Across the land this Christmas season, churches old and new, grand or unpretentious, prepare for the gladdest occasion of the Christian calendar. The choirs, practicing the favorite carols, come as close as they will be to perfection, creches are installed, candles lit. The old is comfortable and familiar. But across the wintry U.S. this year, more churchgoers than ever before will find themselves in novel surroundings (see color).
During the year 1960, a round $1 billion has been poured into new churches, accounting for 13.2% of all public buildings put up in the U.S. The church boom has attracted some of the best U.S. architects, and led them to produce buildings that are often adventuresome in structure and forthright in their use of materials. They are buildings that address themselves, with varying degrees of success, to growing community demands and to changing liturgical customs.
Temples on Human Scale. The new churches first of all bear witness that congregations today are determined to reassert their place in a highly secular century. “This is not a great cathedral-building age, like the Middle Ages.” Chicago’s German-born Ludwig Mies van der Rohe says, “Today, if you tried to build a cathedral, you would succeed only in building a big church. Not religion but technology is the controlling spirit of the age.”
Pietro Belluschi, dean of architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and himself one of the most skilled of church architects, reluctantly concurs. But for Architect Belluschi this fact is in itself a challenge: “If we cannot erect great monuments, we may endeavor to create small temples, on a more human scale, designed in a sensitive manner so as to produce the kind of atmosphere most conducive to worship.”
Honest Materials. The church form most suited to worship varies greatly in the minds of U.S. churchmen. It ranges from such early classics as Carpenter Lavius Fillmore’s First Congregational Church in Bennington, Vt., derived from an 18th century American builder’s handbook adapting the designs of Sir Christopher Wren, to the asymmetrical, aspiring structures of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose intention, in churches like Redding, Calif.’s soon-to-be-built Pilgrim Congregational Church, was to create a wholly new and American architecture. Today the right to use materials naturally and unadorned (as Wright would have them) has become common, accepted practice—seems indeed to have a special churchly appeal because of its ring of honesty. Architect Ralph Rapson boldly built St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Edina, Minn, in exposed steel and concrete, sheathing the exterior with aluminum. California Architect Mario Corbett designed his expressive Hope Lutheran Church in native woods, “unfinished,” noted the minister, “the way God made them.”
Technology, placed at the service of the church, makes possible more audacity in design. For the Benedictine monastery church of St. John’s at Collegeville, Minn., Marcel Breuer has flung skyward a 112-ft.-high bell banner utilizing reinforced concrete and parabolic curves to erect a vertical cantilever, a form that Architect Breuer thinks as expressive of the mid-20th century as the Byzantine dome and Gothic arch and spire were of their times.
Tradition Updated. Technology also tempts to structural exhibitionism. Pietro Belluschi has raised a warning: “A simple church, well proportioned, is always better than an elaborate one. Church design should be an exercise in restraint, in understatement.” Belluschi is equally concerned that the cult of novelty for its own sake, and the clinical clarity now fashionable in architecture, might remove from the church symbols that have both embodied and nourished faith. “People need them and live by them to a greater extent than is realized.” Belluschi says.
In his own churches, Belluschi (a Roman Catholic who has worked as well for Lutherans, Episcopalians and Jews) is responsible for the inclusion of such traditional equipment as candlesticks and crucifixes, calls in such modernists as Sculptor Richard Lippold and Painter Gyorgy Kepes to help. He demands that artists use materials both as contemporary as stainless steel and as old as cathedral glass, to give the church traditional richness and warmth of color. In searching for the most modern solution, he has lately returned to the earliest Christian prototypes: Portsmouth Priory’s Church of St. Gregory the Great repeats in its octagonal plan Ravenna’s San Vitale, founded by the Emperor Justinian in A.D. 526.
Altar in the Center. Tradition is proving a challenge and a help to modern church architects in unexpected ways. A prime example is the fast-growing liturgical movement, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, which emphasizes the centrality of the Mass or Communion for the church, and goes back for precedent to the early Christian practice whereby the congregation gathered around the Communion table and actively participated in the sacrament. “What we are seeking to restore.” says San Francisco’s Episcopal Bishop James Pike, “is the family around the table of the Lord.”
Out of this liturgical movement has come a demand for the altar-centered church. In 1942 Roman Catholic St. Mark’s in Burlington, Vt. experimented with placing the sanctuary with altar at the crossing of nave and transepts, thus making it visible from three sides. In 1948 the Episcopalians at St. Clement’s in Alexandria, Va. placed the altar facing banks of pews. Rector Darby Wood Betts argued that “the Church is first and foremost a family called into being by its Father which is God. Therefore we sit facing one another, rather than looking at the back of one another’s heads as does an audience; we are a congregation, those called together.”
Apostolic Simplicity. This liturgical reform rejects the medieval practice that made the church service an awesome mystery and spectacle seen in deep perspective and culminating in the moment when, to the tinkling of bells, the Host and chalice are raised on high. As clergy and congregation have begun to draw closer together, it was almost inevitable that architects would sooner or later rediscover the church-in-the-round.
In 1955 Bishop Pike, then dean of Manhattan’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, tried the experiment during a Cape Cod vacation. He persuaded his summer congregation in Wellfleet, Mass, to build a church, designed by Finnish-born Olav Hammarstrom, which groups 350 people around an octagonal sanctuary, and no churchgoer is more than six rows from the altar rail. Last year Bishop Pike invited Architect Hammarstrom to the Pacific Coast to design a brother church, St. Anselm’s in Lafayette, Calif., where some 450 parishioners assemble within the octagonal space, none more than seven rows from the altar. In a service that both appeals to Americans’ democratic instincts and, as one parishioner put it, resembles “sitting around the holy table as in an apostolic age,” clergy and even the bishop sit among the people, and laymen rise from their pews in the congregation to read the Old Testament lesson and the Epistle. Even the unvested choir is no longer segregated, but sits with the congregation to prompt them.
“At St. Anselm’s,” says Bishop Pike proudly, “the congregation is not the audience for a performing clergy and choir. The clergy, choir and congregation perform together, and God is the audience.” So popular, in fact, is St. Anselm’s that Bishop Pike now proposes to revamp San Francisco’s still unfinished Grace Cathedral to place the high altar at the crossing of nave and transepts.
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