Anarchy in Our Churches? The American Architectural Press, 1944–65

Abstract

In the mid-twentieth century American architectural journals, including Architectural Forum, Architectural Record, and Progressive Architecture, routinely ran features on the state of contemporary church architecture in the United States. Rapid suburban expansion and the revival of religious life in the post-Depression, postwar era generated tremendous amounts of construction, with a great deal of work available for architects. This article examines the concerns and hopes of modernist editors in the 1940s–1960s, as they sought to stabilize a “direction” for church architecture. Specifically, it examines the role of the architectural press as the self-established gatekeepers for acceptable church design, and their relationship with theologians, liturgists, and building commissions within the Catholic Church. Questions of authority (who was competent to determine whether a church design was successful?) and expertise (whose theological knowledge should be weighted more heavily?) lay behind the stark assertions commonplace in these discussions. Editors, generally not themselves Catholic, used their professional positions to weigh in on hot debates within the Catholic Church over the purpose of a church building, the relationship of the Church to modernity (and modernism), and the appropriateness of new materials and engineering techniques.

Keywords:

• Architectural Record
• Architectural Forum
• Progressive Architecture
• liturgy
• USA
• editorial policy

Notes

1. For more on this development, see Price, Temples; and, for Protestants in particular, see Buggeln, The Suburban Church.

2. “Anarchy in Our Churches,” Architectural Forum, 92–111. Minus the editorial comment, Price confirms this observation: “the very diversity of postwar church and synagogue construction was perhaps the era’s most distinctive feature” (Temples, 4.) For examples of the same genre of complaint, see “The Slow Evolution,” Architectural Record, 121–28; “Building Types Study No. 241,” Architectural Record, 123–54; “Churches,” Architectural Forum, 118–31; “Churches,” Progressive Architecture, 119–37.

3. The concept of a “profession” has been extensively studied and analysed, and a full account of the literature is well beyond the scope of this article. Helpful to me in considering the rhetoric of professionalism and the self-conscious process of professionalization was Larson, Rise of Professionalism, esp. xii–xiii and 104–58. Price, in Temples, gives substantial attention to the emergence of a network of professional religious architectural consultants (especially among Protestants) during the 1940s–1950s, following Dowling, “For God, for Family.”

4. Pai, Portfolio and the Diagram, 4.

5. Although a system of testing and licensing—the hallmark of a profession—gained strength throughout the century, and the American Institute of Architects (AIA) began to provide rigorous guidelines for training, for professional ethics and practice, and for contracts, some architects did resist joining the AIA either because it seemed to infringe on their autonomy or because they perceived it as a guardian of bourgeois respectability. However, while at the beginning of the twentieth century it was still possible to enter the profession via apprenticeship, bachelor’s and eventually master’s degrees became mandatory. This, of course, increased the importance of the discipline: new architects were more and more consistently exposed and held to a coherent set of ideas and practices as part of their progress towards a degree.

6. Table of Contents, Architectural Forum (Dec. 1949): n.p.

7. Hudnut, “Picture, Sentiment and Symbol,” 86.

8. Sovik, “Church Design,” 138.

9. For the most comprehensive overview of the American liturgical movement, which includes attention to its European roots, see Pecklers, The Unread Vision.

10. Leading members of the Catholic liturgical movement began to appear in the secular architectural press even before World War II. “Architecture of Rudolf Schwarz,” 23–26, was written by the most architecturally literate of the movement’s leaders, Hans Ansgar Reinhold, a German priest who fled the Nazis and arrived in the United States in 1936. On Reinhold’s role in introducing Schwarz to America, see Schloeder, “Schwarz and His Reception,” 47–52. Lavanoux (see below) appeared in Architectural Record in the same year with a Design Trends article: “Recent Trends,” 76–83. Subsequent appearances of significant Catholic liturgical movement figures in the secular magazines include, though they are not limited to, LaFarge, S.J., “The Church,” 122; Frei, “Future of Stained Glass,” 120; and “Churches” (December 1949), 63.

11. On the Liturgical Arts Society, Lavanoux, and Liturgical Arts, see White, Art, Architecture, and Liturgical Reform, 226–55; and Osborne, “American Catholics.” Lavanoux, based in New York and with many contacts in the professional art and architectural world, occasionally acted directly as a broker: In 1954, for example, he asked friends at both the Record and the Forum to compile lists of their recent work on religious architecture and send the lists to liturgical movement leader Gerald Ellard, S.J. Correspondence dated November 12, 1954, and November 23, 1954, CLIT 30/02.

