American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow

Building Churches for the Future, 1925–1975

Catherine R. Osborne

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226561165
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the mid-twentieth century, American Catholic churches began to shed the ubiquitous spires, stained glass, and gargoyles of their European forebears, turning instead toward startling and more angular structures of steel, plate glass, and concrete. But how did an institution like the Catholic Church, so often seen as steeped in inflexible traditions, come to welcome this modernist trend?Catherine R. Osborne's innovative new book finds the answer: the alignment between postwar advancements in technology and design and evolutionary thought within the burgeoning American Catholic community. A new, visibly contemporary approach to design, church leaders thought, could lead to the rebirth of the church community of the future. As Osborne explains, the engineering breakthroughs that made modernist churches feasible themselves raised questions that were, for many Catholics, fundamentally theological. Couldn't technological improvements engender worship spaces that better reflected God's presence in the contemporary world? Detailing the social, architectural, and theological movements that made modern churches possible, American Catholics and the Churches of Tomorrow breaks important new ground in the history of American Catholicism, and also presents new lines of thought for scholars attracted to modern architectural and urban history.

CHAPTER ONE

The Biological Paradigm

The methodical spirit of science permeates everywhere.

HANS-GEORG GADAMER, Truth and Method, 1960

In 1971, the architect Pietro Belluschi reflected on the convictions that had informed his career, illuminating a corpus that can appear to swing violently between raw concrete brutalism and graceful, compact organicism: “The modern architect must gain his insight from the world in which he lives. . . . He will accept and interpret the enormous variety of situations which our age has created, just as nature has evolved the weed and the orchid, the whale and the mouse, the eagle and the hummingbird, from a wonderfully complex but orderly set of things.”1 Guided by this principle, Belluschi had recently designed both a vast concrete-and-glass cathedral in technological, commerce-driven San Francisco, and a more intimate, warmly colored fieldstone-and-laminated-wood structure for a rural abbey church in Portsmouth, Rhode Island (figs. 1.1, 1.2). Although both designs were firmly “modern”—as (he argued) was demanded by both architecture and reality itself—he maintained their continuity with the great tradition of Catholic architecture, precisely because they adhered to the law of adaptive variation.

Figure 1.1. Church of St. Gregory the Great, Portsmouth Abbey, Portsmouth, Rhode Island (Pietro Belluschi, 1962). Photo: Author.

Figure 1.2. Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption, San Francisco, California (Pietro Belluschi with Angus McSweeney and John A. Ryan; consulting engineer, Pier Luigi Nervi, 1964–1970). Photo: E. M. Gill, October 1971, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

Portsmouth’s Benedictine monks, meanwhile, actively sought a “distinctly modern church.” Only a few decades earlier, however, they had commissioned an elaborate plan for an English Gothic church, cloister, and school complex from Boston’s Maginnis & Walsh. Delayed by the Depression and the materials shortages of World War II, by 1952, when the monks were ready to resume building, neo-Gothic buildings no longer seemed plausible. Instead, they engaged Belluschi, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, to formulate a master plan for campus and monastery. What had happened, that clients enthusiastic about Maginnis & Walsh in 1928 could hire Belluschi twenty-five years later and even, by the 1980s, demand to know “who in this age of the computer and space shuttle would want a Gothic church?”2

Belluschi’s explanation of the coherent principles behind his seemingly disparate buildings (and his patrons’ acceptance of these principles in both San Francisco and Portsmouth) indicate a thorough acceptance of a paradigm testing architectural practice against scientific knowledge. The analogy of buildings to biology is ancient, yet its implications changed significantly under the pressure of nineteenth-century evolutionary science, producing a modernist architectural theory tied intimately to notions of adaptation and growth. Simultaneously, Catholic ecclesiology also shifted toward organic metaphors. These twin developments, strongly resisted in many quarters of the architectural establishment and the Catholic Church alike, enmeshed evolutionary ecclesiology with proposals for new kinds of worship spaces.

