ARTICLES

Not Architecture

Oakland Diocese Design for Cathedral Draws Comment

By Christopher Zehnder

Is it a giant clam, or a miter with a hat brim? Some have suggested it looks like the "Jaws" shark cast in steel and glass. The design for the exterior of Oakland diocese's prospective Cathedral of Christ the Light evokes a number of associations, most of them sub-marine. So does the interior.

"People say [the interior] looks like a rib cage," admitted Brother Mel Anderson; however, this was not his opinion; to Brother the great vertebral seam, arching up and over the "worship space," with the lateral arches curving downward to the floor, "lends a rather graceful kind of integrity to the building." Brother Mel, a Christian Brother, is the director for the cathedral project. He told me that architect Santiago Calatrava's design for the cathedral reminded him and other judges "of a gothic cathedral with steel and glass." He went on to describe it.

"The glass, which, we hope, will be stained glass, will flood the interior with light, and can depict various figures and colors which will flood the interior with various kinds of light, and messages of one kind or another, without being oppressive in its delivery of messages. We want something modern and inspiring."

Still, it seems that those who see a rib cage are closer to the truth. In describing his work, Santiago Calatrava, a native of Spain now living in Zurich, Switzerland, has written that the motto "Natura mater et magistra -- nature is both, mother and teacher -- has guided all my work. There are many lessons one can draw from nature, real guiding rules and metaphors from observing plants and animals.... I have built tree-like structures and frequently my designs recall the form of skeletons."

Brother Mel said the Oakland diocese had held a competition in which they chose Calatrava as the cathedral's architect. Allan Temko, architectural critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, said Brother Mel, guided the committee for the competition in selecting architects for their consideration. "We had 11 or 12 that we were seriously considering, then we selected five of those. The five all came and appeared for a competition, from which we selected three. Those three were asked to do a model as to how they would proceed if they were given this particular assignment, and we selected Santiago Calatrava from that, based on his imagination, his enthusiasm, the modern look of the design, though it had traditional aspects. We were looking for something that had tradition and the look of a cathedral for the 21st century. Seeing the work Calatrava did on the Bilbao airport and train stations and various buildings is what really convinced people. He's really got an unusual architectural style."

Calatrava's cathedral design -- both exterior and interior -- is certainly unusual. Though nothing so exotic as a clam or a shark, the exterior represents, says the architect, praying hands. According to Brother Mel, Calatrava "looked at his daughter one day when she was saying her prayers; she had her hands together, and he thought, 'ah, there's the design for the cathedral.'" Yet one part of the architect's plan seems less like praying hands, and more like a clam -- he wants the top to open and close.

Since there will so much glass in the building, said Brother Mel, "the exterior and the interior are one and the same, really." There will be so much glass, in fact, that whoever does the interior decorating will be hard-put to find places for statues. Stained glass windows will need to suffice for religious imagery.

Why, I asked Brother Mel, are the seats for the congregants placed in a fan shape around the altar? Why choose this design over the traditional nave and sanctuary model? Brother Mel said the cathedral "really follows the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium. One of the major features of the liturgical movement out of Vatican II was Communio, and so I think having the seats in fan shape brings the community closer together around the altar, rather than the in the old type of lining them up, row after row, in the nave. People can see one another, and see everybody in the congregation from wherever they are sitting. They can see that they are part of a community, rather than just individuals saying prayers in a church."

Brother Mel said that reaction to Calatrava's cathedral design has been for the most part positive. There are those, though, who are not so contented. Michael Rose, author of The Renovation Manipulation said, "Calatrava pulls no punches. Instead he reveals his underlying ideology, which is, at best, is at odds with Catholic liturgy, culture and theology. Calatrava is a brilliant architect but he has completely divorced himself from pursuing a work of Catholic art."

Though stark, Calatrava's cathedral will be costly. Brother Mel said the price could run as high as $50 to $60 million -- though it could go even higher than that. Calatrava's design for an addition to the Milwaukee art museum is reportedly running considerably higher than the estimated $75 million price tag. Brother Mel said that the diocese will fund the project through private foundations and donations, and by a fund-raising drive. "We do not want to affect any of the charitable works or educational works we're involved in right now," he said.

