Description

From the 19th to the 20th Century

Neo-Romanesque and Neo-Gothic

In the ecclesiastic architecture of the 19th century, problems relating to liturgy receded into the background as greater emphasis began to be placed on the appearance of the building. It was not so much about the way in which the congregation came together, but about the aesthetic preferences for the Romanesque or Gothic. The battle of styles, as set forth by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin in Great Britain in the first half of the 19th century and by Petrus Josephus Hubertus Cuypers in the Netherlands in the second half of the 19th century, developed into a heated, almost embittered rivalry between those who favoured the round arch and those who favoured the lancet arch. The radical attitude of the proponents of the Gothic, Pugin and Cuypers, is explained by the fact that both were Catholics living in a predominantly Protestant culture and felt that their “true” religion was under constant threat. However, one way or the other, rounded or pointed, both were an attempt to escape the times. The economic and technological innovations of the 19th century created new social friction, new classes and social groupings. The rapid development of society brought with it change and the need to adapt, something that not everyone was prepared to do. One need only think of the romantic dissidents, of the young German poet Novalis and his speech “Christendom or Europe” (1799). In place of the pressures of the here and now, they yearned for ages past, singing the praises of the Middle Ages in western Europe as the happiest “origins” of Christianity.

The Liturgy as Client

Decades came and went before architecture and design found new forms that were to embrace the genuine energy of the time – in other words until industrial production was used not just to manufacture old forms. Given the often radical conservatism of both Protestantism and Catholicism with regard to developments in society, it is surprising to note that the ideas and concepts of modernism began to influence church architecture almost as soon as they did residential and industrial building. In 1906, two events heralded a change: Cornelius Gurlitt’s manual “Kirchen” (Churches) and the “Second Protestant Congress on Church Architecture” in Dresden. Although Gurlitt’s voluminous publication still featured numerous engravings showing beautiful examples of neo-Romanesque, neo-Gothic, neo-baroque and Jugendstil buildings, the conference in Dresden stood under the motto “The Liturgy as Client”, marking the beginning of a gradual abandonment of the hybrid mixtures of historicism.

From the “Christocentric” to Burg Rothenfels

In the same first decade of the 20th century, young Benedictine monks in monasteries in Rhineland and Flanders sought to revive the experience of communion in word and Eucharist. The spirit of the monks inspired young Catholic students, and the “Liturgical Movement” was formed. Their manner was not short on uplifting, religious revivalism, and they would have had little influence on architecture had it not been for the Gladbecker cleric Johannes van Acken and his manifesto from 1922 entitled “Christozentrische Kirchenkunst. Ein Entwurf zum liturgischen Gesamtkunstwerk” (Christocentric Ecclesiastic Art. A Proposal for a Liturgical Gesamtkunstwerk), which dealt with the topic with such persuasion that any religious architect should have felt compelled to serve the cause. Whether axial or radial, the altar should be the centre of every church, and the spatial arrangement and pictorial decoration should be entirely focussed on it. The nave should be cleared of pillars and columns; the side aisles should serve as mere pathways to the pews, the choir is to be shortened and widened, the altar brought forward from the rear wall and placed beneath the crossing, raised and enclosed by a rail and its position emphasised from above by a baldachin or circular chandelier: he backed these proposals with a call for the use of appropriate materials and construction methods. Iron and concrete, according to Acken, were a “wonderfully effective and compliant helper”. However, despite his leanings towards the Deutscher Werkbund, which van Acken mentions explicitly, his opinions on contemporary culture were nothing other than anti-modern. His notion of a holistic liturgy drew not only on Richard Wagner’s ideal of a synthesis of all art forms, but also the desire for deliverance from the here and now. As with Novalis before him, his writings reveal a nostalgia for the political and religious “Ordo” of the Middle Ages.

The Catholic “Quickborn” youth movement – an “alliance” born out of the context of the “Life Reformist Movement” in the early 20th century – yearned similarly for the ages of old until the Catholic theologian and philosopher Romano Guardini and the young Catholic architect Rudolf Schwarz began to reconcile them with the urban society of the day. Rudolf Schwarz’s conversion of the chapel and great hall at Burg Rothenfels am Main (1928) gave the Quickborn headquarters a modern form, shockingly modern for some. The room was cleared of all decoration and the walls whitewashed. The altar table and circular chandelier, both clearly still influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement, stand out all the more against the plain white background. In the great hall, the wiring for the tubular glass lighting on the ceiling and the arrangement of the wooden seating at floor level allow the large empty room to be used for lectures, congresses, song or prayer.

