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© 1999 John W. Dixon, Jr.
MAIL TO: jwdixon@email.unc.edu

The Iconic Architecture of Rudolph Schwarz

An Essay on Architectural and Theological Method

Sacred structure is no longer understood as that which it actually is: as structure, as the dogmatics of eternity. (p. 8)

…we cannot return to the Middle Ages. The great realities of the cathedral are no longer real to us. This does not mean that "in themselves" they are no longer true. No, they are as true as on their first day and they move us deeply.... But even so we can no longer build these things because life has gone on and the reality which is our task and which is given into our hands possesses a different, perhaps poorer form....On the other hand, it does not suffice to work honestly with the means and forms of our own time. It is only out of sacred reality that sacred building can grow. What begets sacred works is not the life of the world but the life of faith–the faith, however, of our own time. This is the third thing: that sacred substance out of which churches can be built must be, alive and real to us. (pp. 9-10)

Church architecture is not cosmic mythology–rather is it the representation of Christian life, new embodiment of the spiritual. (P. 228)

The art of building, as we meant it, is the creation of living form, and the church as we meant it, is not merely a walled shelter, but everything together: building and people, body and soul, the human beings and Christ, a whole spiritual universe–a universe, indeed, which must ever be brought into reality anew. We meant the primal deed of building. the process in which church becomes living form.

This holy work is comparable to no other. It cannot be derived from contemporary art and its fashionable motifs nor from aesthetic doctrines nor from social theories nor from cosmic myths. Rather is church building a work in its own right, bound strictly to its own meaning and with it exhausted. Church building is not applied theology nor is it the fulfillment of a liturgical purpose (and this a chimera): it is "work which prays," work which is borne by the movement of grace. We develop an engine, a business organization or a strategical plan, not out of a superimposed motive, but out of their own inner law. That just as strictly a church must be developed wholly and in all its parts out of its own inner meaning, that is, out of prayer,–this, is to us the meaning of "sacred objectivity."(p. 212)

The quotations are from Rudolf Schwarz, The Church Incarnate. (Translated by Cynthia Harris, Henry Regnery Co., Chicago, 1958). The title of the English version is, presumably, the translator's, since the title of the German edition is. more prosaically, Vom Bau der Kirche. It is hard to conceive a happier choice of a title however, if the full depth of the book is to be hinted at by the tide.

Rudolf Schwarz (who died in 1960) is most noted as an architect of churches. He preserved more than seventy plans for churches in his own architectural autobiography, Kirchenbau (Heidelberg, Kerle Verlag, 1960), and more than sixty have been constructed (many are reconstructions of war damaged churches, but, in each such case I have seen, the reconstruction is not simply a copy of the destroyed or damaged original but a translation of the original into the language of the twentieth century, faithfully preserving whatever fragments of the older work that survived). He was also, until 1951, director in charge of planning the reconstruction of Cologne.

Schwarz called his book "a primer for church building." (p. 211) If these words are taken literally it is surely one of the most extraordinary "primers" ever written. Yet it is quite true that, in his own terms, this is exactly what he intended the work to be. It is simultaneously true that, if the book is to make any sense at all either as a primer or as anything else, what he means by primer must be understood in his terms for it is only in his terms that the proper relation between the book as it stands and the act of building can be understood. Further, it is only as his terms are understood that the proper relation between the book and the act of theology can be understood for it is my contention that this book is not merely "a primer of church building" but a primer of theological method appropriate to the deepest needs of theology in our time.

In a real sense it is only as theological method that the book can be understood as a manual for church building. It is fundamental to Schwarz's whole position that theological thinking is not even approximately exhausted by conceptual systems but is most real only as it is incarnated in forms functioning within the community. The inability of our age to understand this theological assertion, to see art as theological "statement," has created the basic difficulties in coping with the book in such considerations of it as have yet appeared in print. Ours is an age of theological positivism and theological analysis, unequipped to handle the rational activity of coherent forms. Schwarz was a great artist and his book is not simply an artist writing discursively about his art but is itself a work of art. Thus the book is poetic and must be read as poetry.

