THE HEAVENLY CITY, THE EARTHLY CITY AND THE PARISH CHURCH

The Church Building as Sacramental Sign and Neighborhood Center

A Lecture By: Philip Bess

Building the Church for 2010 / October 31, 2002
The Liturgical Institute, Mundelein, Illinois

 
OVERVIEW

Please note that section headings are hyperlinks.

I) INTRODUCTION

1. General themes:
   • Sacramental sensibility: the Sacred and the Mundane
   • The Church in the City / The Church as a City
   • The church building: inside significance / outside significance
   • The church building as a sacrament of the Paschal Mystery

2. Topics for consideration:
   • Cities and the Good Life
   • Urban Form 101
   • Church Form: Liturgy and the Logic of Architecture
   • Neighborhood Center / Heavenly Witness: some practical suggestions

 
II) CITIES AND THE GOOD LIFE

1. Urbanism: a central metaphor and theme of historic Christianity

2. An intellectual tradition originating with Aristotle, paradigmatically articulated by Augustine

3. Christians are members of two cities, overlapping and mixed: the City of Man and the City of God

4. Suburban sprawl as a crisis of architecture and urbanism: the physical form of an “impossible culture”
   

 
III) URBAN FORM 101

1. The neighborhood as the fundamental unit of urban design

2. Pre-1945 traditional urban neighborhoods vs. post-1945 automobile suburbs

3. The city as inter-related and overlapping environmental, economic, moral and formal orders

4. Characteristics of traditional urban neighborhoods*
   • Blocks, streets, squares / plazas
   • Civic foreground buildings / Private background buildings
   • Hierarchies of (through) streets: Boulevard, Avenue, Street, Lane
   • Variety of housing types, often in same block
   • Pedestrian proximity of various activities
   • Parks for passive and active recreation
   • Prominent sites for civic (including religious) buildings

 
IV) CHURCH FORM: LITURGY AND THE LOGIC OF ARCHITECTURE

1. Characteristics of sacred architecture
   • a recognizable verticality
   • a concern for light
   • a care for craft, durability, and material particularity
   • the conscious use of mathematics and geometry as formal ordering devices
   • a compositional and artistic unity; and
   • a sense of hierarchy

2. Verticality: its symbolic power grounded in our anthropological condition
3. Unity: a constituent element of Beauty
   • Beauty as craftsmanship, unity, harmony, clarity (Aquinas)
   • Beauty as "the harmonious relationship between the parts and the whole such that nothing could be added, subtracted, or altered but for the worse” (Alberti)

4. Paradigmatic church forms: the centralized plan, the basilican plan
   • The axis mundi

5. The historic "mis-fit" of architecture and the liturgy
   • in the centralized plan
   • in the basilican plan
   • in the cruciform plan
   • in the post-conciliar church building

6. The first duty of the church building: an image of the Church as a whole
   • Paschal Mystery provides the context for the liturgy and not vice-versa

7. The legitimate plurality of church form and style, referenced to Trinity and Incarnation:
   • Centralized plan: unity, stasis, perfection
   • Basilican plan: dynamism of Nature and History moving toward fulfillment in God
   • Cruciform plan: intersection of sacred and mundane at the axis mundi; the Church as Body
   • Elliptical plan: the dual foci of Word and Eucharist in the Catholic liturgy
   • Classicism as celebration of the Incarnation
   • Gothic: verticality and light as emblems of the Holy Spirit
   • Local vernaculars and the exuberance of Divine creation
   • Monastic austerity: becoming poor, for Christ’s sake
   • Modern abstraction and functionalism? Not now…

8. The immediate future? Self-limitation, with cruciform plan as favored typology:
   • making churches that "look like" churches
   • "procession" as a central metaphor
   • "Body" as a central metaphor
   • best "fit" between building form and post-conciliar ecclesiology, sacramental theology, and liturgy
   • Precedents as diagrams: Antwerp, Paris, Florence, Rome, Cooperstown

9. "Style" and the Culture of Architecture

 
V) NEIGHBORHOOD CENTER / HEAVENLY WITNESS: practical suggestions

1. A Tale of Two Parishes
2. The London Residential Square as Model for Catholic promotion of urbanism
3. “The Makers”

 
TEN PRINCIPLES OF GOOD URBAN NEIGHBORHOOD DESIGN

Print Version