A Comparison of the Corpus Christi Church and the Church of the Resurrection

While in the 19th century, the opposition of axial and radial arrangements played a minor role, renewed attempts were undertaken in the 20th century to mediate between the longitudinal and circular plan forms. The rabbi and publicist Joseph Carlebach from Hamburg identified the difference between the two concepts most eloquently. In his essay of 1929 entitled “Die Architektur der Synagoge” (The Architecture of the Synagogue), he declared that all spaces could be divided into longitudinal or circular spaces. In the axial arrangement, the people would “disappear”, while in the circular they would “appear”; in the former they are “passive”, in the latter they are “active”. By contrast, his assertion that the longitudinal space is “magical” and “aristocratic”, while the circular is “rational” and “democratic“ is an exaggeration not upheld by the experience of 20th century dictatorships. Nevertheless, a comparison of Rudolf Schwarz’s Corpus Christi Church in Aachen (1930) and Otto Bartning’s Church of the Resurrection in Essen (1930) – the former Catholic and strictly axial, the latter Protestant and strictly radial – proves instructive and shows that Carlebach’s perception was not so mistaken.

The entrance vestibule, nave and side aisle of the Corpus Christi Church in Aachen together total a length of 48.4 and width of 20.7 metres. It covers an area of 1002 square metres and offers seating for 322 congregants. Its construction is a framework with compressed stone infill. Inside the pure rectangular space of the main nave, the floor is covered in bluestone and the walls and ceiling rendered throughout in white lime plaster, creating a strong contrast between dark and light, between earth and heaven. A church of this large size, wrote Schwarz in the journal “Die Form”, is about anonymity and objectivity, mass and arrangement rather than proximity. And indeed, even from the vestibule, one is already aware of a strong directional pull from the entrance to the mountain that is the altar. One’s gaze is drawn forward along a line that runs unerringly down the centre of the aisle. The pulpit, a small box-like protrusion from which priest and congregation can barely communicate, appears suspended from the edge of a section of wall in the centre of one of the long side walls of the nave and underlines the principle of the room: each and everyone should direct their feet and eyes towards the tabernacle and the crucifix alone. Its appearance, composure and material cladding have an almost chivalrous, noble quality: as if through the expression of order, a longing for leadership and governance is fulfilled in those assembled .

To better understand the importance of Otto Bartning’s Church of the Resurrection in Essen, it is first necessary to consider a star-shaped church by the same architect, designed eight years earlier. Its organic, crystalline architecture continues a tradition of utopias, already envisioned and formulated Berlin after the First World War in by the members of the “Arbeitsrat für Kunst”, “Novembergruppe” and “Gläsernen Kette”. Otto Bartning shared a sense of Expressionism with these circles, who were likewise inspired by belief. However, as with so many projects in the early Weimar Republic, the church progressed no further than a model, drawing and description. The building was based on a star-shaped plan with seven points and a 28-metre diameter. Timber ribs and arches supported a giant dome, clad in scale-like sections of slate. In the interior, the preaching space occupied five-sevenths of the floor area, the slightly raised communion space two-sevenths. The pulpit was arranged in the centre, the altar at the highest point of the centralised space of the church. The congregation would leave the preaching space together for the Communion.

The progression from the star-shaped church to the Church of the Resurrection leads from the arched to the straight, from the hot-headed to the level-headed, from the expressionist to the functionalist form. The circular building in Essen has a diameter of 34 metres and an area of 907 square metres. The benches provide seating for a congregation of 700 over two levels, each divided into four segments of a semicircle. What remains from his previous design is the sublime unification of spiritual and spatial centrality for the church service and the division of the church into a larger preaching space and smaller space for the Communion. What have not survived are the material and the construction. The Church of the Resurrection has a framework of steel columns, each enveloped in grey concrete, with an infill of red brickwork. The structure is visible on both the outside and inside. The overall impression is of a sober rationality akin to the factory or office buildings in the Ruhr, except that in the church, this rationality is heightened dramatically by four tiers of rings and shafts.

