Vol. 5 (2017): Protestant Architecture and Modernity. Milestones, transfers, prospects

Cover and index of this number.

The phrase sacred space, suggesting a spiritually evocative environment infused with divine or transcendent presence, is currently applied to almost all religious places, including almost all Christian churches and chapels. Yet Protestant leaders from the Reformation onward vigorously opposed such an understanding of God’s relationship to humanly created worship space. For them, God was not immanent in specific spaces or buildings. How is it that Protestants came to embrace the idea of sacred space and apply it to their own churches? This essay explores the concept of sacred space and its relationship to Protestant architecture, focusing on the second half of the 20th century, a period that brought significant transformation to this relationship. The essay asserts that cultural, theological, and academic transformations occurring in the United States in the post-World War II period, resulted in the development of a universalized view of the sacred that came to undergird new religious spaces, particularly chapels meant to accommodate several faith traditions, which in turn helped to advance that view. Both the ideas and the buildings reflected a growing interest in personal spirituality and new understandings of the relative immanence and transcendence of God.

The identity is expressed in a self-picture, which has visible and immaterial marks. The church architecture is the essential appearance form of this, because it represents not the individual but the community. It gives an account of the self-identity conscience of the church through the community. In this way, architecture gets a great task: physically visualising this immaterial identity. This picture is formed with respect to the technical and aesthetic knowledge.
Does the basically recognizable protestant form exist? Are there ground-plans or spatial form elements, which are the obligate characteristics of these churches? Reflected well on the theological questions, we seek to detect what can determine the identity of the protestant churches in an aesthetic sense by a research highlighting the most important decesions on theological background and churches built in a term of a century.

This essay is an analysis of the Protestant participation in the six editions of the Premio Internazionale di Architettura Sacra Frate Sole (International Prize of Church Architecture Frate Sole) 1996-2016. A presence that has been increasing over the years, although it achieved its maximum recognition already in the first edition, when the prize went to the set of three chapels built by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. It is worth remembering the specific character of the International Prize —in each edition only the churches built in the previous decade can be submitted— and its peculiar contemporary and universal vocation to promote the Church architecture. The meaningful proposals, besides the rewarded ones, which came from the various Protestant denominations, will be analyzed to contextualize their peculiarities. The results obtained in these years mean to suggest the high average quality of these proposal is within the world architectural discourse.

The development of modern religious architecture had, from the beginning, an intense ecumenical character in several European countries. The building of spaces of worship seemed a good start to move towards the unity of Christians, since the request of principle that led to the archaeological foundation of these buildings was common between Catholic and Lutheran architects. In 1963 appeared the book «Iglesias nuevas en España» by the Dominican Arsenio Fernández Arenas. One of its chapters was entitled: «Are Protestant our modern churches?». Fernandez Arenas was a theologian who sought to overcome the most frequent readings on Catholic worship space, so the analysis of this text and the architectures to which it implicitly alludes offers a perfect opportunity to reflect on the important theme about the search for convergence between Christian confessions through the built form. Taking this argument as a starting point, this paper tries to explore the surprising influence of the chapel of the Otaniemi Polytechnic by Kaija and Heikki Siren in the Spanish Catholic churches during the second half of the last century. The discourse about divestment becomes crucial.

Robert Venturi has repeatedly noted in several interviews and conversations that his upbringing was as a Quaker. The Quakers (or the Society of Friends) have deep historic ties with the state of Pennsylvania and the city of Philadelphia and have had a significant presence in Venturi’s life. I propose to examine the inconspicuous and largely overlooked intersections between the Quaker aesthetics and beliefs and Venturi’s 1950 thesis project, a Chapel for the Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pennsylvania. «In the world, but not of it», Quakers have situated paradox at the core of their material culture: while the physical world was stripped of metaphysical content, craftsmanship was highly valued; while meetinghouses were never sacred spaces, they have always acted as depositories of historical and cultural genealogies. Through the lens of Quaker doctrine and aesthetics, I will examine the role of paradox in Venturi’s design for the Chapel for the Episcopal Academy.

