There is No God in that Church

British-Italian architect, Claudio Silvestrin, is the 2013 Walton Critic at the Catholic University of America. He is with us for three weeks in my studio, teaching and critiquing. Last night, he came to our Theory of Sacred Space class and spoke at length with us in question-and-answer format. Some of his most interesting points, in my opinion, revealed his views on modern church design, and where he sees design flaws. I say they were interesting, not because they were radical, but rather because his criticisms sounded radically traditional. Given Silvestrin's devotion to minimalism, I was taken aback by some of his answers. Here, I have reproduced from my notes, his points relevant to church architecture. These comments were in answer to a variety of questions, but I have reproduced them collected and organized.

Question: How do you understand a church? And, what makes a successful church?

Silvestrin: Well, I have never designed a church yet. I would love to design a new cathedral every week, but the Church has not approached me yet. I do not consider any of my works sacred, as such. That would be blasphemy. It is blasphemy to call a boutique, or a restaurant, or even a house, sacred. It is too far. They have moments that touch the soul, yes, but they are not sacred. As for a church, it is a house for God. An architect must not design for only the client, or worse, only for the satisfaction of his ego. Rather, his work is primarily for God. Architecture, like the priesthood, is a calling. Modern churches have forgotten God. They are acts of ego only. They are not houses of God, they are houses of men. Man is at the center of modern churches. Design decisions are based on man, not on God. I went to Ronchamp. It is a great work of architecture. But, that is it. It is a great design by a great architect. That is what I sensed when I was there. There is no God in that church. 

On my way home to London from holiday, I drove way out of my way into Germany to see Peter Zumthor's chapel. I admire Zumthor. So, I went to the chapel. From the outside, it sits very modestly in the landscape. It is unobtrusive, it has a good material quality. All well and good. But as you enter, you must go through this sharp, aggressive triangular door. It is not at all about God. Inside, it felt like a place for the devil, not a place for God.

The great sacred places are all made from natural materials. They have a certain life and vibration. Stone and wood have vibrations that they bring to a building. Concrete, plastic, steel, glass, do not! They are flat, fake, and empty of all vibration! You cannot make a good church out of concrete! Never! It has no vibration, no soul, no life, no history. It is of the machine. You can feel the cold cut of the machine, not the warmth of man's touch, as in wood or stone.

The architect doesn't design a church for himself, he designs it firstly for God. Nobody knows who the architects of the great cathedrals are. The monks built their monasteries for God. They didn't "design" them. They built them honestly, and with purity of intention. That is what gives them their immense power. There is no ego in a Cistercian monastery [Claudio, being a minimalist, is partial to the Cistercian aesthetic]. The architect must disappear in some cases - to reveal the essence of something.

Lou Kahn on Our Epoch

About a month ago, I was working late in my office, as is my custom, and a man working with me said, "I would like to ask you a question which has been on my mind for a long while... How would you describe this epoch?"

This man is Hungarian, who came to this country when the Russians entered Hungary. I pondered this question because, somehow, it fascinates me to answer questions to which I do not know the answer.

But I had just been reading in the New York Times Magazine of the things that had been going on in California. I had visited California, and I went through Berkeley, and I noticed the size of the revolution, and the great promises of the machine, and I felt, as I had read recently, that there were poets who were trying to write poems without words.

I sat for at least ten minutes, without moving, reviewing in my mind all these things, and finally I said to Gabor, "What is the shadow of white light?"

Gabor has a habit of repeating what you say, "White light... white light... I don't know." And I said, "Black. Don't be afraid, because white light does not exist, nor does black shadow exist."

I think that it is a time of our sun on trial, of all our institutions on trial.

I was brought up when the sunlight was yellow, and the shadow was blue. But I see it clearly as being white light, and black shadow. Yet this is nothing alarming, because I believe that there will come a fresh yellow, and a beautiful blue, and that the revolution will bring forth a new sense of wonder. Only from wonder can come our new institutions... they certainly cannot come from analysis.