Rudolf Schwarz’s “The Seventh Plan”

By the time Rudolf Schwarz’s book “Vom Bau der Kirche” (The Church Incarnate, 1938) was published, long after the dedication of the “authoritarian” Corpus Christi church and the “egalitarian” Church of the Resurrected, sacred architecture in Europe had reached a new low. In Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy and Spain the fashion had turned to a new, heavier Romanesque, their designers bowing to the preferences of their respective regimes. Rudolf Schwarz’s book, however, adopts a standpoint of its own. Abstract, idealised plans depict the spatial relationship between man and God; his seven “plans” – no elevations or sections – return to the theme of the longitudinal or circular arrangement. The final plan is entitled “The Cathedral for all Time” and subtitled “The Entirety”.

In a language we are no longer used to – unafraid of solemnity and somewhat unhurried – the author appears to comprehend the liturgy as movement and attempts to mediate between the axial and the radial: “To begin with, all lies in silent sanctuary, turned inward on itself. Then, an opening appears high at the apex or at a point in the periphery. The closed form breaks open, its inside parts and the figure escapes into the open. The space leaves its form, the journey begins. Ascending strongly at first, it gradually tires as it approaches the dead point at the centre of the apex, where opposing forces gather, and it finally comes to rest. The opposition outweighs. Movement is inhibited, stagnates and stops, time stands still, and there, where it came to rest, the figure unfolds to form a new space. A new centre arises and around the new sphere a new world has gathered.”

The Second Half of the 20th Century

A Sign of New Beginnings

The most decisive turning point in the history of church architecture in the modern age was the “ground zero” after the Second World War. The experiences of fascism and war awoke a strong desire for spirituality and new spiritual orientation. This desire overrode all previous debates on the search for communal space in church architecture from the twenties and early thirties. During the Weimar Republic, the discussions were primarily youth-led or within the church, with the aim of reviving the liturgy in both Protestantism and Catholicism. However, in West Germany – particularly in the fifties but also in the sixties – church building became a symbol for a new beginning. More so than the design of museum or theatre buildings, which were far less common at that time, church architecture was the medium through which the avant-garde architect expressed himself.

Likewise, the reconstruction of the cathedrals as well as the central and urban churches was a sign of new beginnings throughout the rest of Europe. The rejection of historical reconstruction and the conservation of churches in their ruined state, such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin by Egon Eiermann (1961) or Coventry Cathedral by Basil Spence (1962) reflected the spirit of the times. A painstaking, historically grounded and correct reconstruction, such as the one undertaken for the Baroque Church of Our Lady in Dresden by George Bähr (2005), would have been met with vociferous protest in the fifties, not just from architects, but also from the majority of the public. By contrast, half a century later, many people regard the approach taken in Dresden as a viable means of re-establishing historical continuity in a fractured urban environment. Around the same time, a similar discussion ensued in Cologne on whether to clad the dark red patch of brick filling on the north west tower of Cologne Cathedral with sandstone from Oberkirchen – work that was eventually undertaken in 2005. As a result, a permanent reminder of the war that was undertaken in 1943 to prevent the tower from collapsing, disappeared from view.

Otto Bartning’s “Emergency Churches”

Church attendance rose most dramatically after the founding of the German Empire in 1871 and after the end of the First World War in 1918; the same pattern emerged in the years directly following the Second World War. In Germany, which was still occupied by the four Allied forces, solutions addressing the increased need for pastoral care were soon developed. The first steps towards a new sacred architecture were made by the Protestants between 1948 and 1951, in the form of emergency churches. Otto Bartning devised four types that seated between 350 and 500 people. Although his designs drew on earlier building forms, he was careful to differentiate his historical references clearly from the vulgar, classicist monumental architecture of the thirties and forties. Yet behind the traditional appearance of Bartning’s designs was a carefully thought-out, industrially fabricated modular system, one that provided the parishes with the basic elements for their construction: timber wall and roof trusses, purlins and panelling for the roof, doors and windows for the walls. The prefabricated elements were delivered to the building site and erected within a period of one to three weeks. The non-load-bearing walls were then added using locally-available material, sometimes rubble from the war. The concept depended on local contribution and has proved strong enough to last to the present day. Although only conceived of as temporary structures, the churches in cities such as Stralsund, Rostock, Wismar, Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Bochum, Essen, Dortmund as well as Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Munich all still exist today and have become anchored in the local collective memory as testimonies of a time of new beginnings. In some respects, their aesthetic as well as functional qualities can still stand as models today.

