Notre Dame's neo-classicists yearn to build grand old churches

National Catholic Reporter, April 21, 2000 by MICHAEL E. DeSANCTIS

Stroik, Smith deplore post-Vatican II church buildings as inconsequential

Not long ago the "Living Arts" section of The New York Times featured a report on America's "New Classicists," a group of architects in their 30s and 40s who have taken to building in the style of ancient Greece and Rome. Bright and ambitious, what apparently sets this "New Bunch of Old Fogies" apart from other recyclers of architectural fashion is the high seriousness with which they take themselves and a reputation among critics for being either blatant opportunists or the stodgiest of antiquarians, all semblance of youthful vigor aside.

Why, observers ask, at a moment when the rest of the architectural community is anxiously awaiting the challenges and opportunities of the new millennium, should these designers want to revisit the building conventions of the distant past? Have they really discovered in the sober formality of classical temple fronts or the mathematically proportioned components of so many loggias, bathhouses and forensic halls something applicable to the needs of our time, or are they just making the most of a hot nostalgia market?

Of little surprise to anyone monitoring the ongoing debate over American Catholic church architecture was the appearance in the Times' report of professors Duncan Stroik and Thomas Gordon Smith of the University of Notre Dame's School of Architecture. Recently the pair has emerged as champions of classical design as well as outspoken critics of the direction Catholic church building has taken in the decades since Vatican II.

Stroik, who at 38 enjoys a kind of wunderkind status in certain religious and architectural circles, gained wide attention early in his career by building his family's South Bend, Ind., home in the manner of a Renaissance villa (his so-called "Villa Indiana"). Smith's reputation developed during a stint as director of the architecture program at Notre Dame, for which he assembled a cadre of faculty and students intent upon making the school ground zero of New Classicism.

Both advocate an approach to design that rejects modern architecture's emphasis on novelty in favor of an inviolable canon of classical propriety. ("Rote is radical," Smith has observed, adding that Notre Dame architecture students are expected not simply to master established design formulas but to apply the logic of classical problem solving to present day situations.) Both are also devout Catholics who, with the zeal of Latin Mass enthusiasts, hope to overturn a half-century of experimentation with liturgy's physical setting by re-popularizing the look and feel of buildings erected, say, by the Emperor Constantine, the Medici popes, the bishops of the Council of Trent or the first Jesuit communities.

Enough of "prayer barns" and "concrete boxes" masquerading as places of divine worship, the Notre Dame classicists have insisted in published statements; the Catholic faithful are weary of church buildings in the modern vernacular and eager to cast their architecture again in the elevated Greco-Latinate forms that were once the glory of the church of Rome.

What Stroik and Smith are proposing is not simply a "preservationist" initiative concerned with maintaining existing churches in the classical style. Instead, they envision a generation of entirely new places of Catholic worship built along classical lines that will set the church again on a proper liturgical-architectural path.

To Stroik, post-Vatican II architectural practice has been an "unmitigated disaster," in part because of the council's own willingness to admit modern modes of expression into the once-hermetic realm of sacred art. In his much-reproduced essay, "Modernist Church Architecture," he argues that by adopting the preferred style of mid-20th-century European and American architects, the church "undercut its own theological agenda."

That agenda, as Stroik sees it, is to preserve the gospel message by means of logic, order and historical continuity -- the very values upon which classical architecture is founded. "Just as to do Catholic theology means to learn from the past," he writes in his equally popular "Ten Myths of Contemporary Church Architecture," essay, "so to design Catholic architecture is to be inspired and even [to] quote from the tradition and the time-tested expressions of church architecture."

From this perspective, modern architecture fails the church because it indulges too easily in gestures of disorder and caprice; it raises too many questions, breaks too many rules and diverges too far from the artistic conventions underpinning the faith of average believers. "People generally agree as to whether or not particular places elicit a sensation of sacredness," suggests Thomas Gordon Smith, who attributes his spiritual-artistic awakening as a classicist to scholarly studies in Rome as well as a period of experimentation with Episcopalianism.

Like Stroik, Smith considers the forms employed by modern architects too inconsequential to bear the weight of religious meaning. "In the 1960s," he laments in a recent essay, "the church tentatively got on the bandwagon of abstract modernism.... [And this] capitulation of Mies van der Rohe's dictum, `Less is more,' [has] led to an iconoclastic movement, rationalized by calls in the [liturgical] documents themselves for `noble simplicity.'"