Modernism and Modern Church Architecture

   A common thesis which has gained some currency recently suggests that the reason church architecture is in such a state of disarray has largely to do with the misunderstandings that arose from the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Such seems to be the thesis, for example, [click] of architect and author Steven J. Schloeder's widely discussed 1998 book Architecture in Communion . "I have undertaken this work," he says in his introduction, "because I find many – or rather most recent Catholic churches to be banal, uninspiring, and frequently even liturgically bizarre." The first chapter of the book is in fact titled, "An Architectural Response to Vatican II" and the whole of that chapter leads up to the last two sections, entitled, respectively: "The misinterpretation of Vatican II" and "The need for a reexamination and a fresh response." In this last section, Mr. Schloeder begins by asserting categorically: "These problems in the interpretation of the Council's documents have undoubtedly contributed to the confusion in the architectural ordering of churches." And one page later, he insists that our current problems are not the result of "an increasingly secularized modern society," but rather "a lack of conviction and direction, brought about by theological confusion, that has resulted in liturgical and architectural poverty." "The barrenness of the building," he says, "reflects the barrenness of contemporary theology."

   Now this thesis is especially attractive, one has to admit, to those of us of a more "academic" bent, such as theologians and liturgists, because it suggests that the problem is one of ideas: art follows ideology. Correct the ideas – get the notion of liturgy right (the job of, guess who?, theologians and liturgists) – and voilá, the architecture will take care of itself.

   Now, as attractive as this thesis is, I'm afraid that its one drawback is that it's largely not true. The character of contemporary church architecture is not, I would suggest, primarily the result of bad ideas about liturgy – although, Lord knows, we have plenty of those. Rather, bad church architecture is the result, quite simply, of bad ideas about architecture. The problems of contemporary church architecture, in other words, weren't caused in the first place by the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. No, they were caused primarily, I would argue, by the embrace of modernist architectural principles by contemporary architects and by the liturgical "experts" who have laid down the guidelines and regulations for all new church buildings.

   While there are many different examples that might be used to illustrate this thesis, for the purposes of this talk, I would like to focus on one small, but particularly interesting example [click] : a little booklet published in 1952 by the Liturgy Program at the University of Notre Dame called Speaking of Liturgical Architecture by Fr. H. A. Reinhold. Although published in 1952, the lectures contained in this booklet were actually delivered at Notre Dame several years earlier, during the summer of 1947.

   (Note the date: in 1947, the Council was still some fifteen years away.)

   The point of publishing the book, according to the book's preface, was "to focus attention on some simple but basic liturgical requirements in the building and decoration of Catholic churches, requirements that are not generally known even by those who have the professional responsibility of constructing our houses of worship."

   Let me repeat that: "to focus attention on some simple but basic liturgical requirements in the building and decoration of Catholic churches."

   Indeed, this is the thesis that is repeated throughout the book: The rules for building churches must be derived from their liturgical function. "One thing it is safe to say," says Fr. Reinhold in his text, "[a church's] liturgical, sacramental function ought to be the determining factor [in its design]." Of his approach to church architecture, he says very clearly: "We are trying to find a principle for our procedure in the liturgy itself." The title of the book, after all, is not Speaking of Church Architecture, but rather Speaking of Liturgical Architecture.

   And here, I would suggest, is the crux of the matter. Here is where something very interesting starts to happen – interesting both conceptually and historically. What seems at first like a very innocent (or perhaps indeed, a very appropriate) principle of architectural design – design the church with the liturgy in mind – can become in practice (and in fact did become, I would argue), something very different.

   Take, for example, one of the major, bold-faced headings of Fr. Reinhold's text, [click] which instructs the prospective student very prominently that the basic principle to be followed in building churches is: "Form follows function."

   Now, as most of you are probably already aware, the phrase, "Form follows function," has been the rallying cry of Modernist architects since the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, Fr. Reinhold's book starts out with a chapter entitled "Functional Characteristics" and develops its notion of church architecture from this starting point. Now although Fr. Reinhold denies repeatedly throughout his book that the church should favor any particular "style" of architecture over any other, yet he begins his own discussion of church architecture (perhaps without being fully aware of it) from a distinctively modernist perspective. And this perspective – this starting point – radically affects everything else that follows in the book.

