Beyond bricks

Is there a spiritual value to inspired architecture?

by Douglass Shand-Tucci

SKYLINE

Bernard Cardinal Law, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston, exhibits many more virtues than one really has a right to expect from a public figure these days.

The cardinal is not, however, notably gifted artistically. At least not visually. And no one has ever suggested that he has a good eye for architecture. The late Monsignor Francis J. Lally, the legendary chairman of the Boston Redevelopment Authority (with whom Daniel Coolidge and I once plotted the restoration of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross), confided that on the subject of architecture -- no matter how exciting the design or how historic the church -- the cardinal just does not engage at all.

He likes white walls. Period.

I was thus alarmed to hear the recent news about St. Aidan's Church near Coolidge Corner, which is headed for closure and possible destruction if the cardinal approves, as he very likely has, the declining parish's merger into the nearby and still thriving parish of St. Mary of the Assumption in Brookline Village.

A historic church -- John F. Kennedy was baptized there in 1917 -- it is also architecturally significant as a characteristic example of the work of Charles D. Maginnis.

A leader in the early 20th century of a group sometimes called the Boston Gothicists, Maginnis was perhaps the most gifted follower of Ralph Adams Cram, America's greatest church architect. And he became his era's foremost designer of Roman Catholic churches in the United States. A considerable influence in the profession generally, he was also president of (and was awarded the gold medal of) the American Institute of Architects.

In Boston, the landmark architecture of his firm, Maginnis and Walsh, includes the historic Gothic Revival towers that so majestically claim the Newton heights of Boston College, and the high altar of Copley Square's Trinity Church, gorgeous in its almost Byzantine glitter and splendor. In New York City, another high altar of Maginnis's, with a richly detailed Gothic baldacchino, is the centerpiece of St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue.

Of course, he is not much remembered now, but he hasn't been forgotten by his profession: the April newsletter of the Boston Society of Architects reported on a recent article in Faith and Form magazine, by Dennis Keefe and F.W. Atherton, on this old Boston firm.

I wonder, has the cardinal read it? Or any of Maginnis's own always-mellifluous writings? And I wonder, too, if what Ada Louise Huxtable wrote about St. Bartholomew's Church in New York (when its architecture was also threatened, in that case by greedy developers tempting parishioners anxious about funding social programs) is not equally relevant to St. Aidan's. Huxtable complained:

That the beauty the St. Bartholomew block contributes to the welfare of the city and all of its inhabitants was not part of the reckoning. . . . Only in a culture where commercial values have vanquished spiritual values would such a church and its setting not be considered a legacy beyond price.

Now, St. Aidan's is not Maginnis's masterwork, as St. Bart's may be Bertram Goodhue's; nor, indeed, was Maginnis the genius Goodhue was. And I do not necessarily argue that all churches of this type, or of either architect's design, should be preserved; or that art and architecture should always trump other considerations. Perhaps we can do without St. Aidan's, a modest though charming Tudor Gothic parish church built in 1911.

But would the cardinal and his advisers recognize Maginnis's masterwork if they saw it? (It is the Church of St. Catherine of Siena in Somerville.) And on what aesthetic grounds, if any, have they decided for St. Mary's, into which St. Aidan's will most likely be merged?

St. Mary's, too, is the work of nationally celebrated Boston architects: Peabody and Stearns, designers who flourished before Maginnis and Walsh in the late 19th century. In terms of architectural significance, one could as reasonably argue for St. Mary's preservation as for St. Aidan's. These things are relative. Is the work a major one, an early one, unique in its locale, stylistically or structurally unusual, nationally or regionally significant? The answers to those and other questions are key.

But the point is: are they even asked? One wonders whether architectural or historical value enters into the decision at all!

More than Cardinal Law's eye -- good, bad, or indifferent -- prompts my skepticism. Historically, the Boston archdiocese has a very mixed record on these matters. In 1964 Cardinal Cushing set the pace for the whole city in mounting a brilliant restoration of the early-19th-century St. Stephen's Church in the North End, Boston's last surviving church of Charles Bulfinch's design. But in our own period, when the Jesuits brutalized the hardly less important late-19th-century interior of the Church of the Immaculate Conception in the South End, the archdiocese mounted no effective protest despite widespread public outcry.

Now, I am a great admirer of the Jesuit Urban Center, as the Immaculate is now called. The Jesuits there are alert to women's issues, and their gay-positive ministry is in striking contrast to the rather less welcoming attitude at Law's own Cathedral of the Holy Cross, also in the South End.

