W11: Saint Patrick & Saint Joseph; Ugly Ducklings
Saint Patrick's Day is March 17 & Saint Joseph's Day is March 19
For this story, we have two saints who seem to have had practically nothing to do with religious buildings in their own time, although Joseph is the patron saint of carpenters and must have spent his life messing about on building sites. Patrick was my first choice because he is so popular, as is the cathedral named after him in New York City. In his own time (c. 385-461), Patrick probably spent more time out of doors than in buildings. He did a lot of camping and sailing as he moved around the coast of Ireland converting people to Christianity (see Saint Brigid, Week 5). If there was any building type associated with Patrick, it would have been the modest stone tent-shaped shrines that were erected at the burial sites of early Irish Christian saints. And frankly, I would prefer to discuss tents than the nineteenth-century re-heated Gothic architecture that marks St. Patrick’s. Never mind, I thought I’d give it a shot, so I made some preliminary inquiries into St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Bingo! Let’s see if you agree that I found an interesting thread to follow…
St. Patrick’s Cathedral was built between 1858 and 1888, and more on that below. For some reason I honed in on the massive bronze doors that were designed in 1949 and that contain six sculpted historical figures, three of them women. The two top figures are the “patrons of the church,” and they are Saint Patrick and Saint Joseph, linked by the fact that their feast days are two days apart during Lent. The third man is Saint Issac Jogues Martyr (first Catholic priest in New York), and the women are Saint Frances X Cabrini (mother of immigrants), Saint Kateri Tekakwitha (a Mohawk and the first canonized Native American), and Mother Elizabeth Seton (daughter of New York). Since Pat and Joe shared the honor of being patrons of this church, I thought I’d do a little digging into the story of Joseph, and I landed on an interesting architectural parallel for these two, which marries their buildings through the critiques they have received at the hands of the architectural elite. In addition, I stumbled into a debate related to concrete design which took me right back to the depiction of Joseph on those bronze doors. There he stands proudly holding his metal square, the perfect symbol of his identity as a carpenter and for the theme that was central to the criticism of the twentieth-century church named after him in Le Havre, France to honor his role as patron saint for the ship-builders there. His church was built between 1951 and 1958 as part of a project to reconstruct the city, which had been destroyed during WWII. The architect Auguste Perret, who is probably more famous for mentoring the very famous architect Le Corbusier than for his own work, was given the commission to re-design Le Havre in 1945 when he was 71 years old; unfortunately, he would never see his project completed.
Now let’s return to the cathedral in New York City for a minute, because I want to spend most of this essay on Joseph and on what is for me the more complex topic of Le Havre. In 1810 the Jesuits were the first to build on the New York site—the present-day block between 50th and 51st Streets and Madison and Fifth Avenues—which at the time was three miles away from any settlement, and in fact when the present church was begun it was still remote from the city center. It was the construction of Rockefeller Center in the 1930s across the street that elevated the status of St. Patrick’s significantly, even though before it stood as the largest church in New York and indeed in the United States at the time it was built. It was designed by the architect James Renwick Jr. who had won renown for his Grace Church (also in NYC), still considered one of, if not “the” finest example of religious Gothic Revival in America. But with St. Patrick’s, he blew it, according to the pundits. “Petrified,” an example of “…a conspicuous instance of the adoption of the details of a style, without having assimilated the spirit that created it…” (this from Sir Banister Fletcher about Cologne Cathedral which supposedly served as the model for St. Patrick’s). And to this day, the much humbler Grace Church (Protestant) remains the architectural jewel in Renwick’s crown.