   But first, we need to be clear about what "form follows function" means. If "form follows function" were meant to imply simply that a building should fulfill its function, that is to say, the purpose for which it was built, that would be one thing. So, for example, a church probably shouldn't have, say, a huge wall across the middle of the nave so that people can't walk down the central aisle; and it shouldn't have its doors hidden so that no one can get in or out – sure. But of course, if "form follows function" had meant that, it's hard to see how it could have become the rallying cry for a new architectural movement. "Build buildings so that they work" is not exactly a bold and daring new statement. Besides, modernist architects are notorious for not caring whether or not people can find the doors in their buildings [click], or whether or not they can get around in them comfortably [click]. (These last two slides were of Catholic churches, by the way.)

   But in fact, the phrase "form follows function" doesn't mean that for modernist architects. Rather, it means something very different. Through a series of bizarre transformations after the first appearance of the phrase in the writings of famed Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, "form follows function" subsequently came to epitomize, as one critic has put it, "the modernist claim that the Modern Epoch was pregnant with new forms, and with a new aesthetics intrinsic to this Epoch, and [it] implied that the primary duty of the modernist designer, overshadowing all his other duties and loyalties, was to serve as a kind of midwife for this new objective aesthetics, which was deemed independent of anybody's taste preferences." In other words, the modernist notion of "function" does not pertain to the subjective desires or designs of the potential users of the building; no, rather "function" is an objective aesthetic category for which a certain objective "form" necessarily follows.

   Who, then, can discern the "correct" aesthetic form necessary to this particular circumstance? Well, that's why you have to hire the Modernist architect (or some other expert intellectual): because he is the only person capable of such aesthetic, intellectual discernment – capable, in other words, of designing, not necessarily the building you would have wanted, but of designing the building you should have wanted.

   We can perhaps best illustrate this sensibility by simply turning to Fr. Reinhold's book and showing what he means by "functionalism." Does he begin, for example, by considering, perhaps by using historical examples, what would make for a beautiful and excellent liturgical celebration? Perhaps things like spaciousness, a dynamic sense of space leading the eye upward, or beautiful stained-glass windows with biblical themes to instruct the faithful and to give them a foretaste of that heavenly banquet to which we are all being called in the mass? Well, not exactly. Rather he decides that, because baptism and the Eucharist are, as he says, "the two most important sacraments," therefore: "the prominence of these two sacraments must determine the architecture of a church, inside and out (I emphasize this)" [that's his emphasis, by the way, not mine]. "A parish church," says Fr. Reinhold, "is above all a Eucharist ... and Baptism ... church. Its inside should express this. If its inside organs are thus disposed and visibly emphasized, honest architecture (functionalism in its true sense) should manifest these two foci on the outside [as well] – in the right place."

   With this, it becomes clear what "functionalism" means for Fr. Reinhold. "Functionalism," on this view, does not mean that the building should adequately facilitate its function: namely, liturgy. No, functionalism, "in its true sense," means "honesty" in architecture, and "honesty" in architecture involves expressing the inside of the building on the outside. This, of course, is Modernist architecture in its purest form. Indeed, in his best-selling book on Modernist architecture, entitled From Bauhaus to Our House, author Tom Wolfe describes in detail this fundamental Modernist principle of design:

Then there was the principle of ‘expressed structure,' [among the Modernists, says Wolfe].... Henceforth walls would be thin skins of glass or stucco....   Since walls were no longer used to support a building – steel and concrete or wooden skeletons now did that – it was dishonest to make walls look as chunky as a castle's. The inner structure, the machine-made parts, the mechanical rectangles, the modern soul of the building, must be expressed on the outside, completely free of applied decoration.

Thus, for Modernist architects, it became essential that the outside of the building "reveal the structure" in an "honest" way. No longer would the outside of the building be allowed to "hide" the inside , for that would be "dishonest."

