California Craftsman Churches and Architectural Values

St. Athanasius Episcopal Church, by Angeleno Heights resident Arthur Benton, once stood at Echo Park and Laguna avenues, across from Echo Park Lake in east Los Angeles. It was demolished in the 1990s.  [source]

  

The original 'mission-style' chair was made as seating for San Francisco's Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem, which still stands.  Image via Wikimedia commons.

The First Unitarian Church of Berkeley, 1894 by A.C.Schweinfurth, cost $5130 to construct.  Photo by Daniella Thompson, 2004)

Berkeley's St. John's Presbyterian Church was built in 1910 and designed by Julia Morgan, who also designed the far more lavish Hearst Castle.  It is now an arts venue. Image via sacredplaces.org

California's unique version of the Arts and Crafts movement expressed itself in churches as well as its better-known homes.  The Craftsman movement was an idealistic one; its proponents really believed that architecture expressed values and they tried to make these churches suit the values they professed,  among them authenticity in materials and a devotion (at least in rhetoric) to a simpler, more natural approach.  These things can be read in the buildings now, but were even more apparent at the time when they were built.  The contrast between these churches and the prevailing Victorian style of fancy brickwork and heavy ornamentation was intentional, and unmistakeable.

These churches look gentle and quaint.  But at the time they were a coded rebuke; a smackdown to the church architecture status quo.

There is certainly design inspiration here...shingled facades and heavy timber beams (note the Vitruvian supporting posts of solid redwood on First Unitarian) are still beautiful features, as is the Swedenborgian church's back-of-the-sanctuary fireplace, which I long to see in a modern worship space.

But more than that, they remind us that our architecture expresses our values.  Does that reassure you about your own church...or make you uncomfortable?  

Church Design Zebras

In medical school, they call them zebras.  Most things a doctor sees are just plain old horse.  Colds, flu, plantar warts.  And so the saying "When you hear hoofbeats behind you, don't expect to see a zebra".  Yet it's well-known that new med students are prone to diagnose common symptoms as rare diseases.  Mostly because once you think about a zebra, it sticks in your mind.  

Our church has spent a year and a half in the design process.  We started with a series of meetings to discuss the history and meaning of church architecture, then moved on to simple bubble diagrams of what type of spaces we needed.  Once we had design concepts and preliminary floor plans from our architects, we had a series of all-Sunday afternoon sessions in which we laboriously listed every function of the church and how it would work in the new space.

And always, always, there has been concern about the zebras.
"What if we need to do a two-casket funeral?"  
"We simply must have a bride's room!"
"I want to be able to completely curtain the stage for a musical performance."
"What if we have 800 people for Christmas?"

Once someone fixates on a zebra, it can be hard to move them off of it.  And zebras require special care, because they are often tied to cherished events like holidays and weddings, or to a congregant's particular ministry focus like the music program or Vacation Bible School.  

It helps to gently remind people that they didn't build their own house to anticipate every possible eventuality.  And we can't build the church to, either.

They didn't build their house to hold, year-round, the 35 relatives that fill it at Christmas time, or to anticipate their daughter's wedding dreams.  Those are zebras.

The 80/20 rule works well here.  We've worked hard to ensure that the design is amazing for 80% of the church's functions.  And that it is flexible enough to *accommodate* the other 20%...some of which we can't even anticipate.

Zebras are rare.  So we've made sure that we can set up extra chairs, shift classrooms, meet outside, and hang the odd theatrical component from the ceiling for their occasional visits.  But it wouldn't be a good use of the Lord's funds to build the church for the zebras.

Transparent Church, Gijs Van Vaerenbergh, Limburg Belgium, 2011

Gijs Van Vaerenbergh's recent construction in the rural landscape of Borgloon (Limburg, Belgium) is based on the design of the local church, but reimagines it as something like a line drawing. By using horizontal plates for construction, the familiar shape of a traditional church becomes a wraith-like object that appears nearly solid or nearly transparent  depending on where you're standing.  And I think it feels quite sacred.

Modern churches can so reject tradition in both form and materials that they become completely unfamiliar; I'm impressed by the way this project radically reinterprets material construction while retaining a traditional shape that can still be 'read' by anyone as a church.   