And I said, "You know, Gabor, if I could think what I would do, other than architecture, it would be to write a new fairy tale, because from the fairy tale came the airplane, and the locomotive, and the wonderful instruments of our minds... it all came from wonder."

- Louis I. Kahn, 1968

On Grotesquely-Dancing Architecture

"Based on such uncertain, shaky, and non-existent cultural foundations, it has not taken long for the structures of much contemporary architecture to assume either the lugubriously ridiculous appearance of a hilariously grotesque Brueghelian dance; or to appear like a sky-reaching duel between aseptic Towers of Babel made of steel, glass, and special materials which, by the first story have lost the reason for their daring apart from guilty and naive construction." - Claudio Silvestrin

 

The Wedding Dance, Pieter Brueghel

Addition to the Royal Ontario Museum, Daniel Libeskind

 

Mr. Silvestrin is an acclaimed Italian-British architect who will be at CUA for three weeks this semester as the Walton Distinguished Visiting Critic. He will be specifically working with the studio I am taking, which focuses on sacred space and cultural expression in architecture. He is an avowed minimalist, which is something that immediately arouses suspicion in my mind, but, as evidenced by the quote above, I think he and I are coming from the same direction when it comes to diagnosing the problem of contemporary architecture. It will be an interesting studio indeed.

Lake House

I've been enjoying developing a design for a lake house that I worked on intermittently during February and March. Previously, everything was done in my sketchbooks, but over the past two days, I've been translating my hand drawings into a SketchUp model. Here's the first design sketch I began with:

Design influences include the work of Brian Mackay Lyons in Nova Scotia, the firm of Olson Kundig in Seattle, and even the work of Richard Meier in his more poetic houses. I think some of the more laudable goals of the modernist movement in architecture can be achieved more readily in a more naturalistic setting. The ability to truly take advantage of a site's topographical proclivities, for instance, is much more easily accommodated in a rural setting.

This is the model in SketchUp so far. Naturally, some things had to give a little bit in order to be accommodated. Things tend to shift as soon as real-life dimensions are applied. In a sketch, one can "draw around" difficult moments in a plan, and simply make things proportional. It is difficult to do the same in a 3 dimensional computer-measured model. This dialog between digital and analog design greatly enhances the architectural process, in my opinion.

I imagined my future self as my client. The site is a vacant sloping lot on Lake Ogemaw, in northern Michigan, where my parents have built a cottage. The lifestyle of such a house is naturally informal, and almost playful. I have attempted to have the architecture reflect such a laid-back way of living.

First Floor Plan

Second Floor Plan

The plan includes four bedrooms and three bathrooms split between two main living levels (above an unfinished basement). The main living space includes a kitchen and dining area that open up into a two-story sitting area. A covered deck is off the dining area. The second floor includes a master suite that boasts a deck that views the lake. Two smaller bedrooms and a bathroom round out the floor.

This section through the main living room shows the high ceilings and the prominent fireplace. Stairs lead to the basement mud room, which is on the main route outside to the lake.

These perspectives show views through the main living spaces of the house. In the first, the kitchen, living room, and main stair to the sleeping quarters are shown. The second shows the panoramic views over the lake from the window-lined main floor.

The house is not completely modeled yet, but it's at a good phase at the moment. It's been fun to think through how the house would be used as I've enjoyed time at my parent's cottage the past few weekends. There are interesting programmatic requirements to consider in such a place: where will the wet bathing suits be hung out to dry? where will the euchre tournaments be played? where does the grill go?

Of parabolic vaults

Here's a little design that I came up with. It is a cross-sectional view through a church, looking toward the altar. Stylistically, it is a bit of a curiosity. It started from a square plan based on some Byzantine precedents. Then, it got a rather Baroque looking altar. Add in some Art Nouveau lines and a parabolic arch reminiscent of the Engelbrekts church in Stockholm, and you have something quite intriguing indeed.

