A Modern Catholic Architect

...The columns at the 459 base of an office building may be claptrap...

...Barry Byrne...

...Wright does in a horizontal treatment...

...Byrne frequently stresses the portal, in fact, as in the Immaculata High School and the Church of Saint Thomas the Apostle, by putting it in an angle formed by the two major elements of his plan...

...Byrne...

...Whatever may have been the personal issues involved, these things are aesthetically regrettable...

...but the mass of the building itself may, as it were, shake off these stale touches and announce its own essential lines...

...Bryne has created a type of ecclesiastical design which can expand to meet great problems or contract to meet modest ones...

...Byrne learned from Mr...

...Byrne's buildings which have tempted me to write about them...

...In these buildings of Mr...

...Byrne's architecture is a distinctive achievement of genuine beauty...

...I speak with partiality about Mr...

...for the point of view he has expressed and the methods he has put to work are capable of being used on other buildings besides churches and schools...

...The second line of advance rests upon the first, and endeavors consciously to complete it...

...This advance has been the work of a series of architects, beginning with H. H. Richardson, and going on through a continuous group of Chicago architects—John Root, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and latest of all, Mr...

...here is an artist who expresses the continuity of the Church with its own past, without attempting to stereotype its present activities and ministrations in some dead form of that past...

...One of them has been the elaboration of new materials and functions: the use of the steel-frame and ferro-concrete and the close adaptation of a building to its functional use—these two characteristics have created structures which by their logic and method, if not by their ornament and finish, belong wholly to our own time...

...The entire ornamental effect on the exterior is concentrated on the portal, partly because of its symbolic significance in the mediaeval church and partly because it is the natural point of interest in the design...

...Sullivan designed a number of country banks which were neither Greek temples nor renaissance palaces...

...Since that time I have seen numerous photographs of Mr...

...Byrne "precedent" is in the nature of the Church's ceremonies and observances, rather than in the crystallization of these elements into some special architectural form in, say, the thirteenth century...

...Byrne's work is sufficiently appreciated among those of his own faith...

...By keeping to simple and modern constructional forms, Mr...

...Byrne has indeed approached very closely to Mr...

...The decoration of a modern theatre may be feeble...

...Byrne was a pupil of Mr...

...here is a builder who has faced sincerely the problems of his own day, who uses simple and direct modern methods of construction, and who, out of this simplicity and directness, lays aside the means necessary for a fresh and vital art in every intimate element of the Catholic ritual—in the font, the altar, the Host, the accessory chapels, the Stations of the Cross...

...Wright created dwellinghouses which, by the altered relation of height and breadth, of window-space and wall, clung to the landscape of the prairies and brought the beauty of garden and pool almost into the interior of the home...

...When we master that rule we will have a living architecture...

...One further fact should be noted...

...The lessons themselves have remained: Mr...

...Byrne faced a situation which compelled him to free himself from his master's tutelage and to evolve a special order of design...

...Working under this impulse, Mr...

...and Mr...

...For Mr...

...In coming to specialize in ecclesiastical architecture, in churches and parochial schools and convents, Mr...

...To understand the importance of Mr...

...and even where it has fallen short, it is a brave experiment in the right direction...

...and an outsider may, perhaps, express his humble regrets...

...Byrne's work, because he has in practice embodied the ideas which, I believe, are essential to the solution of every modern architectural problem, be it a church, a school, or a factory...

...Unfortunately, the architects who work most effectively in these new materials have confined themselves chiefly to industrial and commercial buildings...

...Byrne's designs...

...but there are no pillars to obstruct the view...

...Wright's...

...Byrne's, the Catholic Church has made a genuine bequest to American architecture...

...and by disregarding the conditions suggested by Mr...

...Byrne builds in a warm yellow brick, which differs from the local Chicago brick only by its greater warmth and uniformity: the walls are broken by narrow pointed windows, and the vertical lines are accentuated by indentations or by a fluted column of bricks: the design sometimes breaks as it touches the roof-line, into a crest of warm terracotta, ably modeled in a fresh pattern—not taken out of the terra-cotta dealer's catalog...

...His splendid facade for Saint Thomas the Apostle's has been ruined by a wretched wall and gateway which effectually hide the building from the street approach...

...If one can sum up the common element in the highly diversified work of these architects, it has been to use the primitive forms of modern mechanical construction as the basis for an aesthetic expression which shall logically be bound up with it: this involves sloughing off old systems of ornament and historic styles, and creating new patterns...

...These may seem to be very plain lessons indeed, but the ordinary student of architecture, who begins his study by drawing the Five Orders, and who at the end of his course has learned how to copy and adapt one or all of the historic styles is often very far from learning anything at all about this lesson, and he may spend years, as Richardson did, before he learns to work freely in the materials and forms of his own day...

...his parish churches are admirable, and I have seen the sketches for a cathedral which uses the same direct and simple means to contrive an astonishing effect of solemn magnificence...

...Here is an architect who has reconciled tradition and innovation...

...At the present time the church is essentially a sanctuary surrounded by a congregation...

...and part of the success of his designs is no doubt due to the active cooperation he has maintained with Mr...

...and in his early designs the marks of the master are, naturally, evident...

...Alfonso Ianelli, a craftsman-artist of genuine talent, who is as adroit in the design of a lighting fixture as in a symbolic carving...

...Wright's teaching, if not at every point from his practice, were simplicity and functional adequacy...

...As a result of such an examination, my enthusiasm has only been heightened...

...There have been two lines of genuine advance in the development of American architecture...

...In his exteriors, Mr...

...These are the cardinal points in Mr...

...The result is a wide unobstructed hall, high enough to give both physical air and mental dignity, and severe and calm in all its wall surfaces...

...At its best, Mr...

...The prime lessons that Mr...

...but his innovations are transposed to a realm where tradition and historic continuity prevail, and these buildings are not less Catholic structures because they are also modern ones...

...Sullivan's goal: a rule of building so broad as to admit of no exceptions...

...Byrne can afford to put into original craftsmanship what would otherwise go into obsolete methods of building...

...Byrne's plan, the abstractly excellent Stations of the Cross by Alfeo Faggi lose a good part of their aesthetic effect...

...and with difficulty I put aside the temptation until I might examine some of them on the spot, not merely looking at them from the favorable angle chosen by the photographer, but walking around them and into them...

...Within, the sanctuary is the main focus of the artist's effort: against the simplicity of the architectural frame all the intimate accessories of the ritual stand out with increased richness of effect...

...I was not aware when I made this attempt that the solution had already been incorporated in the architectural work of Mr...

...I wonder if Mr...

...and when they turn, for example, to churches, they fall back either upon ancient methods of stone building, or upon stone forms, helped out in tight places by modern systems of construction...

...Byrne's architecture, one must see it against its background...

...Byrne alters the relation of window to wall as freely in vertical groupings as Mr...