The development of twentieth-century technologies provided numerous opportunities to further explore the architectural possibilities of the shinning glass-crystal symbolism. Associated with Dr. Schuller’s Protestant confession, Philip Johnson’s Crystal Cathedral (1975/80) embraced the renowned televangelist’s «If you can dream it, you can do it!» motto to relaunch the mystique of Bruno Taut’s Alpine Architecture under the perfect sun of Disney’s County. Under its mirrored skin, the elongated star-shaped building concealed an interior landscape plenty of Mediterranean light. It was also a true aerospace Traum aus Glas where the Expressionist Angst became a Californian fun. As supreme mass-media priests, client and architect transmuted the house of God into a magnificent television production studio from which they seduced the postmodernist soul of America. The Diocese of Orange has recently acquired this unique space and soon a makeover will transform the televangelist set into a Catholic temple, the Crystal Cathedral into Christ Cathedral.

Intensive efforts started in the last decades to get to know the Central and Eastern European and the Hungarian church architecture. In this historically depressed period (1920/1945/1989), church buildings were important identity forming potencies in the life of the Protestant communities newly emerged by the rearrangement of country's borders. The modern architectural principles, the structural and liturgical questions gave opportunity for continuous experimentations in the examined period, which resulted a centralizing tendency between the two world wars. Analysing the Protestant space organization, it is verifiable that these centralizing tendencies with identification character did not pull out from the de-emphasizing church architecture in spite of the historical–political events of World War II. The primary importance of the study is the holistic examination of the Protestant church architecture of the 20th century. The study shows the Protestant Church activity of the period through the two most significant denominations —the Calvinist and the Lutheran church architecture—, thereby providing a typological approach.

In 1964, a national project contest was organized for the Presbyterian National Church in the newly opened capital of Brazil, Brasilia. The winning project, carried out by the architects Ubirajara Motta Lima Ribeiro and Sergio A.B. Machado presents excellent architectural qualities, inventive composition and an intelligent rationalization of the constructive solution. If it had been built, it would undoubtedly be a masterpiece. The simplicity of the results is based on a limited range of constructive elements, which, however, could bring significant complexity to the architectural spaces, whose design adequately meets the symbolic load of a congregational and sacred space. This article intends to study this modern project a little more, digitally recovering its design and suggesting possible architectural and theoretical interpretations considering the different scales, from the urban condition to the details and tectonic aspects.

In this communication we propose to explore the thought of the theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965), who understands that arts in general and architecture in particular can stimulate the human spirit to see new angles of reality and existence. Modern architecture, in his opinion, could represent the Protestant religious character and constitute a real possibility of Protestant architectural creation, characterized by the community that meets to hear, thus achieving an honest expression of their faith.
In dialogue with the thought of Paul Tillich, our proposal is to analyze how some of these points are reflected in the project for the Presbyterian National Church, Brasilia, in 1965, developed by the architect Fabio Penteado. This is characterized by the predominance of the wide cover built in exposed concrete and a spatial organization that provides the experience of the encounter of the human being and the transcendent

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate in a critical way the influence of unitary thinking on the conception of Louis Kahn’s Church in Rochester. From the visit to the temple and the interaction with the parishioners, information is collected from Louis Kahn and the First Unitarian Church of Rochester.
Connections are established by setting forth the premises of the Unitarian Church on the revision of data collected from the architect in relation to the conception of the idea. The final project is studied in relation to these premises, which brings a triple reading that combines the intentions of Kahn with needs of the Unitarian Church and the evolution of the project.
Sketches, drawings and photographs show different phases of formalization of the concept. The architect provides a solution, which brings together cultural and technological translations that the client identifies as his own.

One of the courses of the neogothic expression in America was the genre religious, from the ends of the XIXth century up to good brought in the XXth century, with excellent catholic apostolic churches. This religious tie between the neogothic style and the catholic churches seemed that it was exclusive, that is to say, as if this morphology was the 'natural' expression of the Catholicism, for his symbolic remembranzas with that stage of glorious piety in that remote medieval period. These assertions seem to be invalidated on having identified many temples for the historical Protestantism —Baptists, Presbyterian, Methodists— so much in Mexico, as in the principal Latinoamerican cities, many of them, by the way, made by civil engineers, rather than by architects.