If a may engage in a bit of self-congratulation: this is the type of design that is appropriate for a modern church. Yes, the form, plan, and decor is arranged in a traditional manner. But, the stylistic cues come from very diverse sources. The arch over the apse has a certain Louis Sullivan feel to it. The altar, with its domed canopy, evokes Otto Wagner's work on the Church Am Steinhof in Vienna. Even the slim proportion of the Roman brick hearkens to Frank Lloyd Wright.

Short story long: it is traditional, but not historicist. It cannot be pegged to one time period, but it attempts to synthesize some of the highlights of the past 150 years into a cohesive whole.  

Eero Saarinen's Religious Masterpiece

Should any reader of these pages also have the misfortune of following me on Twitter, you may have noticed our rantings to the wee hours of the night about the writing of a certain paper for a certain class that shall remain nameless. The subject of this paper, by our own choosing, was Eero Saarinen's design for the campus and chapel of Concordia Lutheran Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne. Readers may recognize Eero Saarinen as the architect of the St. Louis Arch. Anyhow, Saarinen's design for the chapel has grown on me a great deal since beginning the paper. It is unabashedly modern, all of Saarinen's works were, but it has a certain artfulness about it. Light is controlled successfully, and the traditional liturgical layout is respected. In some ways, it reminds me of the simplicity of a Carthusian monastery.

Why I Hate Bubble Architecture

A giant alien parasite seems to have descended on Graz, Austria

Nothing so far in the course of my architectural education has raised my ire more than the numerous instances of bubbles masquerading as buildings that have cropped up lately. Lord, give me a city full of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier (It's a good thing sometimes our prayers go unanswered), rather than one more single bubble-blob catastrophe.

Bubbles are not architecture. I'm no architectural theorist, philosopher, or practitioner, but I have a right to my opinions, don't I? All architecture since the dawn of time has put humans at the center of its system - humans are the only creatures that build architecture with purpose after all. The Greeks had their rational rules of the orders based on human perceptions of beauty. The Gothic mimicked the human reach for the heavens in its exaggerated verticality. Even the Modernists had the human at heart - evidenced by Le Corbusier's modular man.

So, I ask: where does man fit in a bubble? How does a bubble relate to the aspirations, beauty, or even raw proportion of man? Why do we have bubble architecture? An architecture that is amorphous, practically formless, and rambling does not reflect well on the society that gave rise to it. It seems to suggest to me (remember, I have yet an untrained eye), that our society is becoming more amorphous and bubble-like and less adherent to the natural order that was once prized and celebrated. You build what you believe, after all.

They Don't Make 'Em Like That Anymore

"They don't make 'em like that anymore" is one of those phrases that one hears quite a bit in our topsy-turvey maelstrom of Postmodern America. Sometimes it refers to a sturdily crafted toaster or to a car with enough steel to emerge from the Battle of Britain unscathed, but oftentimes the phrase is whispered at buildings that catch one's eye for their beauty and fine craftsmanship that seem inimitable in our current societal situation. The phrase provokes a symphony of questions: when did our craftsmanship stop? why don't we care about classical notions of beauty anymore? is this even economical these days? Why, indeed, don't they make 'em like that anymore?

The full answer involves a long, tedious slog through the history of modern architecture whose chief and original goal was to destroy ornament and create "machines for living." For brevity's sake I will simply say that architects of the day such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and their fellow Modernist windbags sought (whether they knew it or not) to de-humanize architecture. The result litters America's cities to this day. The city hall of my hometown of Grand Rapids is a chief example of this "progress": a noble Gothic Revival edifice (pictured at left) was torn down to make room for two black glass boxes. Tragedies like that happened nationwide during the decades after the Second World War leaving us with dry, lifeless shells of structure that care nothing for their physical or human surroundings.

So, when we see buildings from an earlier time, buildings that involved the dedication and effort of the community and the skilled labor of artisans, we are rightly awed. Awed, and perhaps - like me - a bit disgusted at what we have sacrificed on the altar of progress. 

My goal, as a future architect, is to make 'em like they used to. People deserve better buildings; our survival as a culture demands them.