The Language of the Masters and the Mediocrity of Imitation

Comparable with the development in France, Italy and Scandinavia, hundreds of churches were built in West Germany, some larger some smaller. In 1958, Richard Biedrzynski wrote that, in Germany, the Protestant Church had built as many churches since the war as it had altogether during the Reformation. In 1973, Hugo Schnell reported that “in most Catholic diocese a church was being dedicated almost every Sunday”. Most influential, whether for their details, béton brut and rough plaster, their colour and skilful, near mystical handling of layout and lighting were Le Corbusier’s Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France (1955) and his Sainte Marie de La Tourette Monastery in Eveux-sur-Arbresle, France (1961).

Besides Le Corbusier’s masterful language, a plethora of styles abounded that, without resorting to the arbitrary, exceed all categorisation. Almost any conceivable plan and elevation, material form or construction was built. There were numerous churches with sharp corners: in the form of a T or an L, a long or a squat rectangle, a square plan, pentagon, hexagon or octagon; numerous churches with gentle curves: in the form of a semicircle, a whole circle, an oval, an ellipse or parabola. In addition, there were open tented arrangements, enclosed fortresses, sweeping arches, spiky crowns, shed roofs, pitched roofs and flat roofs – a multiplicity that Rudolf Schwarz, at the height of his work after the dedication of his Church of St Michael in Frankfurt am Main (1954) and the Church of St Anna in Düren (1956), was to sharply criticise in a lecture entitled “Architektur als heiliges Bild” (Architecture as Holy Image) held at the 77th Annual German Catholic Congress in Cologne in 1956: “The architects of the day are getting carried away with their new freedom and suppose now that they may build whatever comes to mind. The temptations of a new craftsmanship is laid out before their eyes, one that makes it possible to produce endless varieties of forms and shapes, and yet to say virtually nothing, an activity encouraged by journalism insufficiently learned in things of such complexity.”

The ongoing “flamboyance without spiritual reason”, in Rudolf Schwarz’s words, reached its zenith in 1960 From then on, a sculptural architecture emerged, which in West Germany in the sixties is most commonly associated with the name Gottfried Böhm. The latecomers among this new plasticity include Walter Maria Förderer’s Church of St Nicholas in Hérémence, Switzerland (1971), Fritz Wotruba’s Church of the Holy Trinity in Vienna, Austria (1976), and Giovanni Michelucci’s Church of the Immaculate Conception in Longarone, Italy (1978), whose dynamism have only been equalled more recently in the work of Zaha Hadid. At the same time, however – in the wake of Le Corbusier’s Sainte Marie de La Tourette on the one hand and the work of the American architect Paul Rudolph on the other – numerous churches arose in the form of hard grey cubes and rectangles with circular roof-lights, sturdy rainspouts and with a liberal use of decorative shuttering on bare concrete.

The provision of church buildings in the parishes and residential areas, particularly in the new housing estates as well as in the inner cities, remained a priority for the churches throughout the sixties. It was important to show presence in the cities, to send a signal. In addition to the completed buildings, the very act of building became a symbol of the church searching for a new identity – after the end of the “union of throne and altar” and not least after the end of its entanglement in the Third Reich – within the new pluralist society of the West German Republic, with the aim of becoming a fourth pillar alongside the political parties, associations and unions.

The Developments in Socialist Europe

In the socialist states of central and eastern Europe, church building after 1945 was faced with incomparably more difficult conditions. Given the pronounced atheism of the ruling communist parties on the one hand and the constant economic shortages on the other, the state building of new churches was in most cases not a priority, and the parishes had little option but to concentrate on maintaining what was already available. Only in strongly Catholic Poland did a series of new churches come about, most notably the Church of the Ark of Our Lord in Nowa Huta, Krakow, designed by Wojciech Pietrzyk and Jan Grabacki in the fifties but only completed in 1977, in which the legacy of Le Corbusier is clearly evident. In East Germany, where over the course of 40 years of socialist rule, the majority of citizens lost contact with or turned their back on the church, a comparatively limited church building programme was undertaken. With the exception of a few new projects, the German Democratic Republic concentrated primarily on maintaining what already existed and the conservation of the rich heritage of urban and rural churches. The modesty of the roofs, mostly constructed by engineers to protect the churches from further dilapidation, appear as symbolic today as the concept of the “Winterkirche”. The Winterkirche was a heated room beneath the galleries and organ, separated from the nave by a glass wall, which made it possible for parishes to use the churches all year round.

