The Annandale Spire

If you walk around an Australian city you'll notice the very fine public buildings - town halls, universities, churches - that were built in the later 1800s.

Here's an example: the Hunter Baillie Memorial Presbyterian Church in the Sydney suburb of Annandale. It was commissioned by Mrs Helen Hay Mackie Baillie in memory of her husband and completed in 1889. It has the tallest church spire in New South Wales.

Here's the spire rising in the distance:

A closer view:

A detailed view:

Why design a cathedral like this?

Neviges is a little town in Germany. It has been visited by pilgrims since the late 1600s; in 1963 180,000 people made a pilgrimage there.

1963 was also the year that a design was to be selected for the new pilgrimage cathedral at Neviges. The designs most favoured by the jury were of the "hall church" type inspired by the functional modernism of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Chicago chapel:

Chapel of St Savior, Chicago
 

This style was reflected in many of the designs; roughly half of the competition participants "presented an isolated box with a square plan". You can see similar Catholic churches scattered throughout Melbourne's suburbs. The term "hall church" is a good one, as they often give you the sense that you are visiting a community hall rather than a church. Although a lot of these churches were built from the 1960s to 90s, they are based on a Chicago model built in 1949, from architectural ideas developed in the 1920s.

But the Archbishop rejected the jury's recommendations to build in this style. The Archbishop felt that the proposed designs lacked anything to link the building to its role as a church of pilgrimage.

In 1964 the Archbishop decided on a design by the German architect Gottfried Böhm:

Neviges Mariendom

 

Is the Böhm design really all that much better? The hall churches are cool and ordinary, but Böhm's design is chaotic and random in its exterior and coldly massive (cavernous) in the interior.

I'm tempted to ask here: which design would you have gone for if you had been the Archbishop? Would you have taken the box or the rocky outcrop?

Sometimes when you wonder why certain decisions were made in the twentieth century it's because people opted for what they thought was the least bad option. But it's a pity to be limited in this way.

And we shouldn't underestimate how far back modernism in the arts goes. In terms of church architecture, things seemed to change radically from about the 1920s onwards.

Finally, here is another of Gottfried Böhm's churches, this time from Cologne:

Is that really an improvement on traditional church architecture? (It looks a bit like a factory building to me.)

Two fine churches

Here are some pictures of two American churches, one Catholic and the other Presbyterian. It's not hard to pick which is which - the Catholic church is the more ornate. Both churches are beautiful and demonstrate what American culture was capable of.

I'll start with the Catholic church, namely the St Francis de Sales Oratory in St Louis. It is impressive from the outside with a soaring spire:



St Francis de Sales Oratory

 

Here is the altar:

The other church, the Fourth Presbyterian, is in Chicago. It has a courtyard:

The interior is very fine (the first photo looks best if you click to expand it):

It was not that long ago that such impressive church architecture was being created in America. The St Francis Oratory was completed in 1908; the Fourth Presbyterian in 1914.

Buildings as expressions of world views

Is it really some kind of accident that a university chose this as one of its campus buildings?

That's a building at the University of California as reported here at The Thinking Housewife. I can't help but think that this type of architecture is an expression of a modernist mindset, one that is oriented to the technical and the functional. But why be oriented this way?

Jim Kalb in his book The Tyranny of Liberalism writes that:

Since 1945, Western public life has been based on the practical supremacy of economics and the principle that social order exists to get men what they want rather than to express an essence or ideal.
 

So if you aren't oriented to, say, an ideal of beauty or to an expression of man's soul or essence, then perhaps you'll think more in terms of purpose or function. And that's how a campus architect explained the building at the University of California. As reported at The Thinking Housewife, that architect thought that the building was an attempt to represent the purpose of the curriculum, which has a biotechnology focus:

...he impartially ascribed the ugliness to seemingly neutral causes. One of these was the premise that the architecture should reflect one of the main emphases of the curriculum: biotechnology.
 

Not all modernist architecture is as ugly as the building in the photo. It's possible to build for function and have a building with, for instance, sleek, geometrical lines. But I wonder if modernist architecture went through a phase when the aim was not only to build for function, but to assert the modernist aesthetic strongly against the traditional one: hence, a more aggressive ugliness in design.

