Saint John’s Abbey Church: Marcel Breuer and the Creation of a Modern Sacred Space by Victoria M. Young (review)

Architectural historian Victoria M. Young wastes no time early in this study reminding readers of the degree to which Marcel Breuer’s famous abbey church for the Benedictines of Collegeville, Minnesota, deviates from the building conventions of Catholic monasticism. She is just as quick to note that the church, completed in 1961, was intended from its inception to support the most ancient ritual practices of its users. Herein lies part of the “paradox” that resurfaces throughout Young’s behind-the-scenes account of how Saint John’s Abbey Church came to stand amidst the groundswell in Catholic liturgical reform of the mid-twentieth century.

Young devotes considerable attention at the outset of her book to the abbey’s physical appearance prior to Breuer’s arrival in the early 1950s for the purpose of designing a centenary church. The brothers of Saint John’s had twice modified their existing place of worship to bolster participation by the lay assembly that regularly joined them in prayer. In preparation for the 1956 anniversary of their establishment as a community of educators on the outskirts of St. Cloud, Minnesota, however, they proposed erection of an entirely new edifice reflective of such recent instructions on the renewal of sacred worship and art as had been promulgated in Pope Pius XII’s Mediator Dei (1947). Young chronicles this effort in detail and explains in one of the book’s most intriguing sections how it was that a committee of “Twelve Apostles” selected the Bauhaus-trained Breuer (1902–81) to serve as architect from a field of celebrated modernists. Aided by previously unpublished photographs and drawings, she likewise records the experimental give-and-take of ideas that prevailed between the members of Breuer’s New York-based firm and their Collegeville clients as the project unfolded.

Young’s facility for dissecting the formal components of architectural expression is evident in her analysis of the novel interior scheme ultimately devised by Breuer for his church, which accommodated lay worshipers in shallow ranks of pews splayed outward from a centralized altar. She properly notes Breuer’s enthusiasm for wrapping the whole of this ritual setting in vast expanses of reinforced concrete, although her suggestion that the medium’s inherent plasticity represents “a metaphor for the vision the Benedictines had” and even an essential ingredient for “shap[ing] liturgical reform” (p. 33) may be too literal an interpretive stretch. Young situates the Abbey Church project nicely within the evolutionary history of twentieth-century church architecture, however, and correctly measures the breadth of its effect on Catholic church-building universally in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.

Young’s book is quite handsome, and the archival material it unveils will likely appeal to students of Breuer’s work or high-modernist architecture in general. If the study suffers minor weaknesses, however, they appear primarily in those places where its author strays from a strictly historical/analytical treatment of her subject into the abstract realm of sacramental theology. This is not to say that Young’s speculations on the spiritual-aesthetic effect of Breuer’s church on the typical worshiper—lay or ordained—are without merit. Neither is it to claim that her passing references to the role of the “congregation” in the Church’s “ritualistic actions” (p. 109) are anything but near-misses of usage apt to trouble only the prickliest liturgists or guardians of Catholic parlance. Nonetheless, the author’s handling of the theological underpinnings of the Abbey Church seems considerably less nuanced than her observations regarding, say, the tactile qualities of masonry or metal—which may explain why she finds paradox in the amalgam of forces that shaped the building rather than evidence for the kind of synthesis that has characterized Catholic art from the start. Young steers clear of the polemics burdening much...