The Gothic churches of centuries ago, with their soaring, elaborately decorated facades and vaulted interiors, meant to awe those who approach and to inspire them to envision something bigger than this world. The buildings conveyed God in the design, God in the stone carvings, and God in the engineering that held the monuments aloft, defying gravity.
A visitor to Saint John’s University and Saint John’s Abbey, in north-central Minnesota, sees something of that Gothic heritage while standing in front of the abbey church, designed and built around 1960. The church’s 112-foot campanile — a trapezoidal slab made of 2,500 tons of steel and concrete — stands boldly in front of a huge concrete honeycomb wall, with stained glass set in each of the perfect hexagonal cells.
The modern age may seem godless, but architecture like this can still strike one silent with wonder.
This is the work of Marcel Breuer, one of the most remarkable yet underappreciated architects of the 20th century, who brought an ambitious vision to Saint John’s University when he was hired in 1953 to transform this campus. His 10 buildings here are considered some of the best of his career — and some of the best examples of the heavy, and sometimes difficult, Modernist style that followed World War II.
What makes this architecture even more remarkable is that it is tucked away in tiny Collegeville, the home of a Catholic university and a 150-year-old Benedictine monastery, not far from St. Cloud. In 1953, Abbot Baldwin Dworschak invited 12 well-known architects to come to Saint John’s and offered them a chance to design a master plan and new buildings for the growing campus and monastery. The monks were especially interested in the Modernists of the group, which included Pietro Belluschi, Barry Byrne, Walter Gropius, Richard Neutra, and Eero Saarinen, in addition to Breuer.
“We feel that the modern architect with his orientation toward functionalism and honest use of materials is uniquely qualified to produce a Catholic work,” Abbot Baldwin wrote. Building anything less than great Modernist work would be “deplorable,” the abbot added, “since our age and our country have thus far produced so little truly significant religious architecture.”
The Benedictines have a long history of supporting the arts, and the monks at Saint John’s saw themselves within the tradition of Abbot Suger, a 12th-century monk who was among the first patrons of Gothic architecture. “There was a sense that in the 12th century Gothic was what was new,” says the Rev. Hilary Thimmesh, 80, a monk and former president of Saint John’s University, remembering the discussion the community had more than 50 years ago. “But this was the 20th century, not the 12th, so what would be new now? People talked about Le Corbusier and his church at Ronchamp, France, as a striking example of what we could do. We were not just trying to copy the past.” Some monks have also said that monasticism and Modernism shared a perspective on the world — one based on simplicity, the community of artists, quality for the sake of every man, and utopian values.
Some of the candidates invited to Saint John’s had experience with religious designs, but Breuer had not. His reputation was built on designs for modern houses and designs for furniture — the bent-steel Cesca and Wassily chairs, both icons of Modernism, were his. Born in Hungary, he had studied with Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, then later joined Gropius in Cambridge, Mass., where together they formed a design firm and taught at Harvard University. In 1952, Breuer had won a commission to design the massive Unesco Headquarters in Paris, his first major public building.
But his appeal to the monks at Saint John’s was personal. He listened. He was friendly. He seemed humble. (Robert Gatje, a friend and associate of Breuer, once wrote that the architect had in fact a stout but well-concealed ego.) Breuer, at 51, was also relatively young, and the monks wanted a long-term relationship with an architect. Gropius, who had a close but sometimes rocky friendship with Breuer, was 70 when he arrived at Saint John’s for the interview. “I’m too old to see this thing through to completion,” Gropius told the monks. “I really came out here to urge that you choose Breuer.”
At the time he was hired at Saint John’s, Breuer was working on the Unesco project with Pier Luigi Nervi, an Italian engineer who had a deep understanding of structural concrete. Concrete would come to define Breuer’s architecture for the rest of his career. “I like to use concrete because it has a kind of rugged quality,” Breuer once said. “It is not a sweet material. It is a relief in modern architecture from all that glass and steel.”
Breuer “liked to think about architecture as sculpture, and he thought of concrete as a sculptural material,” says Isabelle Hyman, emerita professor of art and architecture at New York University and author of the definitive book on Breuer’s career. “The Saint John’s project was his monumental experiment in concrete design.”
Concrete is a tricky material. When people see rock-hard pillars and vertical walls, they forget that the concrete started out as a stony goop. A concrete building is first constructed in wood, which holds the semiliquid concrete in forms until it hardens.
At Saint John’s, Midwestern carpentry skills, truckloads of local wood, thousands of tons of concrete, and the eye of a radical architect combined in forms that seemed organic, that seemed to defy gravity, despite their weight. Breuer tried to make concrete do unusual things. Campus residence halls that opened in 1967, for example, feature angular, streamlined sunshades over recessed windows. Panels on the ends of the building are cast in sunken geometric forms.
Alcuin Library, completed in 1966, is a box, clad in granite, with windows at the top — a design that some on the campus liken to traditional cloister architecture, walled off from the world but open to the heavens. Breuer used simple terra-cotta flue tile to break up the light coming in through the windows.
Walk inside, and the sight is amazing: Two giant, angular, concrete trees, each with 12 branches, grow out of the floor and rise to hold up the roof. The stairwell at the center of the building is a study in balance: Big granite steps hang off a vertical slab of concrete; the careful observer will see that the bottom step never actually meets the floor, letting the whole thing hang in space. On the other end of the building, a tiny spiral staircase made of granite seems to float inside of a concrete box, painted bright orange on the inside. Descending it can make you dizzy. A monk here said he calls it “the descent into hell.”