In seeking an architect to design the cathedral (which the diocese hopes will last four to five hundred years), Brother Mel said they did not consider anyone at the University of Notre Dame architectural school, which has become a center for the revival of classical and traditional European architecture. "I don't think they were in our purview," said Brother Mel. "As I said, we got a lot of help from Temko, who is very familiar with people like Richard Meier and Frank Gehry from Los Angeles, and all those folks; those are the kind of people we were looking at. They've done churches -- Meyer is doing the Church of the Millennium in Rome. [We were looking for] people of] that quality, and I don't think the people at Notre Dame came in our radar screen, really."

Though Oakland diocese gave them no consideration, I figured I would. I asked Dino Marcantonio, a classical architect and professor of architecture at Notre Dame, what he thought of Calatrava's design for the cathedral. "The sense I get from the building," said Marcantonio, "is that it is looking to invoke in the people who go there a sense of mystery, without speaking about any particular doctrine. In doing that, [Calatrava] has done an excellent job, but that's not really what Catholicism is all about."

Calatrava's design, said Marcantonio, "is a very well-done, modernist piece." Modernism, he explained, "is now about a hundred years old and is a rejection of the Catholic architectural traditions." It has an "agnostic aesthetic" that is unwilling "to embrace a particular doctrine" or "a natural law view of architecture."

The natural law and Catholic tradition of architecture, said Marcantonio, was and is "about the nature of architecture." The Greeks, he said, from whom the tradition arose, "were trying to understand the nature of architecture which is, at least in part, the imitation of building. Art is about imitation. A sculpture, for example, would be the imitation of the human form, or of other natural forms, in stone. If you want to commission an artist to paint the stations of the cross, for example, it's going to be representational painting; it must look like something. It's a little more difficult with architecture, because you are not representing the human form; you're representing construction, elaborating on the forces that one can feel when one looks at a building."

Such "elaboration," or embellishment of the basic form, "is not, strictly speaking, necessary to hold the roof up," said Marcantonio. "If you look at the Pantheon, or at any of the great buildings, you'll see all kinds of fine profiles and elaborations on columns that actually, strictly speaking, do not have to be there; however, they do help the eye to understand what forces are being resisted to keep the roof up, for example. If you look at a column, it resists forces coming from above; so, at the top of the column you would have a capital, which is kind of a elaboration of the reception of a great weight; in the middle you have the shaft which transmits the weight to the ground; and at the bottom of the column you would have an elaboration of the distribution of that weight down to the ground. As a further flourish on that, a column is actually anthropomorphic; so not only does it elaborate on the forces of gravity at work, but it also imitates the body, in the sense that in its most general terms, one can see a body in the column. So, each column is like a person.

"This is a long way of saying that, in many traditions, and especially in the Greco-Roman tradition, you had a high degree of understanding of what the nature of architecture is: anthropomorphic, anthropocentric; and it was about the natural law."

"Modernism, which often involved a rejection of the Greco-Roman tradition in architecture, arose, philosophically from the skeptics of the Enlightenment," said Denis McNamara, who teaches at the Liturgical Institute at the University of Saint Mary of the Lake outside of Chicago. Though they sometimes revived Greek and Roman architectural forms, men of the Enlightenment often became overly skeptical about the value of the tradition. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, "the early modernists of the twentieth century," said McNamara, "were clearly outspoken against using any forms from the past for new design. Architect Sheldon Cheney who wrote a book in 1935 called The New World Architecture, labeled one of the chapters, 'The Past and Its Slaves.' He called on everyone to adopt concrete and the industrial forms as the new architectural paradigm."

Modernism arose, in part, out of a rejection of superficialities connected with the style revivals of the decades after the French Revolution. In the 19th century, said McNamara, "romantic notions of what Christianity should be" got tied up with form, so that people simply associated gothic architecture with religion. "To whatever degree they had to," said McNamara, "they'd make their vaults out of plaster, paint wood to look like marble -- because exterior forms were almost primary. The moderns were reacting against that -- what they'd call 'sham gothic.' They, then, went to the far extreme, promoting a mechanical notion of honesty, saying 'if it's made of steel, we have to make it look like steel.'"

