Congregation Festival – Celebrating the Architecture of Sacred Space

St Theresia Church, Linz - Rudolf Schwarz

On Saturday 29th February 2020, the Architecture Foundation held a one day conference at St Mary's Paddington. "Congregation" drew together architects, academics and philosophers to discuss building spaces for worship.

The afternoon began with a discussion between The Reverend Dr Ayla Lepine and the architect Patrick Lynch, each focussing on a different architect renowned for their work in sacred buildings. 

Ayla spoke about Ninian Comper, who designed the Chapel of St Sepulchre at St Mary's Paddington which is now badly in need of restoration. Ayla presented a number of images of the chapel which is currently not accessible to the public. She explained that Comper believed that a church enshrines the altar of God - where His people gather, dwell, worship and love. His approach can be described as "inclusive beauty" inspired and underpinned by the radical message of St Peter's dream and noted that his WW1 memorial at Downside Abbey featuring St Sebastian had been used on the cover of Architectural Review's "Queerness" edition. 

Ninian Comper - Detail of WW1 memorial at Downside Abbey

Patrick Lynch focussed on the work of Rudolf Schwarz, whose writings and buildings responded to the growth of the liturgical movement in the Catholic Church that went on to influence Vatican II. Lynch commented that whilst those who sought to promote modernism were almost universally anti Catholic, all the best modernist architects were Catholic. He drew attention in particular to Schwarz's first church commission, St. Fronleichnam in Aachen and the later St. Theresia Church in Linz, noting their influence on contemporary architects including, Peter Zumthor and Niall McLaughlin and showing how Schwarz responded to and helped to promote new ways of embodying liturgy in shape. 

We then heard from architects and developers (but no clients) of three recent or ongoing projects to redevelop churches in East London. Matthew Lloyd of Matthew Lloyd Architects spoke about the redevelopment of St Mary at Eton. Richard Gatti of Gatti Routh Rhodes spoke about the redevelopment of Bethnal Green Mission Church and Chris Levett of DLA spoke about the ongoing redevelopment of St John at Hackney. Each of the three schemes involved capitalising on the increasing land values in this part of the city in order to generate a return that was invested to provide improved worship and or community space for the church. Whilst all the designers had consulted widely in order to develop a brief for the projects there was a sense that in most cases the liturgical use of the church space was something left to each church themselves to determine - there was little influence along the lines of Rudolf Schwarz here. 

Shahed Saleem of the University of Westminster and Julia Barfield of Marks Barfield gave an interesting lecture on the evolution of the design of the British Mosque. The first to be built in Britain was a folly in Kew Gardens designed by William Chambers in 1761. The first working mosque, the Shah Jahan Mosque, was built in the grounds of an oriental institute in Woking. Shahed presented statistics charting the growth of Islam in the UK and explained how diaspora and indigenous Muslim communities took different approaches to the design and identity of mosques. The first mosque built by a Muslim community was in Liverpool in 1889 - for mainly English converts to the faith. Frederick Gibberd's Regents Park Mosque completed in 1977 blends modern and traditional forms but from the 1990's a new "authenticity" emerged in mosque design driven largely by Arab engineers based in the north of England which harped back to more traditional designs. 

The Cambridge Central Mosque, Marks Barfield Architects

Julia Barfield spoke candidly about the development of the design of the Cambridge Central Mosque and the influence of the client, Tim Winter, whose father John had been an important architect. The design of the building and the beautiful timber canopy is based on the geometric design know as 'Breath of Compassion'. Unlike church design there were very few rules to follow except for the location of the qibla wall and mihrab. This allowed the client and architect to develop what has become known as the most women friendly mosque in the country. Julia Barfield was open about the influence that donors had on the design of the building, with the dome added into the design later at the request of a Turkish benefactor.

The conference concluded with a discussion between the philosopher Alain de Botton and Simon Henley of Henley Halebrown about the capacity of secular buildings to answer our need for ritual and ceremony. 

Alain de Botton said he was a self-appointed representative for "nostalgic atheists" those who long for something deep and spiritual but are put off by religion. He sees value in a "feeling of transcendence" and called for the development of buildings apart from churches or mosques, which honour some aspect of the meaning of life - loving or service or a place to congregate. 

He explained that ritual has a bad name in the modern world, but the answer to satisfying the longings of nostalgic atheists may lie in religious rituals - which exist to provide a calendar for our emotional life. Many of the liturgies around rituals are artificial but "without a degree of artificiality we will not be able to access that which we truly and deeply long for."

He noted the importance of architecture in creating and forming this sense of purpose - "every building generates certain expectations and we mould our behaviour accordingly."

Links 
Congregation : The Architecture Foundation