A Little Jewel

Some people find modernist architecture uniquely ill suited to churches. The utilitarian obsession with function, the lack of imagery and ornament—it all seems to betray a deeper spiritual deficit.

George Weigel sees it this way. He has argued that modernist architecture springs from a reductive anthropology. The architect sees people as “cogs in various machines,” concludes that “cogs need neither beauty nor uplift nor charm,” and builds accordingly, ordering his design only to “the ultimate value of efficiency.” To make his point, Weigel gestures toward the Saint John’s Abbey Church in Minnesota, which was designed in the 1950s by the Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer. In the mid-twentieth century, the massive concrete church won all sorts of praise, but Weigel argues that it fails to draw the faithful up into contemplation. Instead, “the Breuer church depresses the spirit.”

It’s not just Catholics like Weigel who think this. Consider, for instance, the screenwriter and director Brady Corbet, who is an atheist. At the end of Corbet’s film The Brutalist, released last year, he reveals that his protagonist (a Hungarian architect loosely based on Breuer) designed the chapel of his signature building after a Nazi concentration camp. The true Brutalist, Corbet seems to say, wouldn’t build a space that facilitates an encounter with the transcendent God. Rather, his church would dramatize the difficulty, maybe even the impossibility, of such an encounter. Corbet thinks that is a good thing; Weigel thinks that is a bad thing. Both men agree that modernist churches are designed to fail, to draw Christians back from their pursuit of God.

If you have trouble seeing their point, look at a few pictures of the Carr Memorial Chapel, “the God Box,” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s chapel at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Aren’t the very things that make this building modernist—the plain walls of little beige bricks, the flat roof, the sheer façade, the plain glass entrance that looks identical to the entrances you see on Midwestern elementary schools and county jails—aren’t these also the very things that make the chapel seem spiritually enervating? And so might we not conclude with Weigel and Corbet that the phrase modernist church is something of an oxymoron?

I used to think this way. That changed, though, after I started teaching at the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota, and began regularly attending Mass in a chapel designed by Marcel Breuer—the Brutalist himself.

I initially found the design of Our Lady of the Annunciation Chapel bewildering. I loved the Masses celebrated there, in large part because of the piety and sheer number of students attending. The chapel seats around five hundred people, and, on a Wednesday morning, you need to arrive early to find a seat. But I thought the chapel didn’t do the students justice. Its walls look unfinished. Its ceiling has an odd shape. It’s rather poorly lit. And it’s uncomfortable, with rock-hard pews set at right angles and kneelers that seem to be made out of some even harder material than the brick floor.

I’ve come to love this modernist church, though. What’s more, after asking around on campus, I’ve found that many of my students and colleagues have had similar changes of heart.

My university’s founders, the Benedictine Sisters of Annunciation Monastery, commissioned Breuer to design their priory and college based on his work for the Benedictines at Saint John’s Abbey. The three-phase construction plan included Our Lady of the Annunciation, which was completed in 1963.

Our Lady of the Annunciation bears an unmistakable resemblance to Breuer’s other churches. Like the Saint John’s Abbey Church and his later Saint Francis de Sales in Muskegon, Michigan, it’s composed of Breuer’s two favorite shapes—the trapezoid and the hyperbolic paraboloid (think of a saddle). It features a hefty amount of raw concrete with the pockmarks and imprints of its formwork left undisguised. And its interior is left almost bare of decorative imagery.

Still, Our Lady of the Annunciation is distinct from Breuer’s other efforts. It’s less hulking and monumental, reflecting, I think, Breuer’s more delicate approach to this particular project. He certainly seemed charmed by the Sisters. When first asked to design the priory, Breuer responded, “I should be delighted to try. Perhaps we might create a little jewel.”

The first thing you notice, walking toward the chapel, are its bells. They’re held in a winding, one-hundred-foot-tall banner of concrete with a cross set in negative space. The campus sits on a bluff above the Missouri River, and you can see the bell banner from miles away. The chapel itself, which runs north from the bell banner, is constructed with thick walls of granite fieldstone, leaning inward on the north and south, and topped with a zig-zagging roof of reinforced concrete.