12. A 1967 letter from Mildred Schmertz, senior editor of Architectural Record and herself a Catholic, indicates the warm relationship between herself and Maurice Lavanoux as well as the editors’ record of sharing information. “I will call you when we get [photos of] these churches [by Pietro Belluschi] together,” she wrote, seeking behind-the-scenes collaboration on an upcoming feature. “Needless to say, we are interested in alternate proposals for illustration which you might have. You scooped us after all in your current issue by showing [Jose Luis] Sert’s new chapel. You must have some more new projects which would do nicely. … And let us have another happy lunch.” Mildred F. Schmertz, AIA, to Maurice Lavanoux, August 15, 1967, CLIT 47/01.

13. “Building Types Study No. 93,” 83–112.

14. Foster, “A French Expression,” 97–105; “Christ the King Church,” 461. As it began to narrow its focus to modernist examples of Catholic architecture alone, Architectural Forum turned its attention to architects whose secular work had also caught its interest. For example, it began to cover Antonin Raymond’s work in Tokyo in 1934; two years later, it highlighted his design for the mission church of St. Paul (“Catholic Church of Concrete,” 29–36.)

15. Shanken, 194X. In 1943 Architectural Forum actually printed a forecasting (for a Protestant church) titled “Church of 194X.”

16. “Building Types Study No. 93,” 83.

17. Hudnut, “Picture, Sentiment and Symbol,” 84, 87.

18. Maginnis, “Architecture and Religious Tradition,” 89–91.

19. “Editorial,” Liturgical Arts, 1.

20. Dearstyne, “Basic Teaching of Architecture,” 56–60.

21. Maginnis, “Architecture and Religious Tradition,” 90.

22. Ibid., 91.

23. “Obituary: Charles Donagh Maginnis,” 29.

24. Baumann, “Trends in Church Design,” 95. A more typical move would have been one normative/Protestant article and one Catholic article, or, as the 1950s moved on, one article each by a Protestant, a Catholic, and a Jew.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 96.

27. Ibid.

28. Byrne, “New Architecture of Worship,” 93–96. All of these were also featured in Liturgical Arts, and Lavanoux discussed them with Byrne, who was his good friend. On Byrne, see, most recently, Michael, Architecture of Barry Byrne.

29. “Churches” (Dec. 1954), 118.

30. Cited in Ragsdale, “We Will Build Modern Churches,” 95.

31. Detlie, “Religious Architecture for Today,” 135.

32. Spaeth, “Worship and the Arts,” 164.

33. Knox Shear, “Religious Buildings,” 177.

34. “Churches” (Dec. 1949), 59.

35. Byrne, “New Architecture of Worship,” 96.

36. “Design Awards,” Progressive Architecture (Jan. 1956), 116.

37. “St. Francis of Assisi Church, Weston, Conn.” Other articles highlighting the unity of outside and in include: “Eleven U.S. Churches;” “Building Types Study No. 177: Religious Buildings,” 126, 135.

38. “Building Types Study 265,” 140.

39. “Drama in the Desert,” 97–99. Progressive Architecture agreed, citing the Chapel in their first Design Awards in January 1954.

40. “Chapels,” 149.

41. This practice began at least as early as the June 1948 Architectural Record Building Types Study “Religious Buildings” (116–40).

42. See Schultz, Tri-Faith America. On the extent to which Protestants, Catholics, and Jews both promoted and shied from this notion as it related to architecture, see Price, Temples.

43. “Religious Buildings,” 129. While this practice was consistent across two postwar decades in all three magazines, for another example see “Building Types Study No. 205,” 117–40.

44. “Four Religious Centers,” 107–14.

45. Baumann, “Trends in Church Design,” 96.

46. “Churches,” Progressive Architecture, 119.

47. “Annual Design Awards Program,” 110. At the same time, however, architects had cause to be frustrated with the conflicting demands of the journals, which sometimes lamented, as Progressive Architecture’s January 1951 editorial did, that “in a design sense there does not seem to be any ‘American style’ appearing for churches,” while four years later docking architects who did try to conform to the “emerging style”—the 1955 Design Awards jury gave no award and only two citations for religious buildings as a whole, explaining that they had agreed to discard entries that seemed to be clustering around “certain approaches” that “occurred so frequently as to constitute a cliché rather than a design contribution” (98.)

48. “Building Types Study No. 272,” 147, 150.

49. Burchard, “Architecture in the Atomic Age,” 122.

50. Detlie, “Religious Architecture for Today,” 135.

51. “Building Types Study No. 205,” 123.