Sacred Modernity (in English and German)
Author: Jamie Mcgregor Smith
Publisher: Hatje Cantz, Germany
Searching for the Postmod Ineffable: Finding All-too-effable Answers
by John Kendall Hawkins
World War I, the war to end all wars, as HG Wells called it, described that way because of the universal brutality and unbridled carnage meted out on all sides, ended with a desperate hedge and plea that the establishment of a League of Nations would somehow ward off future cross-border incursions by nation-states -- line-crossings that inevitably led to annihilative impulses. It didn't work. The menace and pure evil produced during WWII, in the guise of Nazis and Fascists, and culminating in the Good Guys (US) exploding the first nukes, mass-killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, produced an even more desperate United Nations. It, too, has proven to be largely toothless, as it is controlled by a security council stacked with nuclear enemies, all of them Cold War posturing.
Post WW2 ushered in the postmodern desire to bring about a revaluation of all values, as Nietzsche put it. This revolution in world-viewing began in the circles of culture and the humanities -- art, literature, history, philosophy, human geography and architecture, among the many streams of thought, each nuanced like Heraclitus's proverbial poly-river. Still, the mood after the second war was somber and serious -- at least, in Europe. Architectural structures for the masses went up that reflected sobriety at the scene of so much destruction of civilization and society. Albert Speer's neoclassical structures no longer framed the emergence of a 1000 year reich, but instead became emblems of failed fascism, gray, drab, and the symbols of the Twilight of the Idols.
In architecture, not only public buildings underwent analysis and reframing, but houses of worship, too, began to adapt to the new mood and sedated vision of the holy. In Sacred Modernity, author and photographer Jamie Mcgregor Smith, along with essayists Ivica Brni? and Johnathan Meades, convene in the pages of the book to address the subject matter of the subtitle: The Holy Embrace of Modernist Architecture. In the postwar, postmod era what are the disputes over form and function in the public space and how are they resolved? In his opening chapter, In Search of the Ineffable, Smith writes of the economic necessity on postwar Europe and its influence on design:
So how did we get from Neo-gothic towers and Romanesque columns to concrete cuboids? The cultural revolution that followed the second world war championed modern architects like Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier. Their machine age aesthetic removed the symbology of the past and embraced the clean utility of contemporary materials. The church is fashion conscious through necessity, and the fashion of the day was concrete modernism. Post-war Europe was poor and conveniently, concrete was cheap.
Churches were in self-flagellation mode. They had had little moral impact on preventing the carnage that overtaken our species in the first half of the 20th century. Plus, in keeping with postmodern paeans to democracy, cement will do just fine. But holy smoke, the structures seem so bleak and Orwellian.
Smith is quick to acknowledge the new look and to question whether its form holds up to the traditional function of sacred space. The shock of the new is one thing, I tell myself, but this seems ridiculous to many, including myself, who grew up with Catholic instincts. Smith writes,
Modern, brutalist architecture is not without its critiques. Often reviled as concrete monstrosities, many have fallen foul to a populist's hammer. Some of its churches are joyfully antagonistic, others coldly minimalistic. Some resemble womb-like military or cold war bunkers, others, bright spaceship interiors reminiscent of mid-century science fiction. These objects just as well reflect the prevailing zeitgeist of their era as they do the traditional Christian message.
Smith appears to be backing the notions that the asymmetrical nonsense is at least an honest appraisal of the state of the species. I have to stop and consider that and not be a crybaby and wax sentimental. I mean, what kind of Nietzschean am I to carry on so and thusly?
Still, even a more accommodating Smith seems to have a moment of pause in his parsing of the new guard, trotting in heavyweight thinker Albert Einstein, world heavyweight champion of relativity, to moon on about the sacred. Smith has Einstein tell us:
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science"To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms-- this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of true religiousness.
But would Einstein appreciate this bunker mentality architecture?
The answer may lie in the transformations of the interior of sacred structures in the modern era. There are new strengths, new radii of delineations, new tensions, new functionality, and new reasons to convene. The essays of architects Ivica Brni? and Johnathan Meades, included in the book, seem to trust the new vision of the interiority of Soul after the tussle of human destructiveness. In his essay, Gravity and Grace, Brni? writes,
For example, in the context of the Catholic Church at the time of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), this discourse yielded a veritable architectural eruption, followed by the admission that the arts are a mystagogical source reflecting God's beauty"Subsequently, churches came into being which are at once apophatic and seeking to come closer to God in the form of techne. In this context, techne can be understood as an after-effect of the Creation.
An after-effect of the Creation? And here I was seeing it as an after-effect of Hiroshima. Damn. And Meades writes that far from suggesting that the Church folded to pressures of modernism, the new form actually suggested a return to its ecclesiastical roots. He writes,
The second Vatican council of the early '60s responded to the Liturgical Movement - which was by then a century old, and which advocated a return to the forms of worship supposedly used by the early, primitive church. It decreed that all that was not essential (whatever that meant) was to be eliminated from new places of worship and the hierarchical division of clergy from congregation was to be quashed.
This, too, seems to be a true reflection of the postwar zeitgeist: a return to the primitive, and a further need to reflect on our collective so-called historical and spiritual progress.
It's primitivism seen in a new light, lots of light.
Sacred Modernity, written in both English and German, contains 139 photos of modern churches. The writing and the images add up to thoughtful excursions into transformations of sacred spaces and a consideration of how form and function, in the context of the sacred and the profane, change over time, and why.
About a year before he died, HG Wells published his last book, Mind at the End of Its Tether. At 52 pages, it was his shortest work by far, and it reads like the dimming light of genius down on the human project. It came out before the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki emphatically belying all future notions of Utopias and Historical Progress. Wells writes,
We are stuck since then at Zero Sum psychologizing and the relativist degeneration of the human spirit. Many of the structures featured in Sacred Modernity reflect the barren and evacuated soul of humanity, the new community of benumbed strangers; you can almost understand why architect Frank Gehry would posit edifices that look like some force came along and punched his art in the face. It's a long fall from the ecstatic grace of the Gothic to this place in time and space of poured cement and awelessness.Man must go steeply up or down and the odds seem to be all in favour of his going down and out. If he goes up, then so great is the adaptation demanded of him that he must cease to be a man. Ordinary man is at the end of his tether. Only a small, highly adaptable minority of the species can possibly survive. The rest will not trouble about it, finding such opiates and consolations as they have a mind for.
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