The Ideal of the Parish Centre

As part of the general movement towards the reform of political and cultural conditions in the late sixties that began with the student revolts but soon encompassed most of society, the parish centre with its multipurpose hall gained increasing popularity. A church is neither the built manifestation of the Communion nor a place of secret worship, according to the argumentation of the day; rather, inspired by John’s rendition of Jesus’ words “In my father’s house are many rooms”, it should be understood as the place where believers gather in the name of the Lord. For architecture, this conceptualisation meant that many clients were more willing to forego specific sacred symbols and the design of many churches – Ferdinand Schuster’s St Paul’s Church in Graz, Austria (1970) by way of example – began to resemble that of a barrier-free cultural centre composed of steel and glass. The tradition of typology, the clarity of axial or radial plans, or of bell towers and main portals, not to mention images such as the “tabernacle” or “place of refuge” were suddenly no longer desired, replaced rather by a church that could be used on Sundays and weekdays alike for a whole variety of purposes. The architecture became primarily functional, as can be seen in Schuster’s red and brown coloured main hall. This de-sacralisation signalled a democratisation of congregational life, and, combined with a conscious expansion of activities into the realms of education, child, youth and women’s groups as well as politics, it fulfilled the ambitions of the church to become an institution at the heart of society.

The best of these mostly Protestant parish centres, including James N. Thorp’s extension to the Central Methodist Church in Morley near Leeds in England (1970), are described in Rainer­ Disse’s book “Kirchliche Zentren” (Church Centres, 1974). However, with all due respect to the aims of an open parish, many of the flexible, extensible or divisible structures designed with maximal active use in mind have not proven themselves in practice. The stipulation to conduct different functions in the same space, and in so doing, dissolving the boundary between the sacred and the secular, has in many cases led to spaces that no one particularly likes. The use of the zone around the altar during the week by a series of charity work groups or dance troupes has provoked general disapproval not only among the older generation of churchgoers. Today, most churches now ask architects for designs that incorporate a sacred space conceived solely for the purpose of the church service. The ability to extend this space as required – to enlarge it five or ten times a year for especially well-attended church services – is often accepted or even mandated by many parishes. However, adaptability should be provided without the need for excessive and mechanically temperamental sliding walls. As is often the case, such elements offer too much variability. In practice, only two or three variants are usually employed for dividing the room according to the nature of the gathering.

The Example of St Judas Thaddeus Church

The architect Ottokar Uhl draws on this experience for the design of the St Judas Thaddeus Church in Karlsruhe (1989). The Catholic parish centre encompasses a multi-purpose hall, a children’s nursery and the pastor’s residence and office – a typical spatial programme for this kind of a complex. The distinctive long narrow building adjoining a suburban market square has a main hall with pitched roof and is clad entirely in light-grey concrete blocks. The building volume and interior are separated into short, medium and tall sections. The short section serves as the entrance and porch, the medium section provides space for weekday functions, the tall section the sacred space for the Sunday Mass, and all three are used together for celebrations on public church holidays. The altar stands in the centre and is surrounded by removable seating instead of benches. The complex also contains three chapels at the edge of the room, rounded “paravents” made of glass-block partitioning that contain the tabernacle and the font, and can be used for silent prayer. The interior of this central space has no partition walls whatsoever and is accordingly always experienced as a whole; the sections are experienced through the stepped ceiling. The lower and medium-height zones and the medium-height and tall zones (the latter inherently connected via the balconies at the sides) can, but need not function together as a unified liturgical space. The St Judas Thaddeus church is flexible. Its space can expand or contract according to requirements without the need for folding screens or curtains to separate the space.

The Renaissance of Church Building Between Invention and Reality

In contrast to this development, some predominantly Catholic countries began to actively undertake church building. An example of such activities are the thousands of churches built in Poland since the early 1980s after the loosening of state restrictions due to the strong Solidarity movement. In responsiveness to the wishes of the parishes and with delight in architectural experimentation, these buildings demonstrate an almost excessively wilful symbolism. Surrounded by vast estates with rows of slab housing blocks and high-rise towers, these large churches, sometimes seating up to 4000 people, serve as a “vehicle of belief with which one can cross the obstacles of the world,” to use the words of the polish architectural historian Cezary Was. The spectrum of forms ranges from the heavenward spiralling stonework of Henryk Buszko and Aleksander Franta’s Elevation of the Holy Cross Church in Katowice (1994), to the space-station-like appearance of Witold Ceckiewicz’s Divine Mercy Pilgrimage Church in Krakow (2002).