McNamara said that " a paradoxical kind of overlay" of functionalism and vague mysticism began to characterize Modernism. "There is Le Corbusier, who was the great modernist apologist and the great modernist architect. He invented the concrete high-rise block, and the planning model of the highway surrounded by tall apartment buildings. He wrote a book called, Toward a New Architecture, in 1927 -- very influential; every architect in the last 40 years has read it, and architectural students still read it. The book has a section where he writes about the machine as the paradigm for new building -- you look at cars, you look at ships, you look at airplanes, these are all perfectly adapted to their function. He wrote that 'we must create the mass-production spirit' and 'civilizations advance when they pass through the age of the priest and achieve what is rightly called culture.' But at the same time there is for modernists this sort of mystic association that these forms are beautiful. It's not a specific religious association; they very often called it spiritual, and they'll use terms like it 'evokes a feeling of spirituality' or some kind of vague notion that there is a rise above mere function, and that's what architecture is. But one of the foundational ideas of making architecture rather than mere building is this machine-like functionality."

Marcantonio said that in the 20th century, "the basis for architectural action starts to get very confused." Falling into, at least, a practical agnosticism, some architects began to look for a basis for their art in psychology whence, said Marcantonio, "you have expressionism in architecture. You have some architects looking for it in Marxism," he continued. "You have some architects looking for it in Freudianism. Some architects looked for it in engineering -- Calatrava fits into that last category, because he was trained as an engineer as well as an architect. His buildings are brilliant engineering feats of gymnastics; but, I might go so far as to say that they are not architecture" -- for they are not imitations of nature.

What, then, are they? Merely expressions of the architect's subjective creativity. "Architectural modernism is related to theological modernism," said Marcantonio. "At the basis of theological modernism is the idea that one can know God through one's emotional experiences of God. Since, as Pius X points out, it is impossible to determine the falsity of any experience, all experiences, therefore, are [presumed] true; so, Catholicism, defined by the Modernist, would simply be a certain set of emotional experiences as experienced by this group of people over here. But since there are other groups of people who have different experiences; we cannot invalidate them." Because of its Modernist spirit, Calatrava's architecture, said Marcantonio, gives the impression of "a doctrine-free religion where one knows God through one's experience, and where a doctrinal imposition is unbecoming."

Even imitating praying hands (or a clam) doesn't, at least, absolve the architect from subjectivism; such architecture is not part of an inherited tradition. Eero Saarinen, the architect who designed the St. Louis arch, said McNamara, was well known for his animal-like forms. Saarinen, said McNamara, "designed the TWA terminal at JFK airport in New York, which is a big concrete building in the shape of a bird. He was trying to express the notion of flight by making the building look like an abstracted bird. At Yale University he designed an ice rink which looks like a whale -- it is sometimes called the 'Yale Whale.' It could be claimed that using one shape overlay for a building is a something of a simplistic approach. In a building from the Renaissance, you see every layer of history represented in that building perfected and taken to the next level."

Given the prevalence of modern architecture in the Church today, one wonders -- has the Church spoken at all on the subject of church design? Marcantonio said the Church has not spoken clearly about the arts, though, in his letter to artists, Pope John Paul II "essentially tells artists to turn their art in the direction of the truth. But you see, the pope can't be so explicit as to say that a particular design doesn't work, or to say another design does. The arts have to remain pretty open territory, because they are several degrees from doctrine."

If, though, artists turn to the truth, and "if the pope manages to clear up the doctrinal problems we are having in the Church," said Marcantonio, "the architectural problems will solve themselves." Instead of accommodating herself to the styles of an agnostic, anti-religious world, Catholics must, "as the pope has said, be signs of contradiction" and adopt styles that clearly reflect the tradition of the Faith. Calatrava's design, Marcantonio thinks, is a bad icon of the Church, which transcends cultures and times. The Calatrava cathedral, he said, "will have its 15 minutes of fame, and then it will be on to the next trendy thing."

Marcantonio concludes: "Within ten years, people are going to look at Calatrava's cathedral, and it will look dated. It will look as ridiculous, then, as the architecture of the sixties looks to us now. We look at that architecture and say, well, that's Jetsons' architecture. It's not serious, it's not enduring."

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