Baptism is the most shared sacrament among the various Christian confessions, but at the same time, it presents historically and geographically an almost unlimited diversification of liturgical formalizations and spatial solutions. These differences do not, however, correspond unequivocally with the differences between the different confessions, but they cross the liturgical architecture in a transconfessional way, according to cultural and social, not just ritual, declinations.
This communication proposes a reading of the debate on the place of baptism in the central decades of the twentieth century, comparing the most widespread baptismal practices between Protestant confessions and Catholic experiments conducted during the Second Vatican Council. We will discuss the hypothesis of whether Catholic baptismal practices of the 1960s and 1970s are debtors of the Protestant tradition. In short, the place of baptism can be considered —with the appearance of the various reforms, both in the sixteenth and twentieth centuries— an extraordinary catalyst for experiences, sensitive to the popular dimension of Christianity in all its denominations.

In the success with which the members of the Movement for the Renewal of Religious Art (MRAR, 1952/67), in a committed way, sought in community to build an alternative to the current architecture, sustained in the search for the Christian principle of artistic honesty, We try in this communication to find elective affinities with the thought of the theologians Paul Tillich (1886-1965) and Louis Bouyer (1913-2004). We associate these affinities with a common understanding of the meaning of the office of architecture, of the defense of an adult religion founded on the permanent updating of Christian sources, which never stopped sprouting, and in the search for a sense of life, rooted in the communitarian sense of the Christian vocation.

The passage from sacred to secular space confers on religious space a wider functionality that will allow the incorporation of an abstract and open spatial symbolism to different perceptions of the divine to see, feel or invoke God. According to Rudolf Otto, on the Protestant churches the architectonic expression of the numinous is made by three fundamental elements of representation: obscurity, silence and emptiness. As elements that conceptually oppose the concrete or definitive symbol, they acquire a universal meaning that modern architecture itself will incorporate as a process of artistic emancipation.
For a contemporary architect to design a religious space thus imposes an inevitable incursion into this Protestant matrix that appeals to the simplicity of forms, to the fidelity of construction and to the aesthetic experience as access to the transcendent. The mortuary chapels I am presenting takes up this contact with the modern constructive knowledge and with the return to the essential sacred place made of space, light and matter.

The temple The Divine Savior of the Methodist Church of Mexico (1901), was the regional center of that religious association, from where the missionaries and the new citizens required by the liberal republic left. Sui generis from its origin, this Church composed of descendants of English and Mexicans, built a unique temple of two levels: two similar sanctuaries for simultaneous use of their congregants.
Pachuca was a bastion of the Mexican liberal movement in the nineteenth century, supported by the Methodist congregation of El Divino Salvador and its schools, whose location is significant, by sharing the most notable public space in the city with the main Roman Catholic temple. From this congregation and its schools have emerged new temples and countless characters, prominent builders of the new society of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The strongly symbolic central plan has been used in the history of Christian architecture for certain types of spaces, especially those with a baptismal or funerary meaning. In the first half of the 20th century, the increasing appreciation of the assembly oriented towards centralized proposals in the Protestant world (Taut, Hablik, Bartning) and also in the Catholic area (Böhm, Schwarz).
In this paper we will analyze the theoretical proposals of Otto Bartning (Vom Neuen Kirchbau, 1919) and Rudolf Schwarz (Von Bau der Kirche, 1937) and their influence on contemporary constructions, as well as the approach of the central plan (Saarinen, Niemeyer, Candela, Chavez de la Mora, Botta, Gibberd) and the central provision of the assembly (Neocatechumenal aesthetic, Communio-Räume) as a proposal of renovation for the religious architecture of the twentieth century.

Mass art par excellence, essentially reproductive and temporary, cinema was present in all corners of modern city. If any architecture could be fully identified with the spirit of modernity, it would be its movie theaters, displaced in the mid-twentieth century by television and other phenomena that, especially in neighborhoods, caused their demolition or transformation into garages, warehouses, shops and evangelic temples. This work is focused in that last and singular form of occupation to establish two dimensions of the spreading of popular worship in Latin American cities (in Caracas, Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile as study cases) conserving attributes of which perhaps have been the only academic architectures builded in its suburbs and slums. The contribution made by present-day Christianity makes possible to point out its importance, even though they are —as facts of modernity— doomed to dissolve.