Yet this does not mean, as common usage often has it, that his speech is elevated beyond ordinary experience. So far from referring to anything visionary, apart from sensuous experience, Schwarz is clearly speaking of things he judges to be the most real and palpable of human experiences. It is characteristic that he begins with two short essays on "The Hand" and "The Eye", which deserve to stand with Henri Focillon's classic essay "In Praise of Hands" as expositions of what actually happens in our experiencing of the world around us. It is perhaps a proper measure of the impoverishment of our common experience of things that an essay so gloriously sensuous should be called by critics "poetic" and "mystical."

The poetry is both a description and a method. The book is a poem in the sense that it embodies in the ordered structure of the physical material of words the essential vision this man had of the nature of things. Thus it must be experienced and is not accessible to summary any more than any great poem can be summarized. It is also poetic in its method for it is only as the builder can experience the essential action of poetry that his work can in turn embody the sacred reality which is the defining purpose of the work.

The book is organized around seven "plans"' and to each plan a chapter is devoted, an exposition of the essential meaning of the plan as an expression of the Christian community. Probably the fundamental error of the reactions to the work is the literalism with which these plans are understood, for they are taken as schematic diagrams of structural possibilities. Despite Schwarz's express warning (p. 218) these have been treated as actual possibilities. They are, rather, schematic diagrams of the Christian community out of which plans can grow but they are not themselves plans. They are metaphors for the sacred reality and out of their metaphoric work can grow the iconic architecture which is the holy metaphor of the Christian life.

Let us then look closely at the method for the method is not only the creative heart of the architectural achievement but the heart of what Schwarz has: to say to all concerned with Christian creativity in art or in theology or anything else.

The first "plan" is "sacred inwardness" and takes the-form of the community gathered in a ring around the altar. So expressed it is a form that can be built and Schwarz on occasion built it that way but here the "plan" is the diagram of the holy community, around which an actual building might be built deriving its shape from the shape of the worshipping community. It is the star image, made up of the center, the concentric rings and the rays of grace that flow from the center through the rings. Thus "the light shines in darkness and the darkness comprehends it; the Lord comes unto his own and his own receives him" (p. 57).

The universe stands open. The dome can no longer hold the things together, it no longer shelters. The vessel is pierced.... This is the 'threshold' between earth and heaven. Thus the inner ring where the earth once bordered the eternal has now become. the hem of coastline, the edge of the waterfall. The inner boundary stretches out across the land along this threshold: it unfolds in great portals as the boundary of the universe. . . . And of these portals at least one becomes visible as that final line where the firmament was cut off: the casement of eternity and within it "emptiness." But basically this plan differs little from the first. The dwelling place of heaven, sheltered at the beginning deep in the innermost heart has now come forth: the hidden openness of the world's center has become visible. (pp. 74-75) The people’s space is the intermediate space, the space in which the earthly church stands in this present life, between providence and light. The space of this world arches over it and God's holy government bounds it. For the earth and the world, the altar is at once the center and the threshold. Earth and world gather in the altar, and in it they reach their end. The altar belongs to two realms: it belongs to the realm of earth in which we can walk and it belongs to the realm of light which we cannot enter, on three sides it faces the world and on the fourth heaven. Thus it is the place where "earth and heaven kiss," the spot where the earth, turned to face eternity, remains- behind. Out from this spot a "sacred way" begins. We can follow it for a little while with our eyes but our feet cannot tread it: it runs its course on beyond the universe. As that way which ran fromdoor to altar, this sacred way was already hinted at and already set out upon the first plan. The way was begun by the priest who trod it, and through him the direction of its course into the eternal way determined. At the point where the centric movement veers out into the infinite stands the impassable portal of heaven: window, threshold, shining negation, the piercing of the world–and, seen from the world, the shining void, God’s other dwelling. . . . The death of the Lord and his going forth are the wound where history bleeds. When the Lord departed, he left the world open behind him. (pp. 80-81)

Thus for the poetry. This is not "mysticism" but objectivity with all the intensity any poet gives to the objectivity of his words. Schwarz is also a builder and a great one. None of his poetic insights is to live of and for itself but only as the germ of building. ("'The good work is built, not according to a pattern but according to an economy of life: it offers the things as a germ.") What then can architects do who have this sense of the community and wants to build the architectural form around it? Basically they must admit it is impossible, for architects do not build an opening into eternity. But they can suggest it.

