All Saints, Margaret Street

In honor of this year's London Festival of Architecture (which begins this Saturday) the neighborhood blog Fitzrovia News pays tribute to what is certainly their finest piece of architecture, William Butterfield's All Saints, Margaret Street. Among the interesting facts to be learned in this thorough description is that the church's particular brick cost more than stone would have at the time. This is a good excuse to update the building database entry on All Saints, Margaret Street and start to finally add the photos from my trip to England which was now over a year ago. Unfortunately, the church was closed for interior renovations when I visited, so I only have a photo of the courtyard with the priest running off to sound the bells for midday prayers and this one of the steeple.

McNamara in the Mail

Today in the mail I received a copy of Denis R. McNamara's Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy (thanks to the in-laws for a wonderful graduation present!). If you are not familiar with the book, which came out late last year, it is one of the more substantial works on church architecture of the past few years.

When the book was first announced, I was very excited because in the press materials (and on the back of the book) it announced that it "intended to find the middle of the road between differing and sometimes conflicting theories of liturgical architecture." This was exciting because no one seems to be looking for this. If these pages [locus iste] have an editorial stance it is that the perceived conflict between so-called traditional and so-called modern must be abandoned.

You will understand my disappointment when I learned that McNamara turned out to have a vested interest in a single architectural expression (or style) when I discovered this utterly inconceivable article wherein McNamara claims that the classical is the only tradition which could fulfill the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs van Balthasar. Now, I have not read all of Balthasar (if that is a feat attainable by mortal men), or indeed the whole of Herrlichkeit. But from my readings so far it seems to me that to make such a claim is precisely counter to Balthasar's project. That a species is beautiful because of the lumen of which it is revelation does not require that said species is the only one through said lumen could be revealed (see GL1.118 and also GL1.25 on the importance of letting go of and not overvaluing specific secondary forms that, like Classicism or Gothic, could be "regarded with suspicion as belonging to an ideology"). Were it true that there could only be one Gestalt per Ganz, how could we talk of the church as "the body of Christ" when the form is clearly different. The multiplicity of forms of the one splendor of the body of Christ is one of greatest strengths of the church. It often seems that it is all that keeps her from utter ruin amidst the volatility of humanity.

The middle road, it seems, is not the answer; we must rather abandon roads altogether.

But it is still an impressive volume, in its omissions as much as its substance, and I will review it here as I work my way through it soon.

Blessed Jerzy's New Home

Last weekend, Father Jerzy Popieluszko became Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko. This Polish Roman Catholic priest was martyred in October 1984 for opposing the Communist rule in Poland. Following the Beatification Mass on 6 June, Popieluszko's relics were brought in procession to the (still unfinished) National Temple of Divine Providence in Warsaw. In honor of Father Jerzy's beatification (and because I did not know about this project until reading about this event), I have added an entry for the National Temple of Divine Providence with a brief overview of its long and fascinating history. A few construction photographs are included; it will be very interesting to see how this massive church looks when it is completed after more than 200 years.

The Gray Lady on Modern Church Architecture

... only without any substance whatsoever, regrettably. A few weeks ago, the New York Times turned its attention briefly to the question of "modern" versus "traditional" architecture. It seems to have begun with this review by Nicolai Ouroussoff of an exhibit of work by Claude Parent (see St Bernadette, Banlay).

This article sparked the (unfortunately all-to-predictable) responses, including this opinion piece in the Times written by Ross Douthat. Mr. Douthat makes no attempt to back up this claims that what he personally finds ugly are therefore inherently secular and perilous. There seems to be the suggestion that the Oakland Cathedral is bad because brutalism is bad. And Jedis are bad, or at least Jedi fortresses are bad (do Jedis have fortresses?) But he does at least offer as counterpoint the work of Duncan Stroik, featured in a review in the Wall Street Journal on 18 March.

Here the LA/Oakland hating continues, but Catesby Leigh has found that there is an alternative to either the modernism destroying the church or "ersatz-traditional schlock." I am not convinced that Mr Stroik's work is not ersatz, even if it is certainly not schlock. But taste goes only so far, and the question of ersatz is ultimately the one we need to address.

Articles like Mr. Douthat do nothing to further the discussion, and I can only echo the response of one of his readers, that if he will not consider the living history of the church or the living history of architecture beyond his self-proclaimed reactionary tastes, "he should do us all a favor and not write about architecture at all."

Dominikus Böhm Photographs

This category page on Wikimedia Commons has an excellent collection of public domain photographs of a number of buildings by Dominikus Böhm.

Watts & Co.

Liturgical vestment + textile firm Watts & Co. have launched a redesigned website. "Watts & Co is one of the most remarkable survivals of the Gothic Revival of the nineteenth century: a firm founded in 1874 by three leading late-Victorian church architects,  George Frederick Bodley, Thomas Garner and George Gilbert Scott, the Younger, to produce furniture and textiles in a style distinctly their own.  The founders of Watts were young men of a new generation of architects who were moving away from the vigorous style of the early Gothic Revival towards a more refined and sensitive understanding of the Gothic style."

Keith Murray worked for the firm and designed the Archbishop's cope for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II before joining with Robert Magure (see St Paul, Bow Common).

The firm's collection includes textiles designed by Sir Ninian Comper and A. W. Pugin. Unfortunately, the new website no longer lists fabrics by designer.

Locus Iste is Live

Welcome to Locus Iste. This site is intended to be a resource for all those interested in the design and study of church architecture. The primary resources of the site are a database of architecturally and/or liturgically significant buildings and a database of texts relevant to the study of church buildings. So far our focus has been on functionality. Most site functions are operational, but there are still some bugs that need working on. Now we are starting to add content. We have populated the building database with over 100 buildings so far. Most of these are stubs, and we will add more information as we go along. The bibliography database and additional resources should be filled out in the near future.

The next two major projects will be the addition of resource links and the refinement of categorization for the buildings database.