Unlike Poland and the Ukraine, in which thousands of churches have been built since the nineties, development in western European states has been very different. Although new sacred architecture is now receiving greater attention than in the the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties, the apparent “re­naissance of church architecture” was primarily – with the exception of Italy – a phenomenon limited to the media, which devoted more attention to the subject than previously. In truth, the number of new churches built between Helsinki and Lisbon is small, and pales in comparison to the sheer quantity built in eastern Europe. That the majority of the new church buildings in western Europe in the eighties as well as in the nineties were ascribed to one of the three programmes attributed to “High Tech”, “postmodernism” and “deconstructivism”, should be no surprise given the prevailing conditions for architectural production. Even those who distrust keywords and dislike the labels of popular architectural journalism will see upon closer examination that Volker Giencke’s St Florian’s Church in Aigen im Ennstal, Austria (1992) can be classified “High Tech” due to its use of steel and glass, Francisco Javier Bellosillo Amunátegui’s Church and Chapel in the Parque de San Francisco in Almazán, Spain (1987) can be associated with “postmodernism” due to its historical references, and Sol Madridejos Fernández and Juan Carlos Sancho Osinaga’s Chapel for a Country Estate and Hunting Lodge in Valleacerón, Spain (2000) can be tied to “deconstructivism” due to its complex geometry.

The strongest influence on the design of sacred architecture from the nineties onwards was not, despite the media attention it garnered, the work of Mario Botta (neither the Cathedral of the Resurrection in Evry, France (1995), nor the St John the Baptist Church in Mogno, Switzerland (1996), with its distinctive elliptical upper face resulting from a diagonal cut through a cylinder), but Peter Zumthor’s Catholic Sogn Benedetg Chapel in Somvix, Switzerland (1998), and Tadao Ando’s Presbyterian Chapel of the Light in Ibaraki, Japan (1989). Both buildings exercise a combination of the archaic and the modern, and exhibit a radical aesthetic restraint, both in terms of their geometry as well as their materiality and construction. Put simply, for Zumthor this approach results in a wooden droplet, for Ando a concrete box. Architectural journalism was quick to ascribe these and other buildings the label of “minimalism”, without, of course, noting that the work of Zumthor, Ando and their numerous followers has only limited parallels to the art of Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and Donald Judd.

However, more important than these stylistic references is the impression that the Sogn Benedetg­ Chapel and the Chapel of the Light share an understanding of the church service as one where the priest stands on his side and the congregation on the other, as if in the liturgy they oppose rather than stand with one another. These two celebrated buildings by Zumthor and Ando are not alone in their surprisingly conservative conception of church communion. In more recent guidelines for the building of churches, one can observe a veritable renaissance of tradition. Of the buildings that follow such principles, it is not uncommon to find that they involve innovative material or technical solutions and complex constructions in steel, wood, glass and concrete: for example, Markus Allmann, Amandus Sattler and Ludwig Wappner’s Church of the Sacred Heart in Munich, Germany (2000), Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church Dio Padre Misericordioso in Rome, Italy (2003), and Matti Sanaksenaho’s St Henry’s Ecumenical Art Chapel in Hirvensalo, Turku, Finland (2005). From a liturgical standpoint these buildings – all axial churches with static longitudinal orientation – subscribe to conventional notions of the Holy Mass and Communion service as a kind of spectacle.

A Desire for Atmosphere and the Sacred

According to an observation attributed to Egon Eiermann, once in a lifetime every architect longs to design a chair as well as a church. The assumption is that, for tasks like these, the usual constraints of efficiency and commercial viability for investors and developers do not apply, that building regulations are more relaxed and that forms are less restricted than they are for offices or residential buildings. The particular interest in the design of sacred buildings is also a factor of the unusual and rare nature of the task. Sometimes the interest is also driven by a desire to create something of architectural permanence – to quote Adolf Loos, something monumental. In any case, it appears that the search for “atmosphere” and for the “sacred” in architecture is a strong motivator for architects today. Whatever sacred may be, it should be made apparent through design: through dimension and number, i.e. proportion; through extreme purity or extreme coarseness of a particular material, so that it is beyond all use and for its own sake; through something incredibly weightless or something tremendously massive, where the force behind it is not apparent to the eye; through translucent rather than transparent surfaces, in which light can simply be light and not have to illuminate this or that object.