In order to avoid all these errors it might be best not to work out the image at all but instead to leave the structure with the rift in it. The open place would simply remain empty, a meaningful break in the ring. This could be intimated by leaving a part of the wall behind the altar utterly white (p. 22).

All that poetic speech and the result is–a plain white wall! The pragmatic American begins to find an almost ludicrous discrepancy here between the greatness of the things said and the littleness of the things done. But the pragmatist knows little of metaphor,

Metaphor is not a thing to discuss or define lightly for it is the basis of all thought. But it is possible here to look at the direction of metaphor. in popular use and in poetry. Things are constantly described or defined in common usage by saying they are "like" something else (the distinction between simile and metaphor is fairly pedantic). It is a normal way of putting things into intelligible order and classification. Then the popular mind tries to be poetic and elects to use metaphor to demonstrate his sensitivity. Too often, however, metaphor becomes a device, not to illuminate the essential being and act of something which is too vast for ordinary comprehension, but to reduce the inexpressible to manageable size, precisely in order to drain it of its power.

Poets use metaphor for various purposes but not ordinarily to make the great little. They are much more likely to use it to make the little great or reveal the greatness that is obscurely present in the small and the ordinary. Thus with Schwarz's white wall. It is a small thing, easily built, even inexpensive to build. But one who comes to Schwarz's white wall with a sense of what. it means in Schwarz's terms is not likely to see it inertly simply as a closure to space. The numinous has become incarnate in that white wall. It is a metaphor of the opening into eternity and partakes of the holiness it reveals. It is thus iconic, being in itself no more sacred than any other of the holy materials of the earth but at this point and to this purpose, theotokos, God-bearer, the revealer of the sacred way, incarnating sacred meaning in the immediate life of the observer.

In these terms can a builder design any wall or any furnishing with the only thing on his mind its practical purposes, as in a business building? The building is the icon and every part of it partakes of this holy mission. of bodying forth to the gathered community its own essential life and purpose and meaning. This does not say there is no place for manuals of appropriate practical instruction else the "plan" remains only a vision and never an actuality (on this see Schwarz on "The Specifications," p. 219 ff.). But against this vision those books which see church building as a matter of traffic flow, lighting, storage of umbrellas, even efficient access to the altar, become a real blasphemy, a profaning of the holy body. The function of the building is to incarnate the church and, so far from being mystical, Schwarz's work is almost scholastic in the precision of its definitions of this task.

The method is poetic and the indispensable instrument is the visual and physical metaphor. The church "cannot be derived from contemporary art and its fashionable motifs nor from aesthetic doctrines nor from social theories nor from cosmic myths." It must be a "representation of the Christian life" and the sacred building can grow only out of sacred reality. It might be important to mention at this point that both in form and in technique Schwarz's work is entirely within the idiom of contemporary architecture; it is only that he doesn't choose the form or the technique as in some mystical sense conferring the merit of contemporaneity on the work. Most modern churches do owe more to either the motifs or the aesthetic doctrines of contemporary art or to social theory or cosmic myth than they do to the reality of the Christian life. Many of them work. A large number are architecturally good and some function meaningfully as churches. They are, however, in a distinctive sense of the word, unfruitful. They can only breed other experimental or fashionable works, not other experiences of the sacred and soon the architects resort to the bizarre, like fish-shaped churches. or serialized tetrahedrons. An expressive and eloquent architectural style is not adequate to the purposes of church architecture for only a profound consciousness of "sacred reality" can produce sacred building.

What of the churches which are successful and are produced by unbelievers? This is the case that proves the rule in the original sense of the proverb. Matisse was an unbeliever who was also a spiritually sensitive man. In designing the chapel at Vence he did not fake an emotion he did not feel and apparently did not even try that extraordinarily difficult task of imaginatively projecting himself into another's attitudes and trying to build a building around his projection. He chose rather that aspect of his own experience which, as it were, overlapped the Christian experience and reduced the chapel to a kind of essence of purity and clarity in line and color.