Inside the chapel, the stone walls and concrete ceiling are painted white. The stone walls form trapezoids against concrete buttresses, and the ceiling unfurls in four sets of hyperbolic paraboloids. West of the entrance is a small Marian chapel set behind a terra cotta grill. To the east are confessionals and a stairway to the balcony that houses the pipes for the organ. About two-thirds of the space between the door and the altar is occupied by black oak pews. The rest of the space houses choir stalls that are flanked by ceiling-high concrete walls stippled with irregular ovals of stained glass. The windows are violet, pink, and blue to the east and yellow and blue to the west, altering the color of the chapel at dawn and dusk. The brick floor is a dark blue that recalls the blue in the windows, the blue of the chapel’s processional cross, and the blue of the cantilevered concrete baldachin that swoops out of the north wall to cover and light the large, granite altar. Behind the altar is a massive gold-leafed tile wall that spans the sanctuary and runs about halfway to the ceiling. To the east of the altar is a small room used as a sacristy. To the west is a matching room that the Sisters initially used as a sick chapel but now houses the tabernacle. The chapel is lit by cylindrical light fixtures hanging from the ceiling and the natural light filtered through the stained glass. While it’s never very bright in the main body of the chapel, the baldachin illuminates the altar quite well.

So why have I ended up loving this strange, modernist church? Is it simply the case that you can grow to love any room in which you pray consistently? If I taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology, would I come to love even the God Box? Perhaps there’s something to this. I’d argue, though, that there are at least two additional reasons for my change of heart, both connected to ways in which Breuer’s chapel is more successful—though no less modernist—than Mies’s God Box.

First, Breuer executes his simple aesthetic plan masterfully. One common misconception about modernist architects is that they have no grounding aesthetic principles beyond efficiency. In reality, the great modern architects often subordinated function to form. After Le Corbusier’s death, Breuer told his friends that the famous architect “never ate his functionalism as hot as he cooked it.” You could say the same of Breuer himself, except that he never cooked his functionalism all that hot to begin with. In one speech, he amends the bumper-sticker slogan “Form Follows Function” by adding “though not always.” In another, he says that for a place of worship, “it is part of its function to reach beyond functions.”

In his 1956 book Sun and Shadow, Breuer articulates the basis of his non-functionalist aesthetic. He argues that great buildings contain “strong opposite forces of ideas, all clearly expressed without compromise, and united in one.” He points to the example of the ancient Greeks, who took rough slabs of unpolished granite and set upon them smooth marble columns that they engineered to perfection. Breuer loved such juxtaposition of forms, writing, “That is the kind of tension in concepts—that is the sun and shadow that makes Greek architecture great.”

This approach could get Breuer into trouble. In 1968, he proposed propping a huge glass-and-steel skyscraper over Grand Central Station in New York. His design looked something like a guillotine descending on the head of a French nobleman. It was widely mocked and, mercifully, never realized. I’d argue, though, that the problem wasn’t in Breuer’s core principles but in his failure to live up to them. The glass box skyscraper and beloved Beaux-Arts train station were nothing if not “strong opposite forces,” but Breuer’s design didn’t manage to synthesize them so that these opposing ideas could become “united in one.”

Where he failed with the Grand Central Tower, Breuer succeeds in Our Lady of the Annunciation. The walls of the chapel seem ancient or even primitive in their design, lots of rocks piled on top of each other and mortared together. Nevertheless, the gratuitous thickness of these walls is impressive. An opening running from the Marian chapel into the atrium outside shows the south wall to be at least six feet thick at its base. What is the function of such excess? It’s hard to say. The aesthetic effect, though, is profound. You feel like you’re peering into a pyramid or the opening of a paleolithic fortress, looking at solidity itself.

In contrast with the walls, the ceiling of flowing concrete is perfectly modern. I find my eyes trying to impose straighter lines and sharper angles on the ceiling than are really there. The delicate movement of the hyperbolic paraboloids keeps foiling my expectations. Rock just isn’t supposed to twist in this way.