The average church client’s understanding for such aspects is limited. The communication of architectural principles by the architect should be part of a critical dialogue between both partners. A proper balance between the participation of the client and the creativity of the designer is an essential part of the planning process. It is about repeated attempts to find new answers, for example, to questions such as: Should the character of the church congregation be immediately apparent from outside as well as inside? Should a church be more representational or more functional? Should it be sublime? Should it be comfortable? Does everyone have to find it beautiful?

At the Beginning of the 21st Century

Liturgy in Reform and its Criticism

In the years of urban reconstruction after the war, the Second Vatican Council that took place from 1962 to 1965 heralded the most significant reforms to the Catholic church service since the Council of Trent. Although a number of new churches – most notably Emil Steffann’s St Laurentius Church in Munich (1955) – had more or less anticipated the new order of the Mass thanks to their strongly centralised orientation, it was not until 1965 that the “Constitution on Sacred Liturgy” came into force. Of particular importance was a paradigm shift from the viewpoint of the clergy to the viewpoint of the people, from the cleric’s church to the people’s church. It was clear that this was to have implications for each and every Catholic church. From this point onwards, the altar was to be placed apart from the apse wall and emphasised only by a low podium. The ambo replaced the pulpit and was to be placed to the left or right of the altar. Fixed seating for the priest, the deacon and altar boys were to be positioned slightly behind or beside the altar. Likewise, the tabernacle for the safekeeping of the consecrated Hosts, which represent the bread of the Last Supper, was to be placed behind or beside the altar.

Today, the architecture of Catholic and Protestant churches differs only marginally. The principal elements – altar, ambo and baptistry – are considered as a whole in both denominations. The space for the liturgy of the word and of the Eucharist must allow a certain amount of scope for flexibility. The church service of each denomination encompasses, on the one hand, the eccentric orientation, on the other, the concentric assembly of the congregation.

Only the differentiation between the axial and the radial, and with it the similar but not identical differentiation between “unified” and “partitioned” as defined by Otto Bartning, remain as a distinctive criteria. Unified spaces, those which are experienced as a whole, include for example Rudolf and Esther Guyer’s Glaubten Church in Zurich, Switzerland (1972), E. Fay Jones’ Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, USA (1980), Shigeru Ban’s Paper Church in Kobe, Japan (1995), and Anssi Lassila’s Protestant Church in Kärsämäki, Finland (2004). Partitioned spaces, i.e. spaces in which the parts of the space are emphasised over the whole, include for example Glauco Gresleri’s and Silvano Varnier’s Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Navarons di Spilimbergo, Italy (1970), Paulo Archias Mendes da Rocha’s Chapel of St Peter in Campos da Jordão, São Paulo, Brazil (1989), Steven Holl’s Chapel of St Ignatius in Seattle, Washington, USA (1997), as well as Peter and Gabriele Riepl’s Church of St Francis Church in Steyr, Austria (2001).

The aforementioned “Constitution on Sacred Liturgy” was not entirely well-received. The British novelist and essayist Evelyn Waugh, author of “Brideshead Revisited,” was unhappy about the eradication of Latin from the church service. The philosopher Robert Spaemann lamented the abandonment of the old Requiem mass, which now only survives in the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Krzysztof Penderecki. In recent times, the number of critical voices has risen. The Frankfurt author Martin Mosebach, for example, regards many symbols of belief as lacking in ritual, speaking of a “heresy of informality”. Others share his discontent, asserting that nowhere is solemnity still to be found, only informal togetherness. However, these at times forceful speeches betray a lack of familiarity with everyday practice, and their attitude resembles more that of aesthetes and cynics who define religion in terms of the elation and fear of childlike belief and – with the demise of all social utopias after 1989 – they seek silent consolation in hard times.