Obviously it's not meant to meet in, but that is inspiring as well.  Churches rarely build anything beyond their own forbidding walls. Landscape interventions, like this one and the cross-gate, are an opportunity to reach into the semi-public space around the church.

In my Father's House are Many Mansions

"In my Father's House are Many Mansions", a bronze sculpture by little-known Swiss artist and sculptor Werner Hilbern, cast in 1970 and installed since 1989 on the wall of the cemetery in Wil, Switzerland [from the Wil website].  I've been looking and looking at this and am so moved by it.

Stained glass and gold mosaics

Many churches of the past relied on awesome architecture and heavy applied decoration to make going to church a spatial experience unlike any other.

Most modern churches, and particularly small ones, don't have either of those.  So how to make a place feel special in a way that is contemporary rather than historicist?  I like to think about new interpretations of traditional church materials, like stained glass and mosaics.

These acrylic lights by artist Tobias Rehberger seem to take the stained glass out of the windows and put it overhead.  They're not commercially for sale (they're on gallery exhibit here) but similar work could be done by a fused glass artist; even my hometown, not known for the arts, has several good fused glass practitioners. 

If you can't afford the golden glass mosaics of St. Paul's, consider the amazing wallpapers of the Chicago firm Maya Romanoff, who through some alchemy have formulated hangable designs made from wood veneers, real metal, mother of pearl, mica and even light refracting glass beads.  They are essentially modern mosaics, to adorn an altar or back a baptistery, create a focal wall in the entry or a luxurious stripe around a room (hung out of reach of little hands!) or maybe adorn a ceiling, ala St. Paul's. 

Maya Romanoff wallpapers are are high end products, with prices at $200 a yard and up.  But I can think of few less expensive means to make such a big impact in just a few feet.  As always, remember to put your money into a focal point; if it is beautiful enough noone will look anywhere else, saving you money spent on multiple small design interventions.  These 'wallpapers' will do that.

Ixxi for church wall art

The large spaces of church interiors can make wall decor a challenge; so often I see churches that have good intentions of warming up their interiors with wall art designed for the home, but because it isn't properly scaled for the wall sizes of a church building it just ends up looking odd.  Large-scale works, though, are usually custom, and therefore expensive.

So I was excited to see (via design-milk) a modular hanging system that joins individually printed cards together to create large-scale wall art.  It's a dutch system called ixxi, and you can use it to make a single image,  a collage, or an abstract pixelated piece.  Your design (or you can use their stock designs) is enlarged and divided onto printed cards 20 x 20 cm (close to 8 inches square), which are joined together with their system of with their 'x’s' and 'i’s' (thus the ixxi name!) to produce a wall piece or even a room divider.  You could use an image that is meaningful to your church's vision and mission, a text, or even a logo.  Think of the impact in a lobby, or a children's or youth space.

And it's surprisingly low-cost!   A 100 card system is about $200, including shipping from the Netherlands, which would make it reasonable to even change out the image over time or seasonally; ixxi also offers 'card only' pricing for those who already have their x's and i's. 

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Textile Inspiration

Textile art in the church is often limited to needlepoint kneelers and homemade banners, but witness the ethereal splendor of Toshiko Horiuchi's handknit installations:

'Fibre Columns/Romanesque Church'
sprang, nylon rope - 15' x 90' x 12'

'Luminous Column', exhibited at 'Fabric in Space'
Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.1987

'Atmosphere of the Floating Cube'  - knitted gold & silver Mylar with linen. National Museum of Modern art, Kyoto.  

An essential part of all of these installations is the lighting that brings them to life; in this case carefully placed floodlights.  Churches installing any form of art should consider the lighting of the piece as integral to the art itself.   

Even with the resurgence of the knitted arts and yarn bombings everywhere, I haven't seen any recent applications of knitted textiles to religious spaces.  Horiuchi's work is from twenty years ago; here's hoping some modern textile artists will follow.