In New York City, the positioning of Saint Patrick’s was a gamble that paid off extremely well, as the Gothic grandeur of the church which at the outset was intimidating and impossible to ignore gradually became absorbed by much larger buildings. If the relative failure of Renwick to infuse this particular example of Gothic Revival with life was at all offensive to passers-by in 1880, by 1940 it was a moot point. Saint Patrick’s served as a delicious foil to the glass and steel skyscraper walls that surrounded it, like a spun sugar fantasy suspended in a mold of transparent gelatin. The situation at Le Havre was exactly the opposite. Saint Joseph’s was designed to be a symbolic lighthouse and a memorial to the 3,000+ who died in the war at Le Havre, and it was designed to rise above a new city of “tower-houses” sitting on grand boulevards leading to the sea. There was nowhere to hide, nor would there ever be.
“Petrified,” “lifeless,” “dead as a dodo” are terms that have been used to describe this church as well. Designed by the architect Auguste Perret (1874-1954), this grand monument that was meant to be a prominent symbol of urban rebirth was rejected for daily use by the parishioners, who preferred the more traditional Church of Saint Vincent for their marriages.
Before we look at the church let me give you a sense of the city and of Perret’s approach to urbanism. Le Havre is at the mouth of the Seine River on the English Channel, and was established as a port city by King Francis I (1515-1547). Its economy exploded in the eighteenth century and in the early twentieth century, before the war, it was a favored destination of ocean liners. When Perret set to work on his redesign after the war, Le Havre had lost 90% of its urban fabric. Perret used the existing street grid as a base, but he widened certain streets considerably, creating the grand boulevards that were part of the urban vision of architects working in the first half of the twentieth century. Perret, Le Corbusier, and many other designers were reacting to the problems in cities resulting from the Industrial Revolution; pollution, dense and dirty residential quarters, and intense vehicular circulation on old narrow streets, and they saw the solutions in creating large apartment blocks separated by boulevards and parkland, elevated from the noise and traffic at ground level by massive piers, or pilotis. There were visions of flying cars, walkways forty feet in the air, and towers, towers, towers. New York was admired for its ambitious architecture, but criticized for its density; the Europeans desired light and space. I am greatly simplifying this ideal, which found its expression in a variety of designs, some of them excellent.
At Le Havre, Perret tweaked his boulevards to focus on the sea and the arrival of those majestic ocean liners that had sailed into port before the war. He imagined massive crowds of visitors debarking and strolling along his parkways to the center of town to be greeted by impressive new buildings in concrete that would be symbols of France and her recovery. The Church of Saint Joseph was to be a symbolic lighthouse, with a 351-foot-high tower whose light can be seen from far out at sea. It is also literally a “house of light,” in that it contains 12,768 pieces of hand-blown stained glass, designed by the artist Marguerite Huré (1895-1967), who is credited with introducing abstract stained glass designs into religious structures. The structure itself is based on a relentless use of squares and octagons, actually a reincarnation of the tower design of Laon Cathedral sketched by the thirteenth-century itinerant carpenter Villard de Honnecourt. Perret may well have been aware of Honnecourt’s sketch and of the eternal usefulness of the rotated square used at Laon and many other Gothic building sites to create towers.
The plan of Saint Joseph’s is square with extensions to the east and west, and was designed to accommodate a centrally-placed altar, a precocious design for its time, but after the second Vatican Council in 1962, perfectly fitting for the new liturgy that encouraged audience participation in the Mass. The tower is raised with a second square, then makes the transition to an octagon which forms the majority of the tower, topped by three additional, diminishing octagons. All of this lit by these thousands of brilliantly colored pieces of glass.
The primary crime of Auguste Perret here and elsewhere, according to the critics, is that he launched a revolution in concrete construction in the beginning of his career and then retired into an endless repetition of the same idea, although they give him credit for making exposed concrete palatable to his public by using familiar forms. Perret was born into a family of builders; his father owned a construction company and was keen on exploring new materials like concrete. Perret started his training as an architect at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris but he left without a diploma in 1895 to join the family business, and then put himself on the map in Paris in 1903 with a concrete frame building he designed and built at 25 bis, rue Franklin (19th arrondissement), a nine-story apartment building with his studio in the ground floor. The concrete frame was evident in all its honesty, and his studio was a grand, open space un-encumbered by columns thanks to the strength of the concrete frame. To put this in perspective, when Corbusier came to work there in 1908 (his first apprenticeship), the German architects who would become known for the “International Style” in twenty years (Behrens, van der Rohe, Gropius et alia) were still searching for a similarly clean expression of structure. Perret had brilliantly brought forward the theory of Viollet le Duc (1814-1879) that new materials should result in a new architecture; in the case of Viollet le Duc it was cast iron that revolutionized his work.