The Ideal of “Communio”

Those who call for a return to the old rites do not solely demand a revival of the use of Latin but also imply the rejection of the idea of “active participation” in the liturgy. After Pope Pius X introduced this term at the beginning of the 20th century, it was rapidly adopted by all reformers of the liturgy. So too the proponents of “Communio,” represented first and foremost in Germany by the theologians Albert Gerhards, Klemens Richter and Thomas Sternberg, who with the name of their liturgical concept clearly advocate the notion of active participation but, some 40 years after the last council, wish to improve on the church’s spatial constellation. Whether axial or radial in arrangement, in most churches the altar and ambo stand on a low podium, or “island”. This does not sufficiently dispel the impression of a stage. The bipolar character of the liturgy of the word and of the Eucharist – specifically of table and lectern – is, they argue, best fulfilled by an elliptical architecture. If one leaves the centre vacant in anticipation of the presence of God, and places the altar at the focal point at one end of the ellipse and the ambo at the other, with the congregation arranged in a gentle arc along each long side of the ellipse, this arrangement of man and space provides a clearer appreciation of the substance of the mass than is possible with the conventional arrangement. Confrontation between the priest and the congregation gives way to integration. The congregants can look one another in the eye, they can even wander with their chairs back and forth from table to lectern to table. There is perhaps a danger that by arranging the congregation to face one another, seated or standing along the long walls, the informal nature of the gathering becomes more forced. In principle, the Communio concept recalls the medieval arrangement of the choir. At that time, the altar and ambo were placed behind the rood screen at either end of the aisle flanked on the left and right by two facing rows of seats. What was previously the prerogative of the clergy is now granted to all.

Dieter G. Baumewerd’s St Christopher’s Church in Westerland on the island of Sylt (2000) is most probably the first new church to be built according to the Communio concept. The interior of the brick and concrete outer shell is articulated by a regular arrangement of closely-spaced columns and windows along the long sides. The organ, ambo, font, altar and tabernacle are arranged along the central axis of the ellipse, the font in the centre, the ambo and altar in the focal points towards each end of the ellipse.

The benches arranged along both long sides of St Christopher’s Church provide seating for around 400 people. By comparison, Franck Hammoutène’s Our Lady of the Pentecost Church (2001) seats approximately 320, and Corinne Callies and Jean-Marie Duthilleul’s St Francis of Molitor Church (2005) around 420 visitors. Both of these buildings are in Paris and both are mentioned for their application of the Communio concept. Unlike St Christopher’s Church, however, the elliptical form in both Paris projects is not evident from the exterior. Our Lady of the Pentecost features a room-height and room-width glass window behind the altar, lending this end more importance than that of the ambo – for this reason, the main space could quite easily be changed to an axial processional arrangement.

Conversion or Demolition

Notwithstanding the interest in the “Communio” as an advanced liturgical model, one should not be blind to the fact that the building of new churches has become rare. In view of the fact that more and more people are no longer denominational – and accordingly that the tax income of both the Catholic and Protestant churches is falling, at least in a nation such as Germany – the options of conversion or demolition of church buildings have become a necessary reality. What make both options so difficult, or even painful, are practical problems on the one hand and a sense of loss, not only of religion but also of architecture, on the other. Once a church has become a restaurant, discotheque, residence, shopping centre or car park, as is happening in the Netherlands and United Kingdom, all is lost: after that there can be no return to the status ante quo.

In Luther’s “Kirchenpostille” (Church Postils, 1522), he writes: “Then for no other purpose are churches to be built, so far as there is a cause, as for Christians to come together, to pray, hear the sermon and receive the sacrament. And where this cause should expire, the same church should be torn down, as one does with other houses, when they are no longer of use.” Without doubt, Luther’s opinion is theologically plausible. In 21st-century everyday life, however, the conversion or demolition of churches is a matter of concern for society as a whole. The strengthening of “collective memory”, to quote the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, only serves a standpoint in which preservation and transformation go hand in hand.

The Example of Dornbusch Church

There are few examples of the conversion of existing churches from the second half of the 20th century. An example is Dornbusch Church in Frankfurt am Main (1962/2005), which with the help of the architects Claudia Meixner, Florian Schlüter and Martin Wendt underwent a process of demolition, conversion and rebuilding, without damaging the sacred function and sacred character of the snow-white building. The long rectangular box has shrunk to half its original size, seating 180 instead of the original 600 persons. The choir, the blank north wall and the east wall with its coloured glass mural by Hans Adam remain. The south wall is new. Outside positive, inside negative, the two metre deep sculptural relief wall represents an impression of the former balcony, altar, pulpit and font. The strong plasticity of the wall is inspired by the moulded packaging material used to protect consumer goods, and perhaps also the work of the London-based artist Rachel Whiteread. The position of the demolished elements is marked on the square in front of the church. Everything is memento, and yet with an impression of the future.

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Originally published in: Rudolf Stegers, Sacred Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2008.