But the Jesuits' progressive attitude on social questions seems very much at odds with the appreciation one would expect from them, and from the archdiocese, for the historical and architectural legacy of the Immaculate -- a legacy celebrated by no less than George Santayana (in his memoirs) as the center of the intellectual and artistic culture of Boston's Roman Catholics in the late Victorian era.

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Fortunately, there is a happier tale to tell of art and architecture in the Boston archdiocese today, and it is to be found at the church that in this century succeeded the Immaculate as Boston's center of Roman Catholic intellectual and artistic life: St. Paul's Church in Harvard Square.

St. Paul's itself, built in 1915, was designed by Edward T.P. Graham, now really a quite obscure architect. But it is Graham's major work, and St. Paul's is beautiful not only in itself -- the heroic marble columns surrounding its high altar may be the most striking altar screen in the archdiocese -- but in its setting.

Seen, as it most often is, behind and to the left of the Lampoon Castle looking down Mt. Auburn Street, the St. Paul's campanile -- modeled, according to Robert Bell Retting, on the Torre del Commune in Verona -- is a picturesque and poetic climax to Harvard's finest streetscape, which compares to the famous prospect along the High of Oxford's colleges. Nor is the church less winning from the front, where it faces on to a small Old World-style square formed by Bow and Arrow Streets that must be one of the most charming and uncontrived urban spaces in any American city.

St. Paul's, moreover, is famously as much worth hearing as seeing: the archdiocesan choir school has been based there for some years. Its emphasis on music has well served that parish's ministry not only to the Harvard community but to the archdiocese as a whole. And that, in turn, was probably as important as the parish's Harvard connections in enabling St. Paul's to realize an addition of unusual architectural distinction.

When a new choir school proved necessary, the parish (prodded by building committee co-chair Tim O'Donnell, whom I informally advised) insisted on a first-class architect. In fact, the choice came down to Kallmann, McKinnell, and Wood or Koetter-Kim. And while I would be fascinated to know what Gerhardt Kallmann and Michael McKinnell would have given us at St. Paul's, there is no denying that Fred Koetter and Susie Kim, who were finally chosen for the job, scored quite a triumph with their much-admired design.

The secret of its success, I think, is that the overall design is superbly urbanistic (in fact, very Italian) -- a playground, pedestrian pathway, and parking lot are combined in a way that beautifully encompasses the elegant gates and stair that lead up to Arrow Street -- while the school building itself is deftly cast in both Historicist and Modernist terms. Not content to respond to the Historicist design of the church, the architects also cast a knowing eye across Arrow Street to the large stucco building, very Modernist in feeling (indeed, it might have been designed by Adolf Loos in 1900s Vienna), that gives such a marvelous European flavor to St. Paul's Square.

Together with the opulent Tudor Baroque of Adams House's Westmorley Court and the little gabled frame building that is home to two matchless Cambridge institutions -- Josefina Yanguas's Café Pamplona and Paul Robertson's Architectural Bookshop -- St. Paul's and the Loos Building (as I call it) define this most picturesque quarter of Boston's Left Bank, as I always think of Cambridge.

It will be even more picturesque if Gerhardt Kallmann's admirers mobilize to give him the chance to contribute to this scene after all by commissioning him to design an Italian-style street fountain for the square, as Kallmann longs to do every time he returns from Rome. He would model it on the Fontana delle Tartarughe in the Piazza Mattei, a little Roman square very much like St. Paul's Square. Four young men disport themselves with dolphins, which spout water into a shell, while all the while supporting turtles that climb into the bowl above. All this in front of Adams House! It would be charming.

One step in the right direction has already been taken. St. Paul's present pastor, Monsignor Dennis Sheehan, has restored St. Paul's deep-toned bells at no little inconvenience: they now ring out the hour, half-hour, and quarter-hour with a dignified clangor worthy of Rome itself.

Church, college, café, bookstore, and bells: who will give the fountain?

St. Paul's gathers all this up beautifully, not only to set off the church, but to give focus to a wonderful urban space that richly endows us all.

This is the way it should be. Church and state each have their own, often (rightfully) incompatible, purposes. But that they can conspire to good effect is clear in old St. Paul's Square.

It is a lesson perhaps for St. Aidan's, and certainly for the cardinal. Yet it is surely a cause for concern that St. Paul's seems so conspicuous an exception to the way things usually happen in the archdiocese of Boston.

If St. Aidan's goes, I for one will feel the loss. Architecture of that quality is a lot easier to tear down than to replace in our fragile urban fabric.

But if St. Aidan's is well and truly lost, St. Paul's is a stellar example of what there is to save.