On modern architecture and churches

 

A dear friend—who happens to be an architect—read my essay Cuando el cielo dejó de caber en el hormigón and answered that modern sacred architecture is not a lost cause. As proof he offered two celebrated buildings: Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp and Richard Meier’s church of Dio Padre Misericordioso at Tor Tre Teste. I owe him a reply. What follows is the view I gave him, now set down for other readers of this blog.

The Hill, the Crab Shell, and the God Who Was Not Consulted

Ronchamp is the building one is not allowed to touch. Mention the wreck of sacred architecture after the war and someone will produce, like a relic, Le Corbusier’s chapel on the hill of Bourlémont. Not a warehouse, they say. Not a gymnasium. Look at the light. And they are not entirely wrong. Notre-Dame du Haut is not the beige auditorium in which a generation of Catholics was taught that God prefers fluorescent tubes. It is a sculpture that knows how to keep a secret. The roof lifts like a sail or a coif. The south wall is a deep, pierced membrane. Color arrives in small, irregular wounds. The floor falls toward the altar as the vault rises. An eighteenth-century Virgin, saved from the rubble of 1944, turns in her glass niche to face the few who pray inside or the thousands who stand in the field. If the test of a church were only that the visitor fall silent, Ronchamp would pass.

That is precisely why it is more dangerous than the galpón.

Le Corbusier was asked to rebuild a Marian pilgrimage chapel destroyed by bombardment. He was not a believer. He had already called the Catholic Church a dead institution and declined to work for her. He accepted at last, and later offered the sentence that should hang over every admiring monograph: he did not know the miracle of faith, but he often saw the miracle of espace indicible—ineffable space. There is the creed of the place. The problem the building solves is not how to house the sacrifice of the Mass, nor how to teach an illiterate pilgrim the story of salvation. The problem it solves is how a modern genius, standing on four horizons, may manufacture the shiver once produced by dogma.

Chartres does not shiver. Chartres speaks. Its glass is Scripture. Its west façade is a Last Judgment you can read with the body. Puebla’s Capilla del Rosario does not invite you to have an aesthetic experience of gold; it conscripts the gold of the earth and makes it kneel. Ronchamp conscripts shadow. The light is real, and it is beautiful, and it is theologically mute. The little windows bear flowers, birds, fragments of the Litany of Loreto—Mary as moon, as morning star—painted by a man for whom nature was a more reliable sacrament than the altar. One side chapel is red. Is it the Blood of Christ, or the blood of 1944, or a plastic decision? The architect never said. A church that will not say what its own color means has already chosen atmosphere over proclamation.

They will tell you the roof is a crab shell picked up on a Long Island beach. They say it with reverence, as if a crustacean were a more honest origin for a house of God than the measurements of Ezekiel or the jeweled city of the Apocalypse. I do not doubt the poetry. I doubt the substitution. The medieval mason also looked at nature. He looked through it. Corbusier looks at nature and then at himself looking. The hill becomes an Acropolis; the chapel becomes “a word addressed to the place.” The place is flattered. The Word made flesh is an honored guest in someone else’s metaphor.

And yet the building works on the nerves. That is the part the traditionalist must not lie about. Walk in from the glare of the Vosges and the darkness is almost baptismal. The roof does not sit on the walls; a thin blade of light separates them, and for a moment the vault seems to hover, as if the stone had remembered the Resurrection and then forgotten the name. People weep who would not weep in a parish hall. Fine. The Devil is not so stupid as to make all modern churches ugly. He is content if they are moving and unspecific—if they train the soul to seek the sacred as a mood, a quality of concrete and sun, rather than as a Person who was born, died, rose, and will judge.

Ronchamp’s true damage is not on that hill. It is in the license it issued. After 1955 every diocesan committee could point to the masterpiece and say: you see, the new language can be holy. What followed was not a procession of Ronchamps. What followed was the alibi. Architects who had neither Corbusier’s eye nor a pilgrim hill nor a rescued Virgin poured the same contempt for the inherited plan into buildings that had only the contempt. The exception was used to abolish the rule. A unique sculpture, paid for by a unique site and a unique vanity, became the permission slip for a thousand rooms in which the heavenly Jerusalem was declared optional.

There is a further irony, and it is not small. The chapel stands on a ridge that Christians had climbed for centuries to honor Our Lady. The old sanctuary was destroyed by war. The new one was born in the same years when French Dominicans of L’Art Sacré were pressing a reformed art upon a wary Holy See, and when Mediator Dei had already warned against turning the altar into a mere table of the assembly. Ronchamp is more cave than table, more grotto than auditorium. In that sense it is “more Catholic” than many later churches built by baptized architects. It is also more pagan: a high place, a white idol of form, a temple to the inexpressible. The Virgin is there, turning on her axis like a clever stage effect. She survived the bombs. Whether she survives being reduced to a hinge between interior mood and exterior spectacle is another question.

I do not ask that every church be Chartres. I have already said that the Baroque found another tongue for the same faith, and that the gold of America was not loot but offering. I ask only that a church be willing to mean the faith it houses. Ronchamp means Le Corbusier with unusual intensity. It means landscape. It means the modern hunger for a sacred that will not obligate. It means, if you insist, a kind of prayer made of mass and void. What it will not mean—what it cannot mean without betraying its author—is that the building itself is a servant, that beauty has a Master, and that the pilgrim came for Someone who was not invented on the drawing board.

