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The Church Building as Sacramental Sign and Neighborhood Center A Lecture By: Philip Bess Permit me to return to the subject of the neighborhood parish church as both identifiable community center and witness to the Heavenly City. In order to do both these things, Catholics (and all Christians) must learn again not only to be good patrons of architecture, but perhaps even before that to be good patrons of urbanism. Urbanism is the default context that allows good architecture to transcend itself; the context that gives most good architecture its pedagogical and evangelical force; but heralding the City of God is only made more difficult by acquiescing in the Suburb of Man. [SLIDE 73] You’ve just heard some of my suggestions for how to think about the church building itself. What about the church building’s immediate context? Unfortunately, Built of Living Stones, its virtues notwithstanding, is again virtually silent about the public presence of the church in its environment, or of its historic reciprocal relationship to public space. It is not the church on the public square but rather the church in the parking lot that is the paradigm for church architecture today. So what can we as Catholics do about that? Let me conclude my remarks this afternoon with a practical suggestion. Let’s start by comparing two good-sized and by certain standards thriving Catholic churches. [SLIDES 74, 75, 76] The first is in west suburban Chicago, on a site just under 10 acres, that is entirely occupied by the parish church building, a rambling single-story parish elementary school, a large surface parking lot, and---initially---a retention pond required for the water run-off created by the parking lot. (The pond has subsequently been attached to storm sewers and drained, and now serves as a depressed, i.e., below-grade, athletic field.) This programmatic arrangement isn’t necessarily what the architect wanted, incidentally; but it’s what the parish asked for and, more importantly, what the suburban zoning either required or allowed. [SLIDE 77] Compare, by way of contrast, my parish church and its associated elementary school, which are located on two adjacent Chicago city blocks, of which the total area (i.e., of the two city blocks) is also ten acres. The difference is that on these ten acres in the city, in addition to the church and the school, there are over 150 on street and off street public parking spaces, as well as more than a dozen businesses and over 100 dwelling units, in buildings predominantly two and three stories tall. My urban parish church is a genuine neighborhood center, easily accessible by both car and foot from its dense urban surroundings. In contrast, the suburban parish church lacks a sufficiently dense and pedestrian-accessible adjacent neighborhood of which to be the center. Consider now an alternative form of suburban development, but one with interesting implications for urbanization. [SLIDE 78] Its precedent is the development in the 17th and 18th centuries of the London residential square. Beginning in 17th century London, which at the time was a dense but still small city, aristocratic estate-holders would contract with a developer to build on a 6-10 acre parcel of land a square surrounded by housing, and in a few cases fronted by a parish church. This happened about the outskirts of London for a period of about 200 years. Small residential square developments (some 350-400 of them) proliferated over the landscape; eventually housing filled in between the squares; and what you ended up with is modern day London, a world class city noteworthy for its many beautiful albeit casually distributed residential squares. Savannah, Georgia is a more regularized but no less beautiful contemporaneous colonial American variation on that pattern of development, and directly indebted to it. [SLIDES 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86] So here’s my proposition: When parishes build today, why couldn’t they play a part analogous to the London aristocrat? Instead of building a church and a parking lot on their 6-10 suburban acres, why not build a church, a public (not private) square, perhaps a school, and the beginnings of a mixed-use neighborhood? Why couldn’t a parish church partner with a developer and use some of the proceeds from the development of its property to pay for part of the construction of its church building(s)? Why couldn’t churches use this strategy to begin to integrate affordable housing and commercial buildings into suburbia as part of mixed-use neighborhoods? And who’s to say that an initially random proliferation of such developments across suburbia---once the exemplary pattern was established---over time might not become, as it did in London, the very physical and spiritual centers so pointedly lacking in contemporary suburbia? [SLIDE 87] / Bess’s 10 acre proposal This proposition, of course, presumes that contemporary Christians have at hand or can develop the aesthetic and spiritual resources---not least the desire---needed to promote good cities; and this may be assuming a lot, at least at the present time. Nevertheless, the challenge we face today is the same challenge Catholics always face: to be true to our calling to celebrate, witness to, and foreshadow the coming City of God. How we might approach this task---focusing upon the work that is before us, attentive to the things around us, not forgetting the end that awaits us---is suggested to us by Dorothy L. Sayers, an Anglo-Catholic who “got” the Catholic sacramental sensibility; and so I would like to conclude with a poem she wrote as the preface to her novel about the emperor Constantine, a poem she entitled “The Makers,” and a poem which is especially attentive to the necessity of attending to mundane things:
Thank you very much…. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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