Corbusier absorbed this and quickly moved on. Twenty years later he would design his Villa Savoye, employing his famous concrete pilotis to free the ground level and support the upper floors—a lesson learned at rue Franklin—but also relentlessly playing with the plastic character of concrete. By 1958 when the Perret’s Church of Saint Joseph was finished (and Perret had been dead for four years), Corbusier’s marvelous chapel of Notre-Dame de Ronchamp had been standing for three years already.
Perret, with the stubborn mentality of an engineer, insisted on maintaining a trabeated expression for his concrete designs all his life, with very few exceptions ( “trabeated” means an architecture of right angles based on a post and beam structure; think Greek temples). He was a Rationalist with a capital R, and explained his approach as a result of economy, which he equated with beauty. Concrete was then cast in wooden molds—it still is in many cases—and Perret held to the tenet that the nature of wood framing, essentially trabeated, should inform the shape of the concrete. Even cantilevers were verboten, as they were an expression of effort and as such fatigued the eye. So by and large, with Perret, we are left with a static architecture; a frame that must not be disrupted or penetrated. Yet with Perret’s insistence on the right angle, we are comfortably in the hands of Saint Joseph, proudly holding his metal square on the bronze door of St. Patrick’s in New York.
Neither Saint Patrick’s in New York City nor Saint Joseph’s church in Le Havre were able to pass through the looking glass to either side of which they sat. Saint Patrick’s saw its borrowed Gothic style reflected back as a caricature of the fourteenth century, and Saint Joseph’s image was returned as a future that never arrived and an expression of a material with all the possibilities for timelessness left unexploited. It seems petty to discuss architectural criticism in the face of the war disasters that visited Le Havre, but on the other hand it seems valuable to raise the question of how best to commemorate this kind of event with buildings. This lighthouse/memorial/church does indeed seem lugubrious and forbidding like the war itself, but the interior is filled with constantly changing light. Could Perret have designed a more “timeless” building instead of a “dead dodo?” Buildings are by their nature caught in the pincers of their moment, as generally they are built to outlast the ideas of their times, or at least wait until those ideas circulate around again. Whether or not Perret’s ideas will re-circulate, the city of Le Havre is happily enjoying an economic revival. After 2000, the city began once again to serve as an important port, this time for container traffic, and in 2005 it became a UNESCO site. Worth a visit!
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References for Week 11: Pat and Joe
Websites
Web site for the Institut Auguste Perret:
https://architectona.wordpress.com/
Another good one:
This is a nice site for images of Saint Joseph:
https://www.lehavre-etretat-tourisme.com/decouvrir/les-incontournables/eglise-saint-joseph-du-havre/
Books and articles
Please note that sources listed here may be available in more recent editions, also in this case, that there is a plenitude of critical theory written about Perret; I wish I had been able to read more of it.
Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1960.
Britton, Karia. “The Poetic Economy of the Frame: The Critical Stance of Auguste Perret,” in Journal of Architectural Education, Feb. 2001, Vol 54, No. 3, pp 176-184.
Clout, Hugh. “The reconstruction of Upper Normandy: a tale of two cities,” in Planning Perspectives, 14:2, 183-207. DOI: 10.1080/026654399364292.
Cohen, Jean-Louis. Scènes de la vie future : L’architecture européenne et la tentation de l’Amérique 1893-1960. Centre Canadien d’Architecture : Flammarion, 1995.
Jordan, Robert Fumeaux. Le Corbusier. New York: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1972.