Le Corbusier's Ronchamp presents a special problem. Here a man of great religious depth created an intensely personal monument which is basically the incarnation of his own intensely personal experience of the Christian faith. I would call it without rival the greatest building of the twentieth century and one of the greatest religious buildings ever built, easily ranking with the Parthenon and Chartres Cathedral. Yet it is impossible to see Ronchamp as a manifestation of a communal experience. It is the creation of one man and, it is great as a church because the greatness of this man's vision could develop a form with the power to receive the vision of others. But it, too, is unfruitful. Like Michelangelo's sculpture it can only overpower the imagination of others. From it can come only imitation.

From Schwarz, however, could spring a whole reformation in church architecture. I cannot conceive of Le Corbusier having pupils, only disciples. An architect could discipline himself to Schwarz's vision and go out to create work which would in vocabulary be entirely different, yet still be faithful to the master's vision. For Schwarz does not teach an architectural style but a method of. relating religious faith to the act of architecture. In his own work there is a protean quality hardly exceeded by those masters of architectural versatility, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright His style ranges from the great majesty of Maria Königin in Saarbrucken, St. Anna in Duren, and St. Michael in Frankfort, asserting their dignity in the world, to the Church of the Holy Family in Oberhausen, shut off from the world, to the austere intimacy of St. Christopher in Cologne. His stylistic language ranges from powerful parabolic curves (Maria Königin. St. Michael), to majestic rectilinear patterns (Saint Anna, Saint Mechhtern in Cologne),. to the expressive angularities of Saint Joseph in Braunfeld and Liebfrauenkirch in Cologne, to the ascetic but majestic geometry of Saint Anthony in Essen.

There is some stylistic continuity beyond the identity of conception running through all these. There is, for example, the placement of windows which are, for the most part, high and apart (there are important exceptions) and are always prevented from functioning as a means for seeing out rather that admitting light at the service of the architectural conception. But the most distinguishing characteristic is the handling of the altar. Here there is only partial stylistic continuity for the form of his altars varies as much as the, buildings, but the continuity of conception is so completely realized that the tone is unmistakable.

One review complained that little is said in the book about the pulpit and that Schwarz should have included some treatment of it Apart from the arrogance of this there is the missing of the methodological point: the only way to stand against a poem is to write another poem. which the reviewers seem in no hurry to do.

Schwarz was a Roman Catholic and his conception of a church is intensely sacramental. The pulpits are not absent from his churches and sometimes they are treated as centrally important. More often they are so modesty handled as to make clear their entirely subordinate position. The altar is so important that the strong impression is that the church grow naturally and organically out of the altar. The altars do not simply reproduce the lines of the building for an altar is not a building. Rather the forms of each altar are so deeply harmonious with the church that it seems entirely natural to see the church as having developed as the. natural and inevitable means for containing the worshipping community gathered at this particular altar. The whole meaning of the building is condensed into the altar which becomes the heart and the essence of the building.

The altars are nearly always tables. Some are monolithic blocks of stone of very great power but even these are so formed that, by the pattern incised deeply on the surface, the corners of the block, without being in any sense cut off from the block, are clearly established as legs. Similarly the tables are not the inchoate articles of furniture adapted from pretentious domestic furnishings of the nineteenth century but massive units powerfully rooted in the earth and so quite capable of functioning as altars. I know of no comparable body of design in altars so capable of stating what an altar is in the economy of Christian worship.

It is, however, in proportion and placement that they receive their most characteristically expressive quality. Schwarz customarily lays out a church either in the traditional basilica form (the sacred way) or the gathered community on all sides of the altar (the ring) or the community gathered on three sides leaving the fourth side open (the open ring). In each case, the altar is unquestionably the focus of the work. Both it and the pews are incomplete without people but it is not theirs as furniture to dispose of at will. It is present among them both as focus and as goal. It is also removed, isolated, carrying the hope beyond die present into the eternal. Other churches in the history of the church have captured the distinctively Christian sense of the numinous. None have done it with greater penetration than these. Schwarz's works are a kind of chalice, containing the holy. The focus of that sense of the holy is the altar.