Among both architects and American Catholics, the constituency for a biological paradigm grew dramatically during the twentieth century. During the first half of the century, the vast majority of American Catholic churches were designed in a neohistoricist style: Romanesque, Byzantine, Gothic, or Baroque. Yet discomfort with this practice dated at least to John Henry Newman’s comment that the Catholic Church required a “living architecture” for a “living ritual.”3 The emergence of a biological paradigm as a pervasive intellectual structure made it possible for Catholics to understand architecture, the Church, and all reality within an evolutionary framework, and thus to prioritize a “living” future worship space, rather than a “dead” recapitulation of the past. With their adoption of modernism’s biological and evolutionary language, a small group began redefining American Catholic architectural standards during the interwar period. In the 1940s and 1950s, as Bauhaus refugees in partnership with disciples of Frank Lloyd Wright came to dominate the architectural profession, Catholic modernists expanded in both number and influence. Collaborations between Catholic clients and modernist architects (Catholic or not) became common, although they did not always result in buildings as successful as Portsmouth’s St. Gregory the Great. Regardless, as architects, liturgists, critics, theologians, clients, and other interested clergy, religious, and laypeople mixed in the physical spaces of conferences, classes, and exhibits and in the intellectual spaces of letters, journals, and magazines, they produced a layered argument for modernist churches ultimately dependent on their adoption of biological metaphors.

“All Things in Nature Have a Form That Tells Us What They Are”: The Biological Paradigm in Architectural Theory

Art and architectural history emerged as academic disciplines in the late nineteenth century, part of the reorganization and reinvention of universities as modern research institutions.4 Although the study of the humanities expanded greatly, it was natural history, encompassing biology, geology, and cognate disciplines, that dominated nineteenth-century thought as evidence for “evolution” gained traction. While evolutionary theory was often far from ideologically neutral, its convincing explanations for species diversity and the fossil record powered its expansion into other domains, making it an increasingly inescapable paradigm for university-educated Europeans and Americans. The establishment of architectural history and art history—among the first humanistic disciplines “born of modernism”—during this period virtually ensured that they would turn to the natural sciences for both methodological insight and intellectual validation.5

While few early art historians engaged directly with evolutionary theory, many drew on prevalent languages and methods of science, aligning themselves with naturalists’ four-step method of “description, the recognition of pattern in the historical record, the creation of mental models or trial narratives to explain those patterns, and the testing of each model to see how well it really [worked] and . . . how broadly it applied.”6 First in Germany and France, then in the United States, self-conscious aspirations to scientific standards embraced method (the collection of specimens and their division into typologies) and institutional organization (the museum, the laboratory, the research university). Specialists began to argue that artwork and buildings should be understood not as isolated pieces, but as examples of “styles,” each belonging to its own time and place. Universities established “laboratories” for the study of art and architecture, and practitioners of “scientific connoisseurship” carefully identified forms and techniques that could be labeled and filed into a growing genealogy of art in much the same way that biologists examined and classified specimens found around the globe.7 Graphic representations of this genealogy—such as Sir Banister Fletcher’s 1896 The Tree of Architecture (fig. 1.3) and the Princeton medievalist Charles Rufus Morey’s 1924 illustration of the evolution of style—made explicit the analogy to evolutionary theories.8 Some of Morey’s students, like the future director of the Museum of Modern Art Alfred Barr, found his taxonomic method “too mechanical,” and abandoned medieval art history.9 But the approach stuck: two decades later, Barr’s famous chart The Development of Abstract Art evoked the diagram accompanying On the Origin of Species.10 The taxonomic, developmentalist approach to art and architecture had come to dominate the profession.11

Figure 1.3. The Tree of Architecture, from A History of Architecture, 9th ed. (Sir Banister Fletcher, [1896] 1931). Photo: RIBA111570, RIBA Collections.

