The term “church” refers both to the Christian congregational body and to the buildings
in which public Christian worship takes place. Although churches share with secular sites
functional attributes common to all types of built structures, they also are endowed with
symbolic meanings consonant with their purpose as sites of sacred ritual. Because
international modernism, which dominated the middle years of the 20th century, was
selfreferential, antiemblematic, and ahistorical in character, its practitioners sought new
ways to express sacredness using space and light, with traditional forms reduced to subtle
references. Since the 1960s, however, symbolism has been recognized as implicit in all
architecture, countering the tendency Pier Luigi Nervi saw to “reduce the ‘house of God’s
people’ to a cold compound of human functions” (Bozzo, 1990).
Representations of sacredness respond to a number of different factors, including
ritual practice and conventional signification. Many forms are ancient in origin, dating
from the third century A.D., when public Christian observance first became legal under
the Romans. Early Christians adopted the basilica from Greek and Roman courts of
justice; the longitudinal interiors lit by a clerestory were ideal for congregational
assembly. The introduction of transepts gave rise to the Latin-cross plan, seen as an
emblem of that most fundamental of all Christian symbols. The Gothic rib vault,
perfected in the Ile de France in the 12th century, then elevated the basilica to the status
of quintessential Christian representation, because the Church of Rome was at the height
of its influence across Europe. Not only did the basilican or processional plan continue to
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hold significance into the modern era, but also as recently as the early 20th century,
Gothic churches still were being built in the traditional manner.
Centralized plans based on Roman tombs and Greek treasure houses were reserved for
baptisteries and martyria. During the Renaissance, however, both centralized and Greek-cross
plans enjoyed a wider use, because neo-Platonic aesthetics influenced architects to look
on these forms as symbols of divine perfection. It was only in the wake of the
Reformation that the Church of Rome decreed a return to more conventional sacred
expression to articulate its opposition to dissent.
For Protestant sects such as the Huguenots in France, architecture became a channel
through which to signify uniqueness. Classicist temples, on rectangular or octagonal
plans with banked seating around a central pulpit, were well suited to the delivery of
sermons, and they engendered a sense of communal worship. In many cases an
ideologically determined simplicity, central to the practice of reformed worship, also was
manifested not only in the temples of French Protestants but also in the early Puritan
meetinghouses of New England. As for banked auditoriums, they were identified with
Protestant observance, particularly after important German baroque examples such as the
Frauenkirche in Dresden, and because burgeoning evangelical congregations in North
America during the late 19th century were accommodated by necessity in church
amphitheaters with adjoining Akron-plan Sunday schools. Catholic churches only
adopted this type of iconography after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s
authorized increased congregational participation.
The significance of plan type and architectural vocabulary in representing sectarian
allegiance also is indicated by a third important precedent from the 6th century, which
holds particular meaning for Christians of the Eastern rite. The domed interior of the
Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (now Istanbul), sustained on a square of four vast arches,
mediates between longitudinal and centralized space with the inclusion of semidomed
apses on the east and west. So impressive was its interior that it became an equally potent
symbol for the followers of Islam after the building’s conversion to a mosque in 1453,
when the Ottomans conquered the city.
In the opening years of the 20th century, the importance of tradition was
affirmed through a renewed interest in Gothic architecture. The
groundwork had been laid in the 1830s, when the Oxford Movement
reintroduced Catholic principles into Protestant Episcopal practice and
stimulated a move toward ecumenism. This in turn found architectural
justification in the writings of 19th-century theorists such as
A.W.N.Pugin, the ecclesiologists (formerly the Cambridge Camden
Society), John Ruskin, and John Ninian Comper in Britain; and in Europe,
through the writings of Eugene-Emanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Romano Guardini, among others. Pugin, in particular, proposed that pointed or Christian
architecture could edify society and at the same time exemplify rational design. By
combining sacred tradition with the chief principle of modernism, Pugin earned a place
among the pioneers of modern design and facilitated the survival of medieval forms into
the 20th century. Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral by Gilbert Scott the younger, begun in
1904, affirmed the Gothic tradition in Britain, just as New York’s Cathedral of St. John
the Divine, begun by Heins and Lafarge in 1892 and continued by Cram and Ferguson,
did in the United States.