A cave may be numinous. The Church was not sent to baptize caves. She was sent to raise, on the ruins of every hill-cult and every genius, a sign that heaven has already come down, and that stone and glass and even concrete are under orders to say so. Ronchamp almost says it. Then it remembers who signed the plans, and falls silent in the most eloquent way of the twentieth century: by becoming a masterpiece.

by Alfonso Beccar Varela and Grok

Three Sails and a God Too Clean to Touch

Ronchamp is a cave that almost prays. The church Richard Meier planted at Tor Tre Teste is a showroom that almost apologizes. They are opposite errors, and they are the same error. Both treat the sacred as a quality of space. One hides it in shadow. The other bleaches it until nothing unclean—which is to say, nothing incarnate—can survive.

Dio Padre Misericordioso was conceived as a gift of the Great Jubilee, a parish for a working-class edge of Rome, and a built footnote to John Paul II’s encyclical on the mercy of God. The Vicariate invited the usual names of the late century. Meier won. He arrived from a career of white museums and offered Rome what he always offers: geometry washed of memory, light without stained narrative, a purity so thorough it looks like fear of the body. He told the Pope the white sails would carry us toward a new world. The sails are three shells of precast concrete, graded in height, filled with Carrara dust and a cement that was advertised as self-cleaning, smog-eating, white forever. The Trinity, we were assured. The Church as ship entering the third millennium. The largest curve, the protective hand of the Father.

Symbolism declared in a press kit is not symbolism earned in stone. Chartres does not need a brochure to explain that the west façade is a judgment. Puebla does not announce that its gold is an offering. Meier must say Trinity because the concrete will not. Three arcs of the same radius, shifted and stacked, are a beautiful structural idea. They are not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They are Meier, as the Getty is Meier and the Ara Pacis pavilion is Meier. The brand has been baptized. The font did not take.

Walk inside. The light is abundant and well-behaved. Glass roof, glass ends, a nave that feels like praying under an expensive sky. A crucifix was allowed to remain—dark wood against the white, a concession the concept could not metabolize. A polychrome Madonna hides in the weekday chapel like a relative one is fond of but will not seat at the main table. The rest is serenity of the clinical kind: the serenity of a gallery between exhibitions. Mercy, in the Christian sense, is not serene. Mercy is blood and dust and a father running down the road before the son has finished his speech. A church named for that mercy and then scoured of every stain is a contradiction wearing vestments of titanium dioxide.

Even the white refused the sermon. The photocatalytic skin was to remain immaculate in Roman air. Years later the shells discolor, grow biology, demand the restorations that all honest materials demand. I almost prefer the stains. They are the first true words the building has spoken: nothing made for earth stays museum-white, and a faith that cannot bear weather cannot bear the Incarnation. The Word became flesh. Flesh yellows. Gold leaf dulls and is renewed. Travertine takes the city into its pores and becomes Rome. Meier’s concrete was engineered to reject the city. That is not transcendence. That is hygiene.

There is a plaque. Not a verse from Dives in Misericordia. Not Misericordes sicut Pater. The architect’s own testament: this structure witnesses to the monumental work of men in the service of spiritual aspirations. Men. Aspirations. The sentence is accurate. It is also the confession. At Chartres the mason hid his name in a labyrinth and pointed the whole machine at God. At Tor Tre Teste the signature is in the atrium, and the machine points at the aspiration of the signer. Spiritual aspirations are what a cultured century has left when it has mislaid the Creed. They are not nothing. They are not enough to justify a church.

The orientation is a small parable of the same pride. The building is a boat, we are told; the altar is the engine at the stern; the Eucharist pushes the parish into the future. East is abandoned for a metaphor that flatters the designer’s parti. For two millennia Christian churches faced the rising light because they expected a Person, not a program. You may invent a cleverer diagram. You may not call the diagram tradition and move on. The poor of Tor Tre Teste did not ask for a stern and a bow. They asked for a place where God is merciful here, in a quarter the guidebooks skip on the way to the Forum. What they received is an icon for architecture students and a parish that must live inside someone else’s monograph.

I do not say the church is a galpón. It cost too much and was drawn too carefully for that insult. I say it is the galpón’s refined cousin: the building that replaced proclamation with luminosity, and then called the luminosity mercy. Ronchamp at least admits the dark. Meier will not. His God is a northern window. His sacrament is daylight evenly distributed. His eschatology is a white that promised never to grow old.

Rome did not need this lesson. Rome already knew how mercy looks when it is built: chapels stuffed with ex-votos, blackened Madonnas, gilt that has known candle smoke, floors worn by knees. That is not clutter. That is the record of people who were forgiven and came back. A church that cannot afford to get dirty cannot afford them.

The Jubilee was supposed to open a door. Meier built a sail. Sails are for leaving. The Christian building, if it is any good, is for arriving—at an altar, at a wound, at a Father who does not require the walls to remain photogenic. Three curves against the Roman sky will photograph until the end of the world. That is not the same thing as preaching. And a mercy that will not take the stain of the world is not the mercy the encyclical named. It is only the old modern dream, washed one more time, and set down at the edge of the city as if cleanliness were a virtue of God and not a nervousness of ours.

by Alfonso Beccar Varela and Grok