When one studies the Protestant Reformation, one notices the emergence of four traditions that still manifest themselves in the western world: Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican and Anabaptist. This study will consider an important element of the Calvinist tradition (also identified as Reformed or Presbyterian): the preaching. It will take place examining the presbytery or furniture in the temples of the oldest Presbyterian churches in the city of Santiago, focusing specifically on the one located in the street Santo Domingo, which hosts the congregation of the First Presbyterian Church of Santiago de Chile. It was an Anglican temple that was purchased by the reformed of the capital. The other temples always belonged to the Presbyterian churches. Through these places of worship, we aim to point out both nuances of the theology practiced by Presbyterians in Chile as well as possible influences of other traditions in the liturgy.

Throughout this article, we are looking at the history of the Reformation, the history of the first evangelical immigrants in Brazil, since 1824, and the historical formation of the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil (IECLB) to understand the place of worship of some Evangelical Lutheran communities. Also, the investigation of some of the reasons that led to the current architectural conformation of the churches present in the diverse communities of the same. This will be analyzed through three different examples. Finally, there is the question of the relationship between architecture and theology in the future of the church, questioning the relationship between the place of worship and the theology of the church.

The article begins by raising the question of Protestant influence in contemporary Catholic religious architecture, addressed in some territorial areas, such as Spanish, even in an academic way, and in publications that have been related to the design of churches at that time, and for study and research on this topic. From this point of departure, the influences received by contemporary religious architecture from the Protestant perspective are analyzed, both from the theological point of view and from the merely architectural and constructive, as well as the role played by other relevant Central European influences. Finally the article develops the accent contributed by the Catholic confession to the contemporary religious architecture from the influences of both the Liturgical Movement and later by the Second Vatican Council, emphasizing the dialogue of these ones with the proposals also shared by the Reformation.

When designing any sacred building, it is not enough to review the relevant literature, but it is necessary to observe the ritual of life, even when one does not share a faith. Therefore, the Community Temples Workshop considered the design of temples and spaces of socialization for the Lutheran, Muslim and Masonic communities, in the context of an architectural career within a secular university, which has been passed on through generations based on a testament stating that religion would not be attached to its classrooms.
It was an experience in which communities served as leaders with the power to explore their real opportunities for building, while students agreed to observe and design spaces for a ritual they did not practice. Everything was done within an environment detached from proselytizing, one that was culturally diverse and welcomed differences in faith, accepting that the common challenge of all creeds is to design a space that steps back from the mundane in order to cherish the most sacred rituals of community life.

Formal and spatial diversity; the absence of clearly established typologies; the strong contextual character of places and cultures, among other aspects, make it difficult to identify a Protestant architecture in the singular. It is more correct to speak of Protestant architectures in the plural, due to their progressive historical reconfiguration and their different contemporary expressions. And to understand the architecture of contemporary Protestant worship buildings, as well as their probable future, we will examine eight unique stages of their configuration, extracting from each one the key elements of their reconfiguration.

How do we define what is sacred architecture? People of all ages are turning away from organized religion, and looking for a more genuine, personal experience of the spiritual. In considering sacred architecture, a distinction is whether architecture itself is sacred or that architecture is an instrument that calls forth the sacred. Distinctions should be drawn between situational versus substantive sacred space. A divine presence is believed to reside in substantive sacred space. In situational, anyplace can be sacred depending on the presence, location, and actions of human beings, often acting in community.
Edward Anders Sovik was one of the most influential architects in the design of modern churches in the US. Active from the mid-20th-century through the 1970s, Sovik designed mostly Protestant churches and wrote extensively about church design and its liturgical underpinnings. Sovik believed that early Christians perceived themselves as a community of faith unattached to any place. His skepticism about the sacredness of buildings and objects sits squarely within Protestant theology. His religious architecture offers a good model for today, as the definition of sacred architecture is changing. Sovik’s emphasis on the secular and the sacred is prescient regarding the current state of religion and spirituality, and became the basis of a recent graduate design studio at Catholic University of America.