If this is incomplete as a Christian vision it is not for a Protestant reviewer to criticize. It would be necessary, rather, to capture an equal vision of the pulpit as a vessel of the word of God. If this were done then the pulpit might be less of a place from which to tell reflective anecdotes but a thing. an icon, that can impose both humility and passion on the preacherd who would go into it fearfully, as the worshipper sees the power in Schwarz's altars. They might then stand there to act not as leader but as messenger. Only if there comes an architect who can realize this vision of the Protestant service can there be any questioning of what Schwarz has here done. And if such a vision should be both articulated and built this would be entirely in the spirit of Schwarz's great vision for it would reproduce, not his forms but the action of his vision; not follow out an intellectual idea or doctrine, but give body to a vision of the presence of God among his people.

II

So stated Schwarz's method points directly to the problems of both contemporary architecture and contemporary theology. These two different fields have much in common in their essential situation: each is burdened with a long and honorable tradition which it now wishes–even needs–to throw off; each is now very much alive and creative; each is producing a wide range of works in varied, even contradictory styles without any sure sense of what unity of form or purpose inheres within this diversity or even whether such form or purpose is possible.

The fact of this common concern is neither accidental nor incidental: architecture is the paradigmatic art, not only for art but for the rest of culture. Architecture is the concretion of all a culture holds essential, all it can achieve. Architecture is the home of its spirit as well as the protection for its energies and a tool to its purpose. Thus what happens in architecture is the concretion of the essential life of that culture. This does not mean that architecture reflects or expresses what is being thought and done elsewhere; it is just as valid to say the influence is the other direction. It does mean that architecture proceeds from the fundamental spiritual reality, the origin too of all poetic or theological thought. There may be no direct correlation whatever between the doctrines of theology and the forms of architecture (there is more likely to be a correlation with the ornament of architecture) but the architecture is far more likely to say what the theological situation actually is, underneath the conscious formulations. In this sense the infamous Akron plan, perhaps the lowest point of Christian church architecture, is a precise statement of the theological condition of the American church, even though there were individual theologians and clergymen with a sounder grasp of essentials than ever appear in architecture.

At this time, I do not want to pursue this argument further than is necessary to establish my basic assertion: Schwarz's great work is not simply a paradigm for the architects but for all Christian thought in our day.

Architecture is the paradigmatic art, not in the sense of model or exemplar as the word is so often used, but in the sense of wholeness, completeness, the art that bodies forth in its fullness the purposes of art. It is, therefore, the only art which can generate community or which can incarnate the sense of its own meaning and purpose that informs a community. Painting and sculpture participate in things insofar as they participate in the architectural act (not just physically, as in the middle ages, but intellectually and formally as in the Renaissance and Baroque periods where the spatial statement put monumentally in architecture was analyzed in detail by painting and sculpture). Easel painting, as soon as it takes on an individual life (as it began to do during the Renaissance), becomes the statement of the individual, no less significant for all of that but clearly functioning to a different purpose. Easel painting may be (as I certainly judge it to be) fundamental to the human enterprise but it is not a communal art.

It may be symptomatic that much contemporary easel painting attempts to assume the space defining role of architecture. Sometimes this has a vulgar and mundane motive: the large picture has an impact on the eye of the judge across a large and crowded space. But, when seriously used, the large modem picture attempts to establish the environment of the spectator, thus usurping the role of architecture. Not all large pictures do this: Raphael and Rubens used the large spaces of their architectural setting but they did not usurp its role. Where architecture has either surrendered its right to shape space or isolated that role into certain usually pictureless buildings, then the picture asserts its own architectural function.

The basic problem, then, for the architect and for the theologian is the recovery of the body. The task of recovering the body in some definitions of that word is a task which can be undertaken by painting and sculpture and the definition of the role of those arts is relevant to the task of recovering man's own body and the body of the earth, the world of created things. But the task of architecture is the task of recovering the sense of the body of Christ, not now as a theological abstraction but as a corporate person living its common life, wearing its own garments. working with the tools of its own structure.