   So it is not really liturgy that takes precedence for Fr. Reinhold – after all, effective and impressive liturgies had been going on in all sorts of different buildings for hundreds of years – no, what takes precedence is the form, the "idea," to which all buildings must conform, or be judged a failure. This is fundamental. We must begin with the disembodied Idea – with the language of pure Form – not with the living reality of what has actually been shown to work in practice, and then force everything to conform to that Idea. Indeed, perhaps nothing is more characteristic of the practice of contemporary liturgical experts than beginning, not with historical models, but with an idea of the "ideal" form, and then enforcing that form on the worshiping community, whether desired or not. The result, as often as not, is a "functionalism" that's not all that functional.

   This is a view of architecture that designs buildings from the inside out. It is a view of architecture that sees the building as not much more than a "covering" or "skin" around a particular interior space. Take, for example, this caption [click] of a photograph from the highly influential little book Environment and Art in Catholic Worship, which says, in part: "The building or cover enclosing the architectural space is a shelter or ‘skin' for liturgical action." That comment, I would suggest, reflects a fundamentally Modernist notion of what a building is or should be. (And that building, I admit, makes me thankful that God didn't think of our skin as just a "cover" or "shell" for a certain bodily action. God knows what we'd look like. Indeed, isn't that one of the great things about skin: that it has a continuity and beauty all its own, not entirely unrelated to what goes on inside the body, but not entirely revelatory of it either?)

   In any case, Fr. Reinhold's functionalist frame of mind is revealed, not only when he talks about modern churches, but when he comments on church architecture of the past as well. So, for example, the one thing that Fr. Reinhold admires about the Gothic style is the fact that the structure of the building is revealed externally. He says of the Gothic use of the flying buttress, for example, [click] that: "The skeleton that was hidden in the Romanesque church has, [with the Gothic], grown out of its layers of skin and flesh, and man is turned inside out in his Gothic churches: he shows his interior .... This honesty in construction ... is something we begin again to love."

   Now, who would the "we" be in that last sentence, do you suppose? Probably the same "we" who loved it when Mies van der Rohe "expressed the structure" honestly [click] in the Seagrams Building in New York. And the same "we" who loved it when the Georges Pompidou center in Paris [click] turned itself inside out, showing its interior exteriorly, in a structurally "honest" way. This is the same "we" who would admire a Gothic cathedral like Chartres or Notre Dame, not because of its beautiful windows or its dynamic spaciousness, but because it reveals the interior structure exteriorly.

   Yes, Fr. Reinhold admires the Gothic's "structural honesty," but still, he finds it lacking as an example of proper liturgical architecture. So, for example, concerning the Gothic cathedrals of Canterbury and York [click], Fr. Reinhold says this:

The beautiful ‘central' towers of Canterbury [shown here] and York are a magnificent architectural accent, but have no liturgical, intrinsic function whatsoever. [Thus they fail, you see.] The spires of so many cathedrals, though lovely creations, create architectural emphasis around the comparatively insignificant bells – if anything. Even if you consider them as ‘fingers pointing to heaven,' then the ‘sermon in stone' or the architectural ‘outcry of the redeemed' reaches its highest pitch at the gates, or straddles across the joining of the crossbeams in a cruciform church, [but are] unrelated to the internal organs ....

Ah yes, the great sin: external structure unrelated to the internal organs.

   In fact, according to this principle, as it turns out, and as Fr. Reinhold plainly admits, almost all the great churches of Christendom have been architectural failures. Of the legendary Church of Holy Wisdom [click] (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople, for example, Fr. Reinhold insists that it suffers from the failure of having what he calls "misplaced accents":

[click]

Notice how the "architectural focus" (line A) and the "liturgical focus" (line B) are out of synch. This mustn't happen – something that the architects who built Hagia Sophia seem not to have considered.

