covenant of the Lord in which, it is written, is His Holy of Holies and His holy place. Next to it God commanded that two wrought Cherubim be placed on either side (cf Ex 25:18)–for KIB is the ark, and OURIN is the effulgence, or the light, of God.”

Think of the ciborium as a room, the ark of the covenant writ large. The church building, like the Temple at Jerusalem on which it is modeled, is a succession of rooms, each progressively more holy, and therefore, smaller: from forecourt, to nave, to schola cantorum, to apse (or sanctuary), to altar. If the apse represents Heaven, then the ciborium represents that which is above heaven. In fact, curtains used to hang between the columns so that, at the most sacred moments of the liturgy (i.e., the Canon), the curtains were drawn and the altar was entirely out of view, just as God is out of view.

The 13th C. ciborium at the Basilica of San Marco, Venice.
The oriental alabaster columns are covered in bas-relief
sculpture depicting scenes from the New Testament.
(Beyond is the exquisite retable, the Pala d’Oro.)

Most ciboria have four columns, coherent with the four corners of the altar. The square symbolizes the earth on which Christ was crucified and in which He was buried. And to symbolize the heavenward movement of the Resurrection, most ciboria are domed in some way. The dome can either be circular or eight-sided (as the Resurrection happened on the eighth day).

St Patrick’s Millstreet, Co. Cork

The facade ante 1914 and before the rebuilding of the 1930s

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