A PARABLE (for a friend)

Not too long ago nor very far away, there are two churches. To the hasty eye, they may seem dissimilar. Other than their common date and purpose, one of them appears more than simple, unadorned; stripped of ornament. The sort of building which gains dignity through avoidance of sham or pretense. The other achieves its appropriateness for Divine Service through the conscious minimization of “style”, distinguished by the artful recognition of functional and constructional necessity. This one is more easily positioned in the spectrum of style; the other, less so, achieving its “style” through subtraction, minimizing all but the essential.

Step within each church, however, and be surprised. Like the architecture of Early Christianity, the exteriors are secular, of this world, while the interiors afford us of ultimate reward for the life well lived. Such is the first example. The second is a greater surprise, unexpected, and a different sort of reward, less readily explained. the difference(s) between them are one small matter; their similarities, another thing altogether.

Their likeness may reveal a common origin: they are, in fact, the simultaneous products of one mind, a single imagination. Their design — for they derive from a single historical source — comes from the 15th century church of Ste. Cecile at Albi in central France, a building shaped, like most of its era, by the genius of Gothic engineering, but additionally by the religious unrest of its particular place and time: the age of Albigensian Heresy, when God’s “mighty fortress” served both spiritual and physical defense. Here the external “flying” buttress would have become its weakest link in the otherwise structural cohesion of Gothic style. The architects of Albi had foreseen tis need and, with a few other churches of southern France and northern Spain (Catalunya), turned these vulnerabilities on the lofty walls they support; removed them from catapult and siege machine; maintained stability by withdrawing this weakest element.

The 19th century exercised its heresies in other ways; this Albigensian ploy served other ends. In dense urban areas of industrializing Europe and to serve the overabundance of Europe’s immigrant population in urbanizing America, church sites were tight, expense trumping expanse. They could ill afford the outward display of the buttress and its waste of useful volume. The Albi experiment was applied this way in Victorian Britain but less often in North America. In our examples at Chattanooga and Kansas City, the internal effect served economy as well as the reinforcement of spiritual power.

How or why our architect William Halsey Wood chose this path isn’t known. He did it only twice, so far as is known, just one of few American architects to do so.

CODA

Good architecture is the product of collaboration those multiple contributors to the process of design and construction. And here we cannot ignore the role of client: the Reverends Henry Jardine and G. W. Dumbell (which I prefer to pronounce “DUM-ble”). Father Dumbell was an emigrant from the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. His origins are neither more nor less unusual than other 19th century Anglican clergy and local tradition has it that the slightly Georgian features of his church at Chattanooga — and unlikely turn of events at that point in American architectural history — had their origin in a ruinous fortification near his birthplace, though images of that source aren’t especially convincing. Seeking more information on the family, however, revealed a far simpler explanation: the churchyard site of the Dumbell family mausoleum is adjacent to Braddan Kirk, the family parish. Old Braddan Kirk, preserved as a cemetery chapel to the south, includes a bell tower almost certainly the inspiration for its reference at Chattanooga.

The story of Father Jardine, Wood’s client in early stages of the project at Kansas City, is attributable to a motive far more than nostalgia or homesickness. Jardine’s churchmanship was a match for his architect’s Anglo-Catholicism, though the priest’s had become an issue with both his bishop and his parishioners. Jardine’s situation at Kansas City had devolved into legal recriminations, defrocking, and imprisonment and ultimately to suicide. His ashes are interred beneath the high altar and local lore has his spirit residing in the church today. That factor could not have been a conscious influence on Wood but there is an uncanny expression in the church Jardine began.

Every building tells a story: of its imagining, its endurance, or demise. Regardless, each of these stories has meaning, though some are routine, merely ordinary, while others are can disturb.