The Cyprian frescoes displayed for the past 15 years on the grounds of the Menil Collection are on their way back to Cyprus. When offered the stolen frescoes in a sale, Dominique de Menil instead paid for their recovery on behalf of the Church of Cyprus in exchange for permission to display them for a period of time. That time has now expired and the frescoes have left the purpose-built chapel/museum/reliquary.

Read the full story that will air later today on NPR.

The Menil Collection via NPR

We will watch for plans for the building.

Very exciting news from Notre-Dame du Haut de Ronchamp from the French construction website Le Moniteur. Construction on the monastery to house the nuns of the association of Sainte-Collette at the site of Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame du Haut is well underway and in fact speeding up. The article includes many site photos.

© 11h45 / Groupe Moniteur

The tower and roof of the chapel is just visible in the photo below. None of the new construction will be visible from the chapel.

© 11h45 / Groupe Moniteur

The story so far in brief, in case you haven’t heard about it. The chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp is generally considered one of the great masterworks of 20th century architecture. It was commissioned by Father Marie-Alain Couturier as part of his belief that the church should employ the greatest artists and architects of the time, regardless of their particular religious beliefs or associations. The primary function of the building was a pilgrimage chapel, staffed by a small community of monks (many of who are buried along the path from the cemetery up the hill, if you forgo the paved road). After the monks departed, the local church used the chapel for occasional masses on a rotation, and it became primarily a destination for architourism.

Renzo Piano

This was the state of affairs during my visits to the chapel, and I must say the loss of the site’s actual religious function diluted the experience and the whole of the building. A building deprived of its purpose is a lifeless thing; and no building can be self-justifying. So the proposal that a congregation of nuns from a nearby town might re-occupy the site was welcome news to me. Not so to the Le Corbusier Foundation, who had long coveted the building and wanted to add it to their portfolio. A legal battle over the site ensued wherein the Le Corbusier Foundation argued that building anywhere near the site would ruin the intent of the auteur and threaten a national cultural treasure. This petition has additional details about the dispute.

This was in one sense a metaphorical battle between the worship of the artist and the worship of God, and I for one am rather surprised at the outcome.

The legal position of the Foundation was weak enough and the design of the new monastery, the work of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, was reverential and hidden enough that the proposal went forward. (View the full article for images of the design as well as further photos.) In recent years Renzo Piano has become the go-to architect for this kind of architecturally-sensitive projects; his office is also designing and addition to the Kimball in Fort Worth.

When your two year old comes to you bearing wooden blocks and says “buiwd a chuch, buiwd a chuch,” how can you say no?

So we built a basilica modeled somewhat after the English cathedral prototype, with buttresses for transepts and a tower at the crossing.
(Regular posting to resume soon.)

Here are some quick teasers for three churches visited last weekend while in San Antonio for the Texas Society of Architects (AIA) convention. I’m working of posting more photos and writing descriptions & analysis of each of these, but I’ve been overwhelmed with other projects this week.

First up, the chapel at the Haven for Hope which was dedicated last Sunday afternoon. Haven for Hope is an incredible place built to serve and transform San Antonio’s homeless population. The scope of the services and the number of organizations & service providers involved is an astounding display of what it means to serve the “whole person.” The scale means that it can help everyone who seeks help, not just a few at a time. Overland Partners led the design team, including the design for the chapel pictured below.

Chapel at Haven for Hope, San Antonio by _jjph, on Flickr

Next up is another campus chapel with a similarly profound & pivotal relationship with its site. O’Neil Ford’s chapel on the campus of Trinity University.

Parker Chapel, Trinity University by _jjph, on Flickr

And then in the evening we traveled out to the Anglican Use Roman Catholic parish Our Lady of Atonement, where the Sunday evening Mass is said in Latin from the (current) Roman Missal of Paul VI. I was hoping for some sign of “tradition sans traditionalism” but unfortunately no trace of that most desired grail was to be found here. The interior is fairly nice with greatest care in all the right places, though signs of cheap construction abound. The exterior is proportionally atrocious & tectonically inauthentic, but more on that later.

Our Lady of Atonement, San Antonio by _jjph, on Flickr

Just had to share this image of a small chapel of ease from 1897. The architect is Sir Guy Dawber, one of those which John Betjeman credits as part of the “thin stream of life and vigorous influence for the good in English architecture for the last 50 years [1883-1933].” More on Betjeman soon, but I couldn’t pass up sharing this building.

Chapel of St John the Baptist, Matlock. by Budby, on Flickr

The chapel is no longer in use and owned by Friends of Friendless Churches.

From the New Liturgical Movement blog, a poignant reminder of the relative insignificance of church buildings compared to their use.

Nigeria mass - elevation

Or perhaps some some fodder for consideration of elemental building in the manner of Laugier. If nothing else, a challenge to assumptions about appropriate pairings of style and liturgical forms. It’s just a wonderful and compelling image, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it.Still more intriguing, this structure was purpose built:

Nigeria mass - building

Our favorite Dominican photographer of churches, Brother Lawrence Lew, O.P., has an excellent description of Giles Gilbert Scott’s Ampleforth Abbey Church on the New Liturgical Movement.

I’d like to think this is one of those few 20th century churches to which none but the most curmudgeonly predisposed partisans would object. This church is ornate where it is fitting, minimal where appropriate resulting in an interior effective and focused. St Bernard of Clairvaux would be proud.

Ampleforth Abbey church by Lawrence OP, on Flickr

Inside Ampleforth Abbey church by Lawrence OP, on Flickr