A PARABLE [for Mr Johnson]
Not too long ago nor very far away there were two churches. To the harried eye, they may have appeared quite different. Other than their common date and purpose, one of them seems more than simple, unadorned; stripped of ornament that might otherwise entice the eye. The sort of building which gains its dignity through the avoidance of sham or pretense in favor of honest and forthright economy. The other church gains its appropriateness for Divine Service through the conscious choice of style, one distinguished by the artful recognition of function and constructional necessity. This example is more easily placed in the spectrum of style; the other less so, achieving that aspect through subtraction, rather than addition. But step within either church and be surprised.
Like the architecture of Early Christianity, the exteriors are secular, of this world, while their interiors afford us a glimpse of reward for the life well lived. Such is the first example. The second comes as greater surprise and a different reward, less readily explained. The differences between them are a small matter; their similarities, another thing altogether.
The likeness of these two churches reveals a common origin — for it is a single source, derived from the 15th century church of Ste Cecile at Albi, in central France, a building shaped, like so many others of its era, by the genius of Gothic engineering, but additionally by the religious unrest of its particular place in time: the Albigensian Heresy, when God’s “mighty fortress” had become both spiritual and physical defense. Here the famously “flying” external buttress had become the weakest link in the otherwise structural rationality and soundness of the mature Gothic style. The builders of Albi had foreseen this need and, with a few other churches of southern France and northeastern Spain (Catalunya), turned these vulnerabilities inward on the lofty walls they support; removed them from the advance of catapult or siege machine. The nineteenth century exercised its heresies in other ways, so the Albigensian ploy served other ends.
In dense urban areas of industrializing Europe and Britain and the overabundance of excess emigrant population in North America, church sites were expensive and therefore tight; they could ill afford the dramatic outward splay of buttresses and the waste of valuable space and useful volume. The Albi experiment was applied this way in Victorian Britain, but less so in North America. Where and whenever it was, however — as at our examples in Chattanooga and Kansas City — it served both economy and the expression of spiritual power. How or why our architect William Halsey Wood chose this pattern is unclear. He did it just twice, so far as is known, one of few American architects to do so.
POSTSCRIPT
Good architecture is the product of multiple contributions to design and construction. So, here we cannot ignore the role of client: the Reverends Henry Jardine and G. W. Dumbell (whose name I imagine was pronounced “DUM-ble”, as in Dumbledore).
Father Dumbell was an emigrant from the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. His origins are neither less nor more unusual than other 19th century Anglican clergy, though, and local lore has it that those slightly “Georgian” features of his church at Chattanooga have their origin in a ruined fortification near his birthplace, though images of that source are not convincing. Seeking more information on the Dumbell family, however, provides a far simpler explanation: the churchyard site of the Dumbell Family mausoleum is adjacent to Braddan Kirk, outside the capital city of Douglas. Old Braddan Kirk is preserved as a cemetery chapel just south of the newer church, whose bell tower almost certainly inspired its reference in Chattanooga.
The story of Father Jardine, Halsey Wood’s client in the early stages of the project at Kansas City, is far more than a nostalgic case of homesickness. Jardine’s churchmanship was, like Dumbell’s, a match for the Anglo-Catholicism of his architect, though it had more often come to be an issue with both his bishop and parishioners, in ways Wood may never have experienced. Jardine’s situation at Kansas City quickly devolved into defrocking, legal recrimination, imprisonment, and ultimately suicide. The good father’s ashes are interred beneath the high altar of the church he inspired and some claim his spirit resides there today.
Every building tells a story — of its imagining, its endurance, its demise and its progeny. And each of these stories is worthwhile, though some are more disturbing than routine.