Architectural theory, aimed at practitioners rather than students of history, began embracing evolutionary concepts simultaneously.12 Like many later modernists, the most notable early theorist of architectural modernism was closely associated with the study of the Middle Ages. Through his controversial “restorations” of medieval churches and in articles on French Gothic architecture, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79) proposed that medieval architects had been rational, scientific, and experimental, the modern men of their day—an assessment subsequently shared by many nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians of medieval art.13 Viollet-le-Duc claimed that each part of a Gothic building, down to the gargoyles, had served some structural and practical function. As the product of a rational system, he argued, Gothic architecture could be observed and analyzed much as Georges Cuvier and other comparative biologists deduced natural forms through analysis of their underlying structures.14

Viollet-le-Duc parlayed this assessment into a general architectural theory, arguing that all good design begins from a rational approach. Thus, the first step in an ideal process is the elaboration of a program outlining a building’s functions. The architect then conceives the best possible arrangement of spaces and volumes for those functions. The facade, regarded by most neohistoricists and beaux arts classicists as the most important part of the design, becomes, if not exactly an afterthought, primarily an outgrowth of the rational construction of the building. Good design uses the most suitable materials for the program and allows the “look” of the building to emerge from the construction process, exposing all structural elements to the viewer and including no ornamental flourishes applied to the building’s skin. If a functional use requires the violation of classical norms such as symmetry, the building’s rationalism would nevertheless make it beautiful to both users and viewers.

Although the typical modernist architect did not read Viollet-le-Duc (with the notable exception of Frank Lloyd Wright, a devotee), his principles were repeated and restated so often that they came to seem like common sense.15 They spread widely and along many axes; for example, they appeared, often in close paraphrase, in Le Corbusier’s 1923 Vers une architecture (Toward an architecture). They also lay behind the best-known dictum of modernist architectural theory, “form follows function,” commonly attributed to Wright’s mentor Louis Sullivan. Like Pietro Belluschi three-quarters of a century later, Sullivan linked the practice of architecture to nature’s ability to produce forms that were beautiful precisely because they were functional:

All things in nature have a shape, that is to say a form . . . that tells us what they are. . . . Unfailingly in nature, these shapes express the inner life, the native quality of the animal. . . . Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds—over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law.16

Technological rationalism and naturalist organicism were inextricably melded at the roots of modernist architectural theory as theorists established universal rules of architectural practice through biological analogy.17

Functionalism has acquired a reputation for a fatal obsession with technical and financial efficiency, resulting in socially disastrous high-rise housing and uninspired suburban offices. But twentieth-century modernist designers saw the interrelation of form and function as a necessary corollary of architecture’s fundamentally biological character. As the Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy pointed out, Sullivan’s catchphrase was not intended to be “a cheap commercial slogan”; rather, it was a commonsense commentary on the similarity between good design and “phenomena occurring in nature,” where the form (shape and color) of, say, a leaf articulates its function (its purpose and activities).18 Despite real philosophical and aesthetic differences, biocentrism united the key figures in American architectural modernism, including Sullivan, Louis Kahn, Eero and Eliel Saarinen, the Bauhaus émigrés, and Frank Lloyd Wright.19

Although Wright produced very little work for the Catholic Church, it would be hard to fathom American Catholic modernism without his presence as both theorist and teacher. Musing on Viollet-le-Duc and his mentor Sullivan, Wright emphasized the perceived biological qualities of architecture, calling for an “organic architecture,” one that “develops from within outward in harmony with the conditions of its being, as distinguished from one that is applied from without.”20 Specifically, he argued that “a building should appear to grow easily from the site”; forms, colors, and building materials should harmonize with the specific location and the project’s needs.21 The Beaux-Arts method of design had encouraged architects to see buildings as, essentially, very large and unusually useful pieces of sculpture. Another possibility was to treat buildings largely as technical problems. Wright was both a great artist and an inventive engineer, but the concept of organic architecture treated buildings first and foremost as if they were plants or animals: a building would succeed, or not, because of how well its necessary functions cohered with its form, and because of how well adapted it was to its environment. For Wright, neohistoricism was doomed not merely because it was backward-looking, but because historic styles could never meet the organic criteria for American architecture. By definition, a Gothic, Romanesque, or Renaissance revival building in the United States was removed from its time, place, and landscape. The idea that a church building should be locally adapted led American architects and theorists—though members of an international network and interested obser...