Church design

I've been reading a lot of books on liturgy and church design recently, and I've always paid attention to discussions about the topic on blogs.  There is one striking thing that I have noticed in the advocacy for traditional architecture.  I've noticed that advocates of traditional church design often fall into a couple of key mistakes:

One trap is mistaking "the way we've done it for a long time" with "the way it has always been done."  It often manifests in the thinking that because we have done something for a thousand years that we have always done it that way, or that doing it that way represents some theology or even Tradition (yeah, big T) to which we must adhere, or that it is the only way to do it.  The tabernacle is a great example of this.  We have not always had tabernacles, not always had them on center.  You can take a "Theology of the Temple" approach and use the precedent of the Temple as the foundational model of church design where the tabernacle is THE Tabernacle, the Holy of Holies in the Temple.  There's certainly something there, but that doesn't mean that the Temple-based model is at the heart of how we should design a church, the only foundation.  The mass is the culmination of all sacrifices, not just the Temple sacrifice.

But at the same time, having a tabernacle on center works, and is a good idea for a whole bunch of reasons.  Unfortunately, we have this tendency in church design to try to legitimatize good ideas by ascribing them some place in Holy Tradition, instead of just letting them stand on their own as good ideas.

Style is another trap.  There is this notion that only traditional styles are appropriate for church designs.  However, that is not the reality.  Otherwise, how could the Renaissance or Baroque or Gothic or even Romanesque styles have ever become appropriate.  The reality is that these traditional styles were largely created for use in ecclesiastic design.  This makes them very well suited to use in churches.  But it does not mean that we have to use them.  Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of examples of other styles being used successfully for churches, they were not developed in the crucible of church design.  But that doesn't mean it's impossible.  Quite frankly, the traditionalists are generally the ones that care the most about appropriate liturgical design.  They are the ones that we need focused on "baptizing" or creating new styles that can serve the needs of church design in the present world, with the current needs of the church.  As long as the people who care almost exclusively work in traditional styles, the less likely we will ever have good designs in non-traditional styles .. and quite frankly, we're going to get churches in a non-traditional style one way or the other.

And the fact that so many traditionalists are closed off to the idea of using a "non-traditional" style actually creates another problem.  If we just copy traditional designs without understanding what made them successful, the great likelihood that our copies will be imperfect means that we are very likely to create unsuccessful churches.  A look at the 19th c. is all that is required to see how rote reproduction leads to bad design.  Rote reproduction led to many churches that just did not work well for liturgy, even though they had all the traditional elements.

The last trap is an uncritical rejection of all that has come since.  There have been a lot of aberrations since the traditional styles fell out of wide-spread use in church design.  But there have also been some legitimate gains.  The one that really sticks out is the altar.  Free-standing altars aren't about celebration ad populum.  Free-standing altars are about the icon of the altar.  The altar is an icon of Christ, the heart of the church, the gravitational center of our liturgy and the building that houses that liturgy.  Yet we still see this tendency in the traditionalist movement to keep building reredoses and candle plinths sitting on and competing with the altars themselves.


I'm a traditionalist, but at the same time I'm not.  I like good church design.  The traditional styles gained their prominence through being good church design.  For that reason, we should most often fall in line with traditional design and traditional styles.  But because they are good church designs, not because they are traditional.  (There is a value of continuity with traditional styles as well, but this value is not a game ender.)

That is where I feel much of the traditionalist movement goes wrong, it usually comes to the right conclusion, but because it so often comes to the right conclusion for the wrong reason, it has the tendency to also come to some wrong conclusions.