By juxtaposing the stone walls and concrete ceiling, Breuer draws out the distinctive character of each and invites viewers to combine them in a new synthesis. In Richard Wilbur’s 1956 poem “For the New Railway Station in Rome,” he describes how the station’s modernist design blends into its ancient architectural context, telling how the station’s roof

Sails out into the air beside the ruined

Servian Wall,

Echoing in its light

And cantilevered swoop of reinforced concrete

The broken profile of these stones, defeating

That defeat.

The station pushes back against the forces of entropy and gravity that we see winning elsewhere to suggest the possibility of transcendence.

The juxtaposition in Breuer’s chapel creates a similar effect. His two profoundly different modes of building call to mind the two profoundly different modes of being that come together in the Mass—the temporal and the eternal, the immanent and the transcendent. This effect is best expressed by the cantilevered concrete baldachin that erupts from the stone wall in sleek curves to cast light on the altar. A friend has told me that it looks as though a different dimension is breaking through into ours, which, of course, is precisely what is happening in the Mass. Though (as critics of his churches like to point out) Breuer was not a Catholic, here his simple aesthetic approach is able to capture something essential to Catholic worship.

The second reason I’ve come around on Our Lady of the Annunciation is that I’ve started to appreciate its lack of ornament. Aside from a statue of the Madonna and Child, which sits behind the grill in the Marian chapel, the only mimetic art in the chapel is the processional cross, which looks remarkably small when placed behind the altar.

At first, the dearth of images seems wrong for a Catholic church. The Benedictines at Saint John’s Abbey hired Breuer because they were taken with his bold modernism. Nevertheless, they often had difficulty accepting how stark Breuer’s plans looked. “Our collective impulse to decorate things showed up repeatedly,” recalls Father Hilary Thimmesh in a book about his time serving on the church’s planning committee. Thimmesh remembers Frank Kacmarcik, an artist who assisted the committee, worrying that the church might be mistaken for “a Calvinistic meeting hall” if a massive apse screen weren’t decorated with religious imagery in time for the church’s dedication. But Breuer had a way of politely listening to such concerns and then simply leaving them unaddressed. Sixty-five years have passed, and the apse screen at Saint John’s Abbey Church is still a bare, red banner.

Of course, a Catholic church shouldn’t shy away from ornamentation out of iconoclastic scruples. But such concerns don’t seem to have driven the simplicity of Breuer’s churches. Rather, Breuer’s opposition to ornament grew out of his hostility to modern commercial culture. When asked about the darkness of the nave at Saint John’s Abbey, he told the monks that he didn’t want to give the church “the uniform illumination of a supermarket.” When someone wondered if the bell banner at Saint John’s might strike some people as commercial, Breuer correctly noted that it would have precisely the opposite effect. In a world gone drunk with images, there is something refreshing about entering a space decorated with nothing more than real things—“good materials sympathetically used,” as Breuer liked to say. And this simplicity can serve a further, spiritual end.

Let me try to explain. When I attend Mass at some richly decorated parishes, I will often take off my glasses. Since I’m near-sighted, removing my glasses has the effect of adding distance between myself and my surroundings, turning down the visual volume, so to speak. I’ve found that doing this calms down my mind and helps me pray.

Recently, when I tried taking off my glasses at Mass in the Breuer chapel—the white walls, the white ceiling, the white altar against the gold tile and below the blue baldachin—very little changed. The volume of the chapel is already turned very low; Breuer’s design generates a distance from my senses that I am usually able to arrive at only with my poor eyesight. Ironically, perhaps, it’s this distance that helps me focus on what’s really in front of me, on the meeting of the temporal and eternal that the chapel represents and facilitates.

I’ll leave you with this thought from Saint Augustine and Saint Monica (paraphrased by Anthony Hecht):

If there were hushed

To us the images of earth, its poles

Hushed, and the waters of it,

And hushed the tumult of the flesh, even

The voice intrinsic of our souls,

Each tongue and token hushed and the long habit

Of thought, if that first light, the given

To us were hushed,

So that the washed
Object, fixed in the sun, were dumb,

And to the mind its brilliance

Were from beyond itself, and the mind were clear

As the unclouded dome

Wherein all things diminish, in that silence

Might we not confidently hear
God as he wished?