Modernism and American Mid-20th Century Sacred Architecture

Anat Geva, Anat Geva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351665339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Mid-20th century sacred architecture in America sought to bridge modernism with religion by abstracting cultural and faith traditions and pushing the envelope in the design of houses of worship. Modern architects embraced the challenges of creating sacred spaces that incorporated liturgical changes, evolving congregations, modern architecture, and innovations in building technology.
The book describes the unique context and design aspects of the departure from historicism, and the renewal of heritage and traditions with ground-breaking structural features, deliberate optical effects and modern aesthetics. The contributions, from a pre-eminent group of scholars and practitioners from the US, Australia, and Europe are based on original archival research, historical documents, and field visits to the buildings discussed. Investigating how the authority of the divine was communicated through new forms of architectural design, these examinations map the materiality of liturgical change and communal worship during the mid-20th century.

PART I

Modernists and sacred architecture

1

MINIMAL RITUAL

Mies van der Rohe’s Chapel of St. Savior, 1952

Ross Anderson

I chose an intensive rather than an extensive form to express my conception, simply and honestly, of what a sacred building should be . . . The chapel will not grow old. It is of noble character, constructed of good materials, and has beautiful proportions . . . It was meant to be simple; and, in fact, it is simple. But in its simplicity it is not primitive, but noble, and in its smallness it is great—in fact, monumental.

Mies van der Rohe¹

The Robert F. Carr Memorial Chapel of St. Savior at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago is Mies van der Rohe’s single ecclesiastical building, and as such it commands a unique place in his vast rationalist œuvre. Completed in October 1952, the diminutive brick chapel was first revealed to the public in an article that was carefully composed for an issue of the journal Arts and Architecture (Fig. 1.1). The compact double-page portrait entitled “A Chapel” comprises one large signature photograph, three small vignettes, one plan drawing, a short project description and four brief, awkwardly phrased statements by the architect, including the one above. The article serves as a compact record of Mies’ aspirations for the chapel and his own estimation of the results. But it also tellingly reveals his difficulty in articulating his comprehension of the duty of religious architecture in the modern period, a time in which, to use Friedrich Schiller’s pithy statement of recognition, “the temples remain sacred to the eye, when the Gods have long become ridiculous.”² It will be seen that the unique challenge of the design of a sacred building elicited an architectural response from Mies that sets the modest chapel apart from all of his other work in subtle yet significant ways.

The spare rectangular chapel sits aloof on the vast lawned IIT campus in Chicago’s Near South Side that spreads itself over an area equal to eight city blocks. The long north and south façades are made from buff-colored bricks set in English bond. Resolutely windowless, they turn through ninety degrees at their ends to frame the corners like square brackets. The short east and west façades comprise five equally sized full-height panels. The outermost are the returns of the long brick walls and the central three are glass, framed by impeccably detailed black steel frames. The façades are identical, except that the entry is fully transparent, while the rear is translucent. The chapel tends to be photographed so as to appear as a lantern—fully exposing the column-free interior focused on the solid travertine altar. The black extruded steel roof beams are entirely exposed to view, as are the pre-cast concrete ceiling panels that they support. Regularly spaced spotlights concealed within the depth of the beams are directed towards the long uninterrupted brick walls, and towards the lustrous deeply pleated altar curtain that divides the congregation from the cloistered chambers behind. The only furnishings are two low oak-veneer benches, and a gleaming stainless-steel altar rail and cross. The interior possesses the puritan spirit of a Shaker meeting-room, and the governing beatitude evidently concerns the meek of the earth. The overall appearance is one of bare, taut, ascetic precision.

Figure 1.1 Mies van der Rohe, “A Chapel” (Chicago, Illinois), Arts and Architecture 70, no. 1 (January 1953): 18–19.

© Travers Family Trust, used with permission.

Unsurprisingly for the taciturn architect to whom the statement “build, don’t talk”³ is attributed, the real arena for his struggle was architecture as an embodied practice—on the drawing board, and with an eye to the construction site—rather than the discourses surrounding building, where he was ill at ease. The following close analysis and interpretation of the chapel is based principally upon scrutiny of his architectural drawings and on the written correspondence and archival photographs that have been archived along with them.⁴ It also takes into account material held at libraries and archives in Chicago, writings by the architect himself, secondary literature by others and direct observations made at the chapel itself.⁵ The drawings and diagrams below are not simply illustrations of the critical analysis—indeed, they are the medium in which it was conducted. There was all the time a “to and fro” between operating with the computer technology now available for carrying out drawings, and reflection on the tools that were originally at the architect’s disposal—principally, the drawing board, T-square, dividers and other manual drawing implements.⁶

The design of the chapel

Mies received the brief for the chapel on 18 March 1949 and the groundbreaking ceremony took place on 1 June 1951. Between these dates, his office produced a very extensive suite of drawings for the chapel, ranging from evocative charcoal sketches, through multiple iterations of the plan, to meticulously delineated and annotated details to be handed to builders. The original brief actually called for two buildings.⁷ In addition to the sanctuary, the chapel’s plan included a free-standing parish hall and living quarters for a chaplain, which would be built first and would serve as a community hall and a temporary chapel. A number of possible configurations of the two buildings were trialed on the drawing board between early June 1949 and the end of July 1950.⁸ Although the orientation of the two buildings relative to each other, and to the site, varied in each configuration, the walls were always made to align with the cardinal directions and were spaced as multiples of the 24-foot grid that Mies had disposed with relentless conviction across the entire campus.⁹ The detached parish hall was eventually pared from the project, leaving only the chapel. It had an exposed steel structure centered on intersections of the underlying 24-foot grid, delivering a rectangular plan measuring 48 by 72 feet. By early October 1950, this version of the chapel had been fully worked-up in a complete suite of detailed working drawings and specifications that were sent out to tender.¹⁰ The estimates that were returned were evidently either much higher than anticipated, or the budget situation had worsened, since it was decided that the cost would need to be significantly reduced.¹¹ This necessitated a rethink of the size, method of construction and finishes of the chapel.

An excerpt from a letter that Wallace E. Conkling, the bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Chicago and the sponsor of the project, sent to Mies on 19 January 1951 serves to illuminate the situation at that time. He wrote:

I deeply appr...