With the development of modern materials such as steel and reinforced concrete, it
was only a matter of time before convention gave way to new types of expression. French
architects Anatole de Baudot and his student Auguste Perret drew on the writings of
Viollet-le-Duc to translate traditional forms into modern materials. Baudot’s St.-Jean-de-
Montmartre (1904) was a groin-vaulted basilica executed in concrete, whereas Perret’s
Notre-Dame-Le-Raincy, featured a segmental, ferroconcrete shell vault extending the
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length of the nave. This approach also was explored by Karl Moser at St. Anthony in
Basel, Switzerland (1927), and somewhat differently by Werner Moser in the Protestant
church of Altstretten in Zurich, Switzerland (1941). Otto Bartning’s Steel Church for the
Press Exhibition at Cologne, Germany (1928), realized a similar project in steel and
glass. In other instances, historical references were reduced to a minimum, as was the
case with Corpus Christi Church in Aachen, Germany (1930), by Rudolf Schwarz and
Hans Schippert, a simple concrete hall with clerestory windows with the merest trace of
an ancient basilica.
Attempts also were made to translate Gothic vaulting into a contemporary idiom. For
example, Antoni Gaudí conceived an extraordinary series of organic forms to complete
the more conventional 1882 design his mentor Villar had proposed for Sagrada Familia in
Barcelona. (More recently, Santiago Calatrava reinterpreted Gaudí's idiosyncratic
vocabulary in his 1991 Tree of Life design for the nave and transepts of New York’s St.
John the Divine.) In a similar manner, the paraboloid concrete barrel vault with low
transverse aisle vaults, which Domenikus Böhm adopted in the Catholic church of Christ
the King at Bischofsheim (1926), invested the basilica with what Henry-Russell
Hitchcock called “a strong emotional effect…both Gothic and Expressionist in tone.”
Two decades later, Oscar Niemeyer revisited the idea of the single bold paraboloid in his
Church of St. Francis of Assisi, Pampulha, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and fashioned a
transept from four undulating concrete shells. His approach found sympathetic
affirmation in the work of Spanish-born Felix Candela, who also created a basilica of
hyperbolic paraboloids for Santa María Miraculosa in Mexico City (1954).
Medievalism also pervades the regional expression of the Grundtvigs Church in
Copenhagen, Denmark (1913 and 1921–40), by Vilhelm Jensen-Klint. Its massive,
neotraditional brick facade harks back to Baltic vernacular, with an overscaled evocation
of a pipe organ conjured from a cathedral portico.
By 1952 the boxy, steel-and-glass chapel Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed as part
of his campus plan for Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology had formulated the
fundamental problem of sacred architecture in the modern era—how to represent matters
of the spirit in the stark, universal geometry of international modernism. A different
approach was explored by Eero Saarinen and Associates in the interdenominational
Kresge Chapel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1955). Its simple cylindrical
form, executed in red brick, was set on a moat of water that reflected dimly into the skylit
interior, where a beam of light precipitated on an ethereal retable of suspended brass
rectangles to invoke the divine as tangibly as any baroque Ges amtkunstwerk (total work of art). That
same year Le Corbusier finished what has come to be recognized as the 20th century’s
most extraordinary example of sacred architecture, the Pilgrimage Chapel of Notre-
Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp, in the Vosges, France (1955). Sculptural and massive, the
structure supported a soaring, sail-like roof on battened wedges of raw concrete, pierced
only by deep window wells that send light refracting into the deeply protected refuge of
the interior.
In the decades following these key syntheses, a variety of approaches were tested.
Marcel Breuer, Hamilton Smith, and Pier Luigi Nervi designed a church of concrete,
granite, and stained glass for St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota (1961),
then announced its presence with a mammoth bell tower similar to the pylon of an
ancient temple. Concrete was also Alvar Aalto’s choice to create organic arcs of space in
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 482
the Vuoksenniska Church (1958) in Imatra, Finland, and again for a church at Riola, Italy
(1978). Less conventional still were the fortress-like blocks out of which Gottfried Böhm
forged the Pilgrimage Church (1968) at Neviges, Germany, its plan lobed around a
central pulpit. Equally powerful was the spectacular brick interior and fanned accordion
roof that Paul Rudolph designed with Fry and Welch for the interdenominational
Tuskegee Chapel (1969) at the Tuskegee Institute.