Victoria M. Young, an associate professor of modern architecture and the allied arts at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, who has studied Saint John’s architecture extensively, says the monastic community “liked how Breuer made engineering part of the architecture, how it wasn’t an afterthought and how it was essential to what the design was going to look like.” In this, Breuer resembled Gothic architects, who revealed the ways that the buttresses and the carefully placed stones held their buildings up.
The monks “were looking for engineered buildings, where the art of engineering would show through,” Young says. “That was something they wanted to tie themselves to their medieval monastic brethren.”
In engineering and aesthetics, the grand achievement at Saint John’s is the abbey church. Breuer believed that the cantilevered concrete slab was the signature architectural feature of the 20th century, much the way that the dome was the feature of the 16th, so he used it to form the church’s massive bell tower. Breuer also drew inspiration for the tower from churches he had seen in Greece, where bells were hung in perforations in the walls.
Visitors walk under the bell tower’s arched legs to pass through the front door, where they encounter a baptistery in concrete and granite on a sunken floor, recreating the feeling of wading into a river. A sinewy bronze statue of the patron saint John the Baptist, designed by the Expressionist Doris Caesar, stands next to the baptistery, with an arm gesturing people toward the water. The baptistery, set out in front, is meant to recall baptisteries that were situated at the front of early European churches.
In the nave, concrete walls, folded like the bellows of an accordion, form 12 pillars that hold up the roof. The heavy roof and wall system is sustained by thin pillars, allowing for long windows and abundant light at ground level. A streamlined, cantilevered balcony at the back of the church juts out over the pews.
In the abbey church, as in other buildings on the campus, the aesthetic touches are understated. Often one has to find the beauty in the concrete — in, say, the impressions left by the wood forms, and the unusual angles at which they come together. Breuer had the workers use a bush hammer on some of the concrete, which roughened the surface and exposed the stones in the mix, giving the surface a different texture. Breuer’s signatures were his “reveals,” or little gaps he left between different kinds of materials. Breuer was so impressed with the clean lines of the concrete that he decided not to paint the interior of the church, as planned.
One vital element of the church design did not come together according to Breuer’s design. Breuer wanted Josef Albers, a Bauhaus artist who had taught at Black Mountain College and Yale University, to design the stained-glass window in the hexagon cells on the front of the church; Albers had a design that would have bathed the church in orange and red light. But the architectural committee at Saint John’s rejected Albers’s design in favor of a colder, more overtly religious design by a faculty member. In his memoir of his years working with Breuer, Robert Gatje said members of the committee believed that Albers was an “atheistic Jew” and thought he was haughty (ironically, according to Gatje’s book, Albers was a nonpracticing Catholic, and it was Breuer who was Jewish). Breuer sent angry letters to the committee about the decision, but he continued working at Saint John’s. (An Albers-designed window sits in a skylight at the top of the church.)
In 1961, soon after the abbey church was finished, Breuer’s work on the campus was featured in Architectural Record. “The untreated concrete, brick, granite, and dark oak woodwork seem expressive of the austerity, humility, and continence of monastic life,” the article said. The church was constructed for about $3-million. “That seems incredible now,” Father Hilary says. “Nowadays we couldn’t do it, because it would be too expensive.”
After Saint John’s, Breuer designed a number of well-known American buildings, like the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. But Breuer sometimes lamented that some of his best work was “way out in Minnesota,” as he put it, out of the public eye. In the United States, Breuer never achieved the fame of some his contemporaries, like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, or even the household-name status of one of his former students, I.M. Pei.
But Breuer’s buildings at Saint John’s have been protected. Breuer’s architecture, sometimes associated with the reviled Brutalist style, has reached a perilous middle age — too new to inspire nostalgia, too old to excite. Last year preservationists in Cleveland and Grosse Pointe, Mich., rallied to save a tower and a library, both designed by Breuer and slated for demolition.
Some on the campus say that Breuer relished the idea of working at Saint John’s, a kind of timeless place, because he knew that the monks would care for his buildings forever.
“I’d believe it,” said Gregory Friesen, an architect who has been hired to renovate Alcuin Library, during a recent visit to the campus. “They have a different sense of time. … They take the long view.” The buildings here, both Breuer’s and those that came before, are meticulously preserved. Unlike many college campuses, Saint John’s, through careful financial management, has almost no deferred maintenance.
And Breuer is regarded with reverence on the campus, even by monks who never met him. Friesen related a story about another architecture firm that came to bid on projects at Saint John’s: One of the architects pointed to the Breuer buildings and said, “We tear down that stuff all the time on the Coasts.” Later the firm tried to send an emissary to repair the damage, but it was too late. The monks had cut that firm out of the running immediately.
Altering a Breuer building at Saint John’s, even only a little, inevitably means chipping away at Breuer’s intent. Nearly everything in Alcuin was designed according to Breuer’s vision, from the ebonized-wood carrels and bookshelves right down to the black, boxy wastebaskets.
Architects who work around these buildings have to tread lightly. The firm of Vincent James, an architect in Minneapolis, designed additions for the abbey and the chapter house that blend almost seamlessly with Breuer’s work. Friesen himself designed an addition to a Breuer science building that uses concrete, granite, and flue tile in ways that Breuer used them.
Friesen will use some of those same materials to produce his addition to Alcuin. In renovating the building to update its spaces and bring it up to code, he says he is not altering anything permanently. Everything could be put back as it was. “The key is to try not to bring one’s own voice to the forefront,” he said. “I think for some architects that’s extremely difficult.”
He plans to show the design to Hamilton Smith, a former associate of Breuer: “The idea is that when we show it to Ham, he would say, ‘That’s the way we would have done it.’”
Scott Carlson is a senior reporter at The Chronicle.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 26, Page B9