Finally, I thought I'd include a few photos of some of the traditional architecture at the University of Melbourne, by way of contrast:

If you look at the Melbourne buildings and then the California one, you get a sense of how cold and soulless the modernist architecture is. And as I've tried to explain, I don't think that's an accidental outcome, as the modernist mindset isn't oriented to a consideration like man's soul - the focus is instead more technocratic.

Gloucester Cathedral

The foundation stone of Gloucester Cathedral was laid in the eleventh century. It's an ancient and beautiful piece of architecture:



From a distance

 

The exterior

 

An interior view



The cloisters

What was the building?

Well, my clever readers figured it out. The mystery building I posted a photo of is a church in Austria commonly called the Wotruba Church after the architect who designed it.

Here it is:

Oddly, it is said that Wotruba was inspired to design the church by a visit to Chartres Cathedral:

I can't help but think that those who designed Chartres Cathedral had a different underlying understanding of things than Fritz Wotruba.

Chartres represents an attempt to create something beautiful in an ordered universe reaching upward toward the heavens; Wotruba might well have attempted to capture the "essence of Europe" but he created a church which represents a more random and chaotic universe.

Perhaps I've misunderstood what Wotruba was trying to achieve - it's difficult to determine as I couldn't find a detailed explanation of his theory of architecture.

What is this building?

Here's a reader quiz. Look at the pictures of the building below and guess what the building is, i.e. what the building is used for.

Marburg

I was browsing the internet and came across an historic town in Germany I'd never heard of called Marburg.

Its existence was first recorded in 1140. In 1228 a noblewoman moved there and dedicated her life to caring for the sick. She was later canonised as St Elisabeth. The Teutonic Knights built a church in her honour, the Elisabethkirche, which is an early example of Gothic religious architecture in Germany.

Here is the interior of the church:

Marburg's medieval architecture has managed to survive over the centuries:

The Grimm brothers went to university in Marburg and collected some of their stories from the region.

Truro Cathedral

Here is an achievement worth noting. Truro is a town in Cornwall, England, with a population of only 21,000. But it boasts a magnificent cathedral.

So is this something created in the distant past? In fact, the cathedral was begun in 1880 and completed in 1910. So only about a century ago the English were still adding such magnificent buildings to their nation's heritage.

The architect responsible was John Loughborough Pearson.

Pearson designed many churches including St Augustine's in London, the interior of which is shown below:

I wasn't able to find a good photo of the interior of Truro Cathedral, but you get an idea of how fine it is from the following YouTube clip:

Feeling connected to your suburb is now a sin?



Rush at the station

Camberwell is one of the nicer historic garden suburbs of Melbourne. It is also also the boyhood suburb of comic Barry Humphries and the home of actor Geoffrey Rush. Both Rush and Humphries have taken part in movements to protect the heritage of the suburb from overdevelopment, including proposals to build a nine storey car park and office block over the historic railway station (they lost).

Their efforts to protect the heritage of Camberwell have drawn fire from a leading architect, Professor Kim Dovey. According to Dovey, people who resist modernity are ... well, racists and whatnot:

Melbourne University academic Kim Dovey has also accused some residents of trying to defend their patch from ethnic and class differences.

"There's an element of 'well, we're not racist, we welcome different kinds of people as long as they behave exactly the same as we always have," Prof Dovey said yesterday...

Prof Dovey said Rush had dramatised the issue by making people feel if they accepted change "they would be giving up something of themselves".

So bad luck if you feel attached to your lovely, green, historic suburb. According to Professor Dovey you're not allowed to try to conserve it for yourself or your children. If you do try, you're just resisting modernisation/globalisation and must be a racist. And Professor Dovey gets even more Orwellian. You're not even allowed to think, as your suburb gets transformed, that you're giving up something of yourself - that too is a forbidden thought.

A sentimental victory

I found a book showcasing my home town, Melbourne, in a second-hand bookshop on the weekend.

Published in 1968 it is full of glorious photos of the Victorian era architecture of the inner suburbs, with Carlton featuring strongly.

So I was taken aback when I read the text accompanying the photos. The authors described the inner suburbs as follows,

In districts eventually destined for rebuilding the great majority of present-day residents still live in time-expired houses made habitable and, indeed, often presentable by renovation.