The church as one person, no more than the separate persons who make up the body of Christ, has never been able to resolve the tension between its two attitudes toward the world in which it lives. The church is a pilgrim in this world, living under the conditions of the natural order, submissive to the lawful order of society, yet never losing sight of the city which holds its true citizenship. What is the duty of the church or the individual Christian to this world? To designate the poles of definition as "the way of affirmation" and "the way of negation" is too simple, for the problem imposes itself on man with greater complexity than that. There is the world of the flesh, of matter, with its insistent demands and its enticing pleasures. There is the world of people, in their persons and in their arrogant institutions. Do the Christians withdraw from the flesh and from the authority of other people? Do they deny the flesh but submit to the authority of the social order, in which they finds themselves? Do they affirm. the flesh and the world of matter as good and given to them for proper use and society as surrogate for the divine?. If they affirm the world of politics do they accept it on its own terms or do they feel they must bend it to submission before the lordship of Christ? Does the Christian as Christian live according to his Lord's humility and suffering in the world or according to his lordship?

The most cursory familiarity with the church's life and thought will show that these themes and other possibilities are drawn from actual experience. There is no resolution of the problem, for each attitude represents one segment of the truth and any group which succeeds in fixing its views on the life of the church fixes it into partiality and therefore error. It is probable to the point of certainty that the church can live with some hope of fidelity only as it contains the tension among these and is not exclusively devoted to any one for it is only their mutual attachment that prevents the bearer of them from toppling over the edge into heresy. Various definitions are possible; what is not permissible is to claim that a new combination of the elements of the problem provides a formulation of the faith which can require the loyalty of all men.

The question is inescapable and it is often answered. in ways which are not at all conscious. Probably neither contemporary church builders nor contemporary theologians are particularly aware that they are concerned with the structural problem of interpretation, but there is that in the work of each which is an answer, conscious or not. The answer is not always easy to determine for it not only involves an intrusion into a man's sense of his own purpose but also involves the difficulty called by literary critics "the intentional fallacy" where the interpretation is determined by the knowledge of the author's intention. Is Barthianism an affirmation of the structure of the faith or a denial of the imperious demands of the world? Does Tillich reject the terms of traditional theology or affirm the needs of a new theological language? It ought at once to be protested that the formulations are too simple and the interaction too complex to be reduced to an either-or. But the center of gravity lies somewhere.

Contemporary architecture and contemporary theology seem to have arrived at a roughly comparable state of relation to this problem. There is much solid and unassuming work done in each, modestly adopting a new vocabulary, but using it to decorate traditional forms. There is much mind destroying imitation of past forms, from which life has long since departed. There is much of the same negative passion to abandon all sips of traditional forms and live within the forms that are evolved out of the "secular" life of man. There is much work which is highly individual often to the point of being bizarre. There is occasionally a brilliant work, both original and faithful, new and coherent. Again the definitions are too simple and the interaction of affirmation and negation are extremely complex, but, again the center of gravity lies somewhere. Do those committed to "the theology. of, the secular" joyfully accept the world as given in the grace of God? Or do they painfully surrender the worn out garments of inherited theology and let themselves be absorbed into the anonymity of the world? Do the builders of churches, inspired by contemporary technological forms joyfully accept the givenness of the machine and machine products (which can be extraordinarily beautiful, and expressive)? Or do they turn away from worn out forms and try to conceal under forms conceived elsewhere the fact that they have no architectural language which belongs to the church?

This requires facing the actualities of the situation: no basic insight into the structural, formal or expressive problem of modern architecture was first achieved in the architecture of the churches; no major advances in the development of modern architecture is marked by a church. Instead the churches have enriched themselves with the work of men who, for the most part, generated their artistic vision in other kinds of work.