Better Children's Spaces

One of the things we're spending alot of time on at the moment is the design of the children's house for our church.  We know what we don't want:  a series of walled off classrooms along a hallway where children are strictly divided by age level.  Right now, I'm really inspired by the quiet design of The Children's School, a Montessori school in Stamford Connecticut, who requested a one-room schoolhouse for sixty from architect MaryAnn Thompson.

Choosing a Church Architect, Part II

I was reminded, when our architects visited again for Easter, of how unconventional our 'selection process' was.  That's their further development of the site plan, including a memorial pavilion to the two young soldiers lost from our congregation, above.

The pavilion is where it all started; when we didn't have the money to build on our 100 acres, the congregation decided to focus on developing the front twenty-five or so intended to be open to the public in a park-like setting, which would include a memorial pavilion to the (then one) young man who had been killed in Iraq, and a lake, and walking trails.  I felt near panic at the possibility of a decision to erect a faux-Victorian gazebo from the building store down the street.

Somewhere around page 50 of a desperate google search for 'pavilion' I turned up this:

Never mind that it had been in the courtyard of the British Library, which is one of my favorite places in the great wide world;  it had a single post (an idea that had been in my mind as a symbolic sentinel) with support beams which my church-design mind read as a cross, it had been constructed to interact with the sunlight timed to a poetry reading (light is a guiding concept for our church), and it had been constructed by students from stock lumber (woohoo!  we could build it ourselves!), so I sent off an email inquiry in hopes that we could just buy the design for some reasonable sum and duplicate it on the lone prairee.

But that is not how proper architects work, and the d's of drdh would no more sell me a pavilion design that was made for another place than they would have sold me a stock church plan made for another church...not out of preciousness but because they knew, as I didn't completely understand at the time, that only a design made for us would really work for us.  And when we sat down and had a long talk about the church, and the land, and the light, and Aldo van Eyck, they said they would be happy to make us a pavilion but they really wanted to help us build our building.

If you search out conventional wisdom about how to hire a church architect, one of the most common is 'only use a church specialist, only use a firm that has designed many churches'.   This is usually put forward by firms who, guess what, specialize in churches.  Whether you choose to go with a 'specialist' or not (and we didn't) doesn't really matter though, if you just remember that in seeking out an architect you're looking for two things, and wherever you find them that will be a good place:

Skill, and Sympathy.

Skill - The firm's work (and yes, you should meet the principals, not some sales department; if you're given any sort of a marketing pitch cross them off your list immediately) should impress you.  It doesn't really matter if they're churches or not.  For 'skill' do not read 'wow-factor', as in bright colors and swoopy exteriors, and remember that gigantic media screens are not equivalent to good design.  Does their portfolio show that they think deeply about what buildings mean to people?  About how space works, and how people work within it?   About finished details?  Have they made spaces that look to you like they would feel good to be in?

Sympathy - Are the principals in sympathy with your goals and desires for the building?  If so, they will also be in sympathy with your budget, and respectful of it.   Do you feel comfortable with them as people, with how they listen and respond to you?  Do they WANT to build your church?  Never work with someone that you have to drag into the job. 

After a few more visits and talks it was clear that our architects wanted to build our church, and we wanted them to build it.  That arrangement, not just of mutual benefit but of mutual desire to accomplish, lends mutual trust.  And knowing them to be 'men of skill', as it were (see Exodus 31:2-5) freed us from the compulsion to prescribe their work, or to submit every detail to a committee review--one of the perennial complaints about the building process within churches.  We knew that they could come up with better answers on our behalf than we could on our own.  And they have.     

Colin McCahon, Elias triptych, 1959

Colin McCahon (1919 - 1987), New Zealand's most significant artist, began painting in religious themes in the late 1940s.  Through the 1950s, he increasingly utilized text, including this stunning triptych as part of his Elias series, painted in 1959.  His entire catalogue is online here.

This is a special week for our little church, as our architects are visiting again from London with the next iteration of design plans for the new building.  So no posting for about a week...have a blessed Easter season.