There were also consciously iconic approaches. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill opted
for a symbolism of site with a series of geometric aluminum tetrahedrons, like the
clustered wings of a plane, for the Air Force Academy Chapel (1963) at Colorado
Springs, Colorado.
By contrast, St. Mary’s Cathedral (1970) in San Francisco, by Pietro Belluschi, Pier
Luigi Nervi, and others, took up a more ancient iconography. Their white sailing ship of
poured concrete was a play on the concept of the nave or navis , the ship of souls, and the
interior was conceived like a Gothic cathedral with stained-glass windows. Emblematic,
too, of consumer culture and the role of the automobile in North American life was
California’s Garden Grove Community Church (1978) by Philip Johnson and John
Burgee. Known as the Crystal Cathedral, its star-shaped hangar of steel and glass opened
to accommodate drive-in participants in the service.
Another strategy stressed awareness of the natural environment. Frank Lloyd Wright’s
sensitivity for both materials and site extended in his religious works to a spiritual
communion with nature. His First Unitarian Meetinghouse (1951) in Madison,
Wisconsin, introduced a monumental window beneath a triangular copper gable, which
opened up the sanctuary to its natural setting. His son, John Lloyd Wright, in turn took
the approach a step further in the contemporaneous Wayfarer’s Chapel at Palos Verdes,
California, its glass enclosure, framed in redwood, sanctifying silent communion with the
surrounding coastal scenery. Wright protégé E.Fay Jones refined the concept in the
Thorncrown Wayfarer’s Chapel (1981) for a hilltop site in the Ozark Mountains, near
Eureka Springs, Arkansas, one of several similar structures the architect has since
executed in other locations.
Some churches actually become one with the setting. Philip Johnson’s Shrine at New
Harmony, Indiana (1960), for example, consisted of a lobed, parabolic hood of timber, to
focus upon the concept of the sacred without actually circumscribing the space. By
contrast, in Sedona, Arizona, Ashen and Allen’s Chapel of the Holy Cross (1965) was
built into the red sandstone cliffs, while the domed Taivallahti Church (1969), in
Helsinki, Finland, by Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen, was blasted into bedrock, the crater
of which nested the footings of the interior. Stanley Tigerman’s St. Benedict’s Abbey
(1978) at Benet Lake, Wisconsin, was buried in the ground to express humility. A similar
integration executed in consciously vernacular terms by Auburn architecture professor
Sambo Mockbee and his students, working collectively as the Rural Studio, was realized
in the Yancey Chapel (1997) at Mason’s Bend, Alabama. A lean-to dug into the earth and
partly open to the sky, the chapel was built on a low budget for needy clients, without a
specific plan and from scavenged materials, including old tires, rusted I beams, large
trusses, pine from a century-house, tin from an old barn, and river slate.
Other architects have fused the geometry of international modernism with an
appreciation for the natural setting. For example, in 1957 Finnish architects Heikki and
Kaija Siren introduced a glass sanctuary wall into the linear geometry of their University
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Chapel in Otaniemi, Finland, locating the altar against a natural screen of fir trees.
Similarly, contemporary Japanese architect Tadao Ando consciously combined the
spirituality of East and West in his Church on the Water (1988) in Hokkaido. Its twolevel
structure, a roofless crown framed by four concrete crosses and a lower chapel with
a glass wall overlooking a lake, aspired to “constructed nothingness” through a hybrid of
geometry, nature, and materials that engaged the worshiper in a direct experience of
nature.
More primal in their impact were the works of Hungarian architect Imre Makovecz,
whose disturbingly anthropomorphic Mortuary Chapel (1977) in the Farkasret Cemetery,
Budapest, is matched only by the ligamented viscera that frame his Roman Catholic
Church (1990) in Paks, Poland. From cosmopolitanism to an experience of the sacred
expressed in highly personal terms, religious architecture of the 20th century is a
bricolage of tradition, ritual practice, formal expression, and an intangible articulation of
spirituality.