This is not an indictment or a value judgment but an attempt to analyze, a cultural situation. To many the situation might be welcome. They see the Christian life as accepting its function within the forms of society and thus the problem of church architecture would be a simple and direct manifestation of the larger problem which is definable within the culture. They should find it a cause for rejoicing that the church should occupy now a role of recipient, rather than demanding or attempting to re-win its ancient authority as controller of culture If the role of the Christian life is that of servant in society, the church, too, should seek the role of servant and can receive with gratitude the forms that are given it

The problem cannot be stated so simply as to set forth the contrary of this attitude. There are those who still feel that the church has a role of creative centrality in culture. They cannot be dismissed as nostalgics altogether. Yet it must be recognized that it is highly unlikely that the church in the foreseeable future will really be able to assume such a position so it is anachronistic to build churches that assert a role in society which the church no longer has. The problem, then, is not to seek for ways to regain a position which for our time at least is almost unquestionably lost. The problem is posed by a simple circumstance of the architectural language: whatever conviction the builders may hold about the relation between function and form, the function of a building inevitably stamps itself on the form. A building which is thought out in formal, spatial terms in the language of contemporary secular (in the sense of "non-ecclesiastical") architecture still must serve the functional needs of the church which it embodies. Thus it so often happens that a conventional ecclesiastical ground plan and arrangement of parts is stated in a formal vocabulary derived from quite other thinking. This inevitably results in a kind of architectural schizophrenia. The consequence is a large number of churches which may serve the practical functions of a church but contribute nothing to that function which is the proper role of the church. From the fact that the popular song, "Greensleeves" could be turned into a lovely carol, it does not logically follow that "Waltzing Mathilda" is appropriate music for the mass.

Thus the thinking that has created some of the current conditions, in theology and in church architecture, has been much the same, consciously or unconsciously. The bankruptcy of many of the traditional modes of theological and architectural thought is evident. In despair at this collapse of. traditional language many counsel surrender to the modes of thought, the images and the forms, of the "secular" order. In architecture the appropriate attitude would be to abandon all resemblance to traditional forms and merge into accessible form completely. In this sense the proper solution for the problem of church architecture. in our time would be the store front church (an idea worth pondering). In point of fact, theologians who speak most eloquently about accepting the world of the secular continue to hold positions in seminaries, and church builders most aware of contemporary techniques inevitably turn out buildings that "look like churches".

It is inevitable that this be so. Both theology and church. architecture have a function to perform and it is not performed with tools designed for another purpose, however worthy that purpose might be. This much must be received from those who recognize now the role of the secular order: the role of the formal church may not be any more acceptable in the eyes of God than many other tasks. The church may not, by some derivation from the "spiritual," be superior to the hospital which directly serves human needs where the church as such, is helpless or, for that matter, the factory which may sustain a whole town. But abandoning. the claim to special merit does not change the fact that there is a special function which is served only by tools appropriate to the purpose.

"Function" is a word which raises ghosts. Early in the controversy over architectural function-

alism the distinction between "functional" and "utilitarian" was lost. Since the first major prophet of functionalism in American architecture, Louis Sullivan, made extensive use of extremely florid ornament and relied heavily on forms which were visibly powerful and whose texture contributed much to the expressive whole, it should have caused some thought to those who translated his concern for function into its most utilitarian reference. To Sullivan a building exists to serve some humane purpose. If the form of the building does not grow naturally out of that humane purpose, give body to the function which it basically performs, then no amount of utilitarianism or elegant imitation will make that building anything other than a denial of the spirit and purpose of man. No amount of modernity of vocabulary can make, the building genuine if the forms do not grow out of, express and serve the essential purpose of the building.

III

Essentially the argument is complete and it may not be absolutely necessary to add anything, other than to make explicit what should be implicit in the juxtaposition of argument and evidence. It is in the cleft between the forms and needs of his own day and the particular requirements of a building which is not that of the common life that Schwarz's method is seen most clearly.