   And indeed, this problem of "misplaced accents" besets, unfortunately, as it turns out, the majority of Western churches. [click] "In many cases," says Fr. Reinhold, namely "medieval England, baroque continent, [and] modern American" [which, you have to admit, pretty much covers the spectrum] – in these churches, "the accent question was not answered very well." Notice again how line A doesn't line up with line B. Not allowed.

   Which brings us to what Fr. Reinhold thinks a church should look like or "do." In answer, he offers the reader this [click] – something he calls an "ideogram" of the ideal church. (Notice that the door is in the middle between the baptismal font and the main altar: that's Fr. Reinhold's ideologically preferred place.) Following this plan – this "ideogram" – will finally give us, he says, "suitable" liturgical architecture.

   Now to be fair, and in the interests of full disclosure, I must immediately add that, according to Fr. Reinhold, this "ideogram" of the "suitable" church is not meant to be an actual "architectural design." Indeed, he says, "it could be built in Gothic, Renaissance, or Modern Style, if there were good reasons to decide to do so" (but, of course, the door would still need to be in the middle).

   And yet, ironically enough, nowhere in his book does Fr. Reinhold offer us any "good reasons" to build new churches in anything like the Gothic or Renaissance styles. Indeed, in the conclusion of his book, he positively discourages it. He says of these older styles that they were "children of their own day," and that our architects "must find as good an expression in our language of form, as our fathers did in theirs."

   But this presupposition itself – that all the styles of the past were simply "children of their own day," which need to be replaced by a new, modern language of form that reflects our own age – shows as much as anything else Fr. Reinhold's distinctively Modernist cast of mind. It would have been completely foreign to a Medieval or Renaissance architect to talk this way. Quite the contrary. Medieval and Renaissance artists and architects saw themselves as working within a tradition – one whose standards they had to live up to. They didn't look back at the past with scorn and disdain as something passé, as something to be superceded; rather they looked at the great exemplars of the past with humility and pride as things to be emulated and imitated.

   It was the Modernists, rather, who contrived the notion of re-creating architecture itself out of whole cloth, on a blank slate, so to speak, and who demanded an architecture that expressed the "spirit of the modern age." It was, for example, Mies van der Rohe, perhaps the most influential of all the Modernist architects, who had described architecture as "the will of the age conceived in spatial terms."

   Whereas previous architects had always seen themselves as being in continuity with the great forms and architectural traditions of the past, the Modernists sought to throw off all those "chains" of the past and create architecture anew – from the ground up – much as Descartes had attempted to re-create philosophy by methodically doubting everything that had come before him and allowing back into his mind only those ideas that had mathematical clarity and certainty. Author Tom Wolfe has written about those who studied in Germany's Bauhaus, for example, [click] , that:

The young architects and artists who came to the Bauhaus to live and study and learn from the Silver Prince [the Bauhaus's founder, Walter Gropius] talked about ‘starting from zero.' One heard the phrase all the time: ‘starting from zero.' ... how pure, how clean, how glorious it was to be ... starting from zero! ... So simple! So beautiful ... It was as if light had been let into one's dim brain for the first time. My God! – starting from zero! ... If you were young, it was wonderful stuff. Starting from zero referred to nothing less than re-creating the world.

Just as, after Descartes, there no longer seemed to be any point in reading the likes of Plato or Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, so too after Corbusier and Gropius, there no longer seemed to be any point in studying Vitruvius or Palladio or any of the work of the classical architects and designers. They were, quite literally, banned from the curriculum in favor of "starting from zero."