Initiatives in Theology and the Arts

 And if you like 'Veil', you'll probably like the idea of Duke University's Initiatives in Theology and the Arts.  Now, I live in academia, so I know how out of touch it can be, how prone to using the word cognate far too often.  (and mercy-sakes-mabel Duke, if you're going to have an art exhibit, put images online already!)  Nevertheless, it is one of the few places that accommodates the kind of prolonged, thoughtful discussions that these subjects deserve.

Since my own interest is in the way that design of space can facilitate the church, I'll be following their research into Theology and the Spatial Arts, and I wish I had time to read everything on the very comprehensive arts-in-theology and theology-in-arts reading list! 


See also related programs at the University of Otago in New Zealand  and St. Andrews in Scotland.

Thanks to reader Joelle for the tip!

[the above image of the 'joyful angel' is one of a set of windows by Charles Cordel at the Church of the Three Kings in Frankfurt, Germany   (installed 1956) has stayed with me for some time...I love his splashes of bright color in a muted, paned matrix.]

Veil

Our new church design has a sanctuary that is a space within a space, and the inner structure provides the possibility of veiling some or all of the interior.  So I was very interested to see 'Salutation', an art installation by Wallspace for Christmas 2009.  "An exploration of the theme of the annunciation, when traditionally the angel appeared to Mary to announce the birth of Jesus, Salutation filled the church with huge muslin veils with the appliquéd gold text 'what manner of salutation this might be'."

Cross Tower, Kensuke Watanabe Architecture Studio, Tokorozawa Japan, 2009

"The existing church complex had difficulty being recognized as a catholic church because of its gymnasium-like appearance with no significant symbol. With the addition of this Cross Tower, the existing complex will easily be acknowledged as a church, showing its religious faith and Christian activities."

Designed by Japanese architects Kensuke Watanabe Architecture Studio for a church in Tokorozawa, Japan.  Obviously reminiscent of the Saarinen arch in Saint Louis, this tower nevertheless speaks to local traditions, using ship building techniques to  gradually twist the arch so that it faces outward at its bottom ground, adding structural stability and  "also creating a welcoming gesture which enables the tower to serve as a gate for people to walk through daily or in ceremonial occasions"

As I've said before, given a banal building, put your money into a single distinctive focal point...hiring a skilled architect to make an innovative steeple gave this church an immediate new visual identity.  [via dezeen]

Selecting a Church Architect, Part I

Building a church requires careful attention to visual details.  If your architect isn't sensitive to the visual character of their own website, why would they be more attentive to your church?  Churches also increasingly require the incorporation of technology...if your architect can't even stay current with the design of their website is she likely to be on top of technology trends?  The worst websites are often from 'design-build' organizations, which says something, I think.  The website of a thoughtful architecture firm will also convey something of their design sensibility--traditional, modern, avant-garde.  Your first clue to a firm's character, and whether or not they will be in sympathy with your project, is its website.  Take it seriously.

Curtain Dividers for small groups

Another interesting option for flexible classroom groupings within larger spaces like those in commercial settings...from my files; I've long lost the reference.  Let me know if you have it.

Futuna Chapel, John Scott, 1961 Wellington, New Zealand - at two scales

Futuna Chapel by John Scott is considered one of the most significant twentieth century buildings in New Zealand and incorporates ideas from the wharenui (below, the traditional communal house of the Maori)--including a prominent load-bearing pole, visible rafters, eaves that slope sharply and end low to the ground, and a modest entrance--combining these features with Scott's characteristic strong geometries within a modernist idiom  The chapel was self-built by the Brothers of the Society of Mary, for whom it was designed as a spiritual retreat.

Sold to developers in 2000 and allowed to fall into disrepair, the building is now owned by the Friends of Futuna Charitable Trust, whose website has frustratingly small photos showing the sketches, models, and  interior of the church.  But who, for the chapel's 50th anniversary just a couple of weeks ago, created commemorative scale models in conjunction with the amazing 'personal factory' firm Ponoko.

What a special project for any church with distinctive architecture!  Note that scale models of 'whale' churches are unlikely to be any more interesting than the real thing.

Read more about John Scott's work, including his churches, at a very nice blog of his work: scott-architecture.blogspot.com/, and some more images of the futuna chapel at this flickr stream.