We can but dimly sense what great things would come to pass were the whole creative human being to enter into "technical work"–to enter into it not in order to decorate it but in order to bring to bear in serious work the creative power of the feeling hand, of the seeing eye, of the hearing ear, of the whole moving and effective body. Such serious work would still be–or would be for the first time–truly valid and effective work. This other technology–actually it would be a new architecture, the heiress of the Gothic–is our greatest hope. Promising beginnings are already at hand: now we are commencing to "see" technology and what we see is a primeval forest of forms clothing the earth. These forms are proven in hard tests, they are powerful, wild and primary, and unfortunately they are neglected–but they are real. The fact that we see this forest of forms is, however, the beginning of a true liberation from within–and this liberation has nothing to do with the decoration of the handcrafters and the sociologists even though these, too, have sometimes been referred to as an emancipation. And is not this liberation already at hand in the great and oft misunderstood doctrine of the new architecture? (p. 222)

This is a genuine modernity and marks Schwarz as one of the creators and leaders, not one of the epigones. This is a long way from using the forms of the now architecture because the church must be modem where the imitation of superficial forms (imitative architects do not only imitate the Gothic or the Georgian) gives the illusion of modernity without the substance of the modern spirit.

Schwarz's churches are not abrasively "modem" but no form in them proceeds from any other source than a spirit profoundly in harmony with the most. creative thought forms of his own day. It is not likely that his churches would be mistaken for anything other than churches. This is particularly true of his early and mature forms. Several of his last churches had become so austere in their style that he could use to his purpose a characteristically industrial technique (steel beams or reinforced concrete beams in a large grid with an infilling of brick). Even these, however, state externally the spatial division which originates with a congregation gathered around the altar.

His procedure, his paradigmatic method, appears to be to start with a sure grasp and an absolute commitment to the structural vocabulary of the world he lives in. Then that vocabulary is treated with the transparency of a vocabulary, a screen through which the essence of things is seen and a tool by which the seen is grasped and given palpable shape. "Analysis" at this stage may be a useful discipline but it is not a constructive device.

The next stage is seen as clearly in Schwarz's "secular" work as in his churches. The Gurzenich, Cologne's ancient festival hall-beer cellar-exposition hall, was rebuilt to Schwarz's design and is a place of great elegance and dignity with no sense whatever of the numinous quality which would be here so out of place (except as the numinous inheres in the great memento mori which he incorporated. The noble central staircase goes around the apse of a ruined church and the windows look down on Kaethe Kollwitz's tragic sculpture, 'Sorrowing Parents"). Schwarz's technical vocabulary was at the total service of his vision of the task at hand. As a faithful Christian he chose his task as that of churches. so, without self-consciousness about the vocabulary of modernity, he built his structure around what he saw, the worshipping community in the presence of its holy Lord. The questions that so torment theologians and churchmen become irrelevant He has not asked how he can speak to modern man. He has not asked how he could appropriately use the thought forms and the language. of his own day. He sought first the kingdom of God and those things were. Added to him.

It is at this point that the methodological procedure should become clearest compared with the common temptation of theology or of architecture. The architects of churches in our day do not generally begin with what Schwarz calls "sacred reality" which is alive and real for us. They begin with some doctrine about what a church should be. Very often the doctrine itself is unimpeachable for there are a great many churches being build by intelligent and learned and competent men. Many of the churches are brilliantly done, fascinating buildings or impressive buildings. But they aren't numinous buildings. They state a doctrine but they don't incarnate the life of the community. They are arguments and neither chalices nor proclamations.

To recover the body is to recover the origin of art and of thought. Otherwise art and thought serve the propagation of dogma. To start from. the body and the essence of its experience of natural creation is to start from the things which are given in the economy of God. To start from the body in faith and hope is to experience the world as it is, not as it used to be experienced or, as we would like it to become. The task of the Christian architect as for the Christian thinker is neither to reject forms not make himself subservient to forms which have grown up elsewhere nor to burden his consciousness with any doctrine of forms or language. His task is to start with the deepest experience available to him of the Christian life as it is given in the order of this day and to clothe that experience with the forms or the shapes that most adequately enable it to act in the space given us to live in.: He cannot give his work a distinction in the common life which it does not rightly have nor can he, fearful of human favor, obscure the function which his. work rightly serves. He does his work as it is given under the conditions which prevail. The event is in the hands of God.