   And when those same architects fled from Hitler's Germany in the 1930's and ended up in America, they brought with them that same sensibility to the architectural schools in this country. Permit me, if you will, one more quotation from Tom Wolfe, in which he describes the somewhat unexpected character of this German "invasion":

   All at once [says Wolfe], in 1937, the Silver Prince himself was here, in America. Walter Gropius; in person; in the flesh; and here to stay.... Other stars of the fabled Bauhaus arrived at about the same time: Breuer, Albers, Moholy-Nagy, Bayer, and Mies van der Rohe .... Here they came, uprooted, exhausted, penniless, men without a country, battered by fate ....
   As a refugee from a blighted land, [Gropius] would have been content with a friendly welcome, a place to lay his head, two or three meals a day until he could get on his own feet, a smile every once in a while, and a chance to work, if anybody needed him. And instead....
   Well, Gropius was made head of the school of architecture at Harvard, and Breuer joined him there. Moholy-Nagy opened the New Bauhaus, which evolved into the Chicago Institute of Design. Albers opened a rural Bauhaus in the hills of North Carolina, at Black Mountain College. [And Mies –] Mies was installed as dean of architecture at the Armour Institute of Chicago [click]. And not just dean; master builder also. He was given a campus to create [click], twenty-one buildings in all, as the Armour Institute merged with the Lewis Institute to form the Illinois Institute of Technology. Twenty-one large buildings [click -- and this chapel] in the middle of the Depression, at a time when building had come almost to a halt in the United States – for an architect who had completed only seventeen buildings in his career — ...
   It was embarrassing, perhaps ... but it was the kind of thing one could learn to live with .... Within three years the course of American architecture had changed, utterly.... Everyone started from zero.

   So it was, I would suggest, that when specialists in liturgy, such as Fr. Reinhold, turned their minds to church architecture, they breathed in, as it were, "the spirit of the age": the currents of air that were wafting through all the American schools of architecture – perhaps without even being aware that that was what they were doing. But whether aware of it or not, when a liturgical specialist such as Fr. Reinhold thought about church architecture, it's clear that he thought about it in the categories that had been set by a generation of Modernist architects who, by the time he was writing and lecturing, controlled all the major schools of architecture in America.

   Indeed, this Modernist perspective, I would argue, still dominates contemporary discussions about church architecture. Consider, for example, the person with whom we began: author Steven J. Schloeder. His fundamental criticism of current church architecture is what? – that it doesn't have the correct idea of liturgy behind it. Remember: "The barrenness of the building," he says, "reflects the barrenness of contemporary theology." But in making this criticism in this way, he shows himself to be as throughly Modernist in his approach as any of the designers he criticizes. The problem, ultimately, is that the idea of the building is wrong, not its lack of beauty. In the end, his approach is as Modernist as Fr. Reinhold's.

   And indeed, Fr. Reinhold's modernist sensibilities affect not only his view of what is appropriate for the outside of the church, it influences his aesthetic judgments about interior design as well – and in ways that the contemporary church-goer will recognize instantly. Take, for example, the following statement about the "ideal parish church": "the ideal parish church," says Fr. Reinhold, "is the one in which the architecture creates the ideal setting for full participation." Now, the notion of "full and active participation" as a determining factor in church design is one that most people associate with Vatican II. But in fact, here it is being stated with authority already in 1947.

   What is even more important to notice, however, is what Fr. Reinhold means when he talks about "the ideal setting for full participation." Note that, once again, instead of starting from a historical survey of excellent churches that have been shown to successfully encourage full and active participation, Fr. Reinhold, in line with his functionalist methodology, "starts from zero," so to speak – begins with a tabula rasa, as though no church had ever been built before – and derives his norms for proper functionalist design from his own conception of the "ideal" church. (And remember, by "ideal" here, we don't mean the design that has been shown by experience to be best or most practical, rather we mean, the design that is in accord with the proper aesthetic "ideal": that's the "ideal" church.)

   What, then, according to Fr. Reinhold, writing in 1947, is the "ideal setting for full participation"?   Here it is (under that large, bold-faced heading that says "Form follows function"):

[click]

Ah yes, it's the fan-shaped congregation, or "church-in-the-round." You see it all the time [click]. Or perhaps I should say: You see it all [click] the [click] time [click]. (And yes, those were all Catholic churches.) Indeed, liturgical experts have even taken regular straight churches [click] and turned the congregation sideways to accomplish "church-in-the -round."

