44: "My Breuer" by Brendan Riley (Tuesday, August 18)
By the time I learned who Marcel Breuer was, he’d already indelibly shaped my ideas about knowledge, my thoughts about spirit, and my first steps into adulthood. I went to college at St. John’s University, a small Catholic school for men run by Benedictine monks, nestled among the trees between a couple small lakes and a lonely stretch of I-94 in central Minnesota. The campus has a distinctly divided architectural flavor. On one hand, many of the buildings are red brick and stately. The stately Monastery itself, the “Quad”, and a few of the dorm buildings preside over the grassy expanse of campus. They feel old, weighty, traditional.
And then there are the Bauhaus buildings: the old science building, a couple more dorms and the library. These buildings feel modern. Not trendy, modern; they bring this century, this country, the modern world into the alcove of medieval tradition that monasteries represent. If this were the whole of the experience, the campus would feel shockingly divided. The grey, modular buildings striped with cold bands of concrete would stand in contrast to the weathered old brick buildings.
Instead, the crowning achievement of Breuer’s work at St. John’s acts like a keystone supporting the two styles on campus: the Abbey church. The church towers above you like a Gothic cathedral, its enormous honeycomb of stained glass windows reaching all the way up the North wall of the church. But it also defies ancient practices, most significantly by placing the altar away from the wall, with significant seating behind it. The sloping, angular concrete walls also overturn conventional church design, both in shape and in their minimalist decoration.
St. John's Abbey Church*
But most people remember the bell tower, the first thing you see as you drive up the hill onto campus, indeed, one of the first things you see from the freeway. The wide expanse of the tower’s concrete banner defines the church, even more than do the windows. Once again, it mimics the ancient purpose of such towers by calling brothers and fathers and students to prayer while simultaneously announcing that something different happens there. A different spirit resides in a place simultaneously so ancient and so modern.
Just as the banner mirrors the church, so does the mix of Bauhaus and brick mirror the spirit of education and service at the heart of the Benedictine order as it manifests at St. John’s. The monks and nuns in central Minnesota believe in their order and their God but also in their hearts and their minds; they advocate ethics and service. They’re not ascetic, but engaged. It’s that blend that Breuer brought to campus architecture with his edifices of angles and concrete.
*Image by NateJ, used under CC-Attr-NonCom license.