The argument that inner suburban areas must be rebuilt to provide residential accommodation for a much greater proportion of the population is patently true. The metropolitan sprawl cannot go on much longer ...

Central Melbourne - the city of the first hundred years is vanishing. It had much that was quaint and charming, but it was uneconomic and therefore an anachronism. Sentiment may yet preserve some of its buildings as curiosities, but they will never again much influence its atmosphere.

Such a dry economic rationalism! The love of place and heritage and gracious architecture is recognised only as sentimentality. The future belongs, it is claimed, to the more impersonal, objective requirements of scientific planning.

And initially history seemed to prove the authors right. A small part of Carlton was, indeed, demolished and replaced with modern, high-rise Housing Commission towers.

But "sentiment" was not so easily vanquished. Today, the Housing Commission area is considered a blot on the landscape, and the old Victorian terraces of the inner suburbs have soared in value. There are still many sections of the inner suburbs where the historic atmosphere has been largely preserved.

Ironically, it is the extraordinarily dry and technocratic views of the authors which now seem quaintly anachronistic rather than the Victorian terraces.

It's good to reflect that something relating more to the soul has proved stronger than an empty rationalism. I have often walked such inner suburban streets and felt connected to the historic character, and felt pride in what my own ancestors created, and enjoyed the pre-modern architectural design, with its emphasis on elegance and charm.

It seems I was not alone in valuing such things.

Selfish, conservative & inward looking?

One good thing that's happened in Melbourne in recent years is a move away from modernist styles of housing. There's been a revival in heritage styles in architecture, and the quality of these homes is sometimes very high.

Charm has made a comeback!

But the revival of heritage styles doesn't have everyone's approval. As an article in today's Age puts it,

Architects loathe these developments, just about as much as people like them.

Patrick Kennedy is one such architect who is not amused by the fashion for heritage style homes. He complains that,

These houses now reflect the same view as our political climate -
selfish, conservative and inward looking.

Nor is fellow architect Norman Day impressed by the popularity of heritage styles. He believes that such houses are in fashion because,

people are scared. They no longer see houses as places to live - they are investments, they are commodities.

Unfortunately, it seems as if some architects are so committed to modernism that they fail to understand how most people see things.

A lot of us have a greater emotional response to heritage style homes because they connect us to our history and cultural identity and because such styles are generally less severe than the stripped down geometric styles typical of modernist architecture.

Modernist homes often look like offices. Sometimes they are stylish but cold. At other times they are just plain brutally ugly.

Norman Day is wrong. People do see houses as places to live, which is exactly why they have been choosing houses with some traditional homely charm, rather than the more severe modern styles. This may be, as Patrick Kennedy claims, a symptom of conservatism, but it is not selfish and nor is it inward looking.

It has helped to make the newer outer suburban estates more attractive places to live.

(Here's one example of the newer style of housing. I don't like the protruding garage, but the rest of the house is a nice example of a Melbourne heritage style.)

Angry architects attack public

When I was a boy I spent many happy hours at the St Kilda pier, fishing for mullet and garfish. I'm therefore one of those people who grew to love the distinctive, historic kiosk at the end of the pier.

The bad news is that the kiosk, a St Kilda landmark, burnt down last year. The good news is that Parks Victoria has decided to rebuild it following its original exterior design (but with a modernised interior).

A simple decision? Not according to the Melbourne architectural profession. In an article in yesterday's Age, one "urban design consultant" labelled the decision as "pathetic and tragic" and unsuitable for a "socially progressive" community.

An architectural academic went further and said the decision was a "retreat from the real world" which showed "some sort of serious psychological problem on the part of the people who want to have irrelevant styles".

A letter writer in today's Age has eloquently replied to these architectural modernists. He writes:

How fascinating that a public requiring beauty, simplicity, charm and a sense of history from their city's buildings and structures should be accused of having "some sort of serious psychological problem.

Professor Miles Lewis - no doubt an expert in mental health - should perhaps consider that the right of his profession to use our city as a billboard upon which to promote abstract theories of geometric design to one another does not outweigh the the general population's right to go about their daily existence in a landscape that sustains a sense of local identity, tradition and pride of place.

Well put, and congratulations also to Parks Victoria for standing by local residents and preserving a much loved piece of St Kilda's heritage.