   Ever wonder why so many modern churches are built this way? Ever wonder why it seems impossible anymore to build a new church with straight aisles? Well, now you have your answer. This particular configuration (fan-shaped or "church-in-the-round") wasn't specified anywhere by the Second Vatican Council. And yet we find it stipulated here by an American liturgical "expert," as the necessary functional "form" for a church already in 1947 – nearly fifteen years before the Council!

   So, for example, here are some of the possible configurations Fr. Reinhold suggests:

[click]

Strangely, these 1947 diagrams look suspiciously similar to these [click] 1998 diagrams from Steven Schoeder's book, Architecture in Communion, which carry the caption: "Church as Amoebae (top) and [church as] Paramecia (bottom) – aberrant forms which Schloeder blames on misinterpretations of the Second Vatican Council. Well, yes and no.

   What the Council did was to wisely exhort the faithful to "full and active participation" at the Mass. What seems to have happened, however, is that when American liturgical "experts" heard those words in 1965, they had already long been conditioned by their training to connect "full and active participation" with "fan-shaped" congregations and "church-in-the-round." And what's more, once connected, the two ideas became inseparable. To "go back," as they would put it, to straight aisles in a church would be tantamount to rejecting the Council's norms for "full and active participation." Indeed, it seems to have become impossible now for such experts to conceive of "full and active participation" without the fan-shaped, church-in-the-round design.

   One last example. Another architectural innovation that people have mistakenly associated with the Second Vatican Council, but which was already present in 1947 in Fr. Reinhold's little treatise is this [click]. On p. 20 of his book, Fr. Reinhold mentions a wonderful new innovation he has discovered which he wishes to recommend to the reader: "Rudolf Schwarz (designer of this [click] famous church) – Rudolf Schwarz proposes [the idea of ] a white-washed wall behind the altar." "There is great beauty in this original approach," says Fr. Reinhold, but are we ready to carry it out?"

   To that question, the answer, as subsequent history clearly shows, [click] would have to be an emphatic "yes."

   But now the question is: Can we ever get liturgical experts to stop? Must every church in Christendom [click] have a blank, white-washed wall [click] behind the altar? How many beautiful rear altars [click] were torn out of older churches to make way for the miracle of the blank, white-washed wall behind the altar? [click] It was Mies van der Rohe who said of architectural design, that "Less is more." Well, we've certainly gotten a lot more of the "less" than we ever thought we would!

   But look, that's enough. My point is simply this: Here in this 1947 treatise, we find a popular course of lectures, proposing and promulgating to future liturgical experts, the following notions: that a church should be understood as a covering or "skin" around a certain activity; that what takes primacy in building and designing a church is the Form or Idea of the "ideal church" which is to be applied; that the fan-shaped or "church-in-the-round configuration is the "ideal" (thus required) design for achieving full participation; and that it would be preferred if we had the courage to require blank, white-washed walls. All this in 1947: long before the Second Vatican Council ever even began to set pen to paper.

   Indeed, it is my contention that, when the Council documents finally did reach America in the mid-sixties, they were delivered into a social and cultural context that was already well-imbued with the modernist architectural ethos. And, moreover, when American liturgists read and interpreted those Counciliar documents, they did so, I would suggest, through the interpretive lense of that modernist architectural perspective. We were well on our way to this kind of church, [click] in other words, long before the Council fathers ever wrote a word of Sacrosanctum concilium.

   If this is true, then it may well give rise to the following questions:

   If what Fr. Reinhold proposes represents essentially a modernist approach to architecture, and if modernism is a style like any other style, then is it really wise to canonize these principles as though they were essential to Catholic church architecture?

   And if, as many cultural commentators have suggested, we are moving into a "post-modern" age, then will the churches that arise out of that modernist architectural ethos really continue to serve us well into the next generation? If post-modern architects have moved on, then perhaps we should as well.

   And indeed, if post-modern architects have begun to re-introduce classical elements into their designs, might we not find ourselves presented with an exciting new opportunity as Catholics [click] to reintroduce contemporary architects to some of our classical and traditional design elements as well?

    There might be great beauty in this original approach. But are we ready to carry it out?

Thank you very much.