St John's Abbey Church: Marcel Breuer and the Creation of a Modern Sacred Space

摘要

In 1957, J.M. Richards discussed a new Roman Catholic church in Basildon, St Basil's, in the Architectural Review. 'I don't have to begin in this instance,' he wrote, 'by analysing the function of the building.' For Richards, 'the purpose of a church' was something 'fixed and unalterable and therefore does not involve the architect in a search for improvement in the programme he is initially set, as a factory often does, or a hospital'. Yet, as a growing number of historians have shown, church and cathedral architecture in the middle of the twentieth century was hardly 'fixed and unalterable', as Richards put it, but in many cases involved experiments not only with architectural form and structure but also layout. The results were often striking and innovative. Some writers, such as Robert Proctor, Elain Harwood, and Ayla Lepine and Kate Jordan, have approached the subject typologically, illustrating how religious architecture was re-made by a range of people-architects, the clergy, engineers and congregations-in response to evolving views of the church's purpose and its services. Others have looked at architects whose output included religious buildings alongside other work, showing how these buildings reflected broader architectural debates, and that in turn they informed those debates.