POSTED ON: 02/03/07
Modernist houses of worship among the city's treasures
From Friday's Globe and Mail
DAVE LeBLANC
Edmonton's famous, 36-foot-tall, 100-voice "singing Christmas tree" hasn't sung in Central Pentecostal Tabernacle's modernist pyramid since December, 2005.
When the church financed a move to larger quarters across town by selling its land, it put the 1972 wood-shingled pyramid and its companion, the 1964 concrete and glass pavilion — both by award-winning architect Peter Hemingway — at risk of being bulldozed for a condominium development. It also placed the iconic buildings on the Heritage Canada Foundation's "top 10 most endangered places and worst losses" list for 2007.
Also on the endangered list is Toronto's own 48 Abell St., the 19th-century artists' live/work factory that underlines the problem with the all-powerful Ontario Municipal Board, and, in the "losses" category, Peter Dickinson's landmark Inn on the Park at Leslie Street and Eglinton Avenue.
But I digress. The listing of Mr. Hemingway's buildings got me to thinking about Toronto's modernist churches and synagogues — the larger, monumental ones that belong to the entire city and the smaller, tucked-away gems known only to their immediate neighbours — and how I'd miss them if they were gone.
Anyone who has driven east on York Mills Road past the Don Valley Parkway will have witnessed how commandingly Parkwoods United Church occupies its wedge-shaped lot. Especially beautiful at twilight, this glowing stained-glass triangle is a beacon of calm to motorists navigating the curve.
Similarly, the aggressive, projecting prow of St. Peter's Estonian Lutheran Church on Mt. Pleasant Road north of Eglinton is a dominating presence despite overhead wires, traffic signs and high-rises. Designed by Estonian-born architect Michael Bach, it shows a strong Scandinavian influence. "He was a great talent," says architect Jerome Markson, who counted Mr. Bach among his professors at the University of Toronto, from where he graduated in 1953.
Interestingly, Mr. Markson, who started his own practice in 1955 (the same year St. Peter's was built), is collaborating with architect Cindy Rendely on a new sanctuary that will stand in front of the international style building that the Beth Torah Congregation has called home since 1965. On a small residential street in the Lawrence Avenue and Dufferin Street area, the large, thick-roofed box by Friedman Petroff and Jeruzalski Architects is similar to one of the threatened Edmonton buildings.
On another small street, there is another large box — architect Irving Grossman's design for the Beth David B'nai Israel Beth Am Synagogue. In a 1995 interview, Mr. Grossman explained that "severe economic constraints" forced the design in the direction of an "industrial box," but a collaboration with artist Graham Coughtry to create huge, repeating menorah motifs in poured concrete for the wall panels transformed the synagogue in the Bathurst and Sheppard area into a "jewel box."
Indeed, modernism was a logical choice for religious organizations in the 1950s and 60s. Most buildings designed in the modernist style could be built more cheaply than those featuring traditional, ornament-heavy, ecclesiastical architecture. What's more, with the real or imagined fear that television — while perhaps not a tool of the devil — was at least partly responsible for dwindling attendance figures, it was hoped that space-age designs would put the pious back into the pews.
"Next to modern public buildings, 'old-fashioned' churches appeared hopelessly obsolete," professor Gretchen T. Buggeln wrote of the post-Second World War period in an article entitled "Sacred space: designing America's churches" in the June, 2004, edition of The Christian Century. In a 1997 essay entitled "The roots of modernist church architecture," which appeared in the Adoremus Bulletin, Notre Dame architecture professor Duncan Stroik made a similar point. "After World War II, the modernist movement was embraced worldwide as an expression of the technological triumph of the war," he wrote. "Many pastors followed the lead of government and big business by building abstract, asymmetrical and futuristic churches in modern materials."
Modern masters Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Finnish father and son team Eliel and Eero Saarinen all tried their hands at religious buildings, the most famous, perhaps, being Le Corbusier's Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamps, France.
Locally, in addition to Mr. Bach and Mr. Grossman's other religious buildings, Mr. Dickinson designed the impressive (and rather O'Keefe Centre-esque) Beth Tdezec Synagogue at 1700 Bathurst.
Also deserving of praise (pardon the pun) are Toronto's smaller neighbourhood gems. Among them are Wexford Presbyterian, which crowns Lawrence Avenue, east of Pharmacy Avenue; Bloordale United (4258 Bloor West), a glass-walled affair with an amazing wooden ceiling that bills itself "the round church on Bloor;" and Mount Olive Seventh Day Adventist, a split-roofed beauty at 1030 Albion Rd. in Thistletown.
Interesting rooflines abound: St. Andrew's Presbyterian at 1579 Royal York Rd. is a six-sided dish, St. Ansgar Lutheran at Avenue Road and Lawrence is a zoomy butterfly with a companion concrete arch for a bell tower (think of a pinched Dufferin Gate), and the Peoples Church at 374 Sheppard Ave. East, which sports a bright white barrel vault.
Of course, the more adventurous "go-go" designs fell from favour by the mid-1970s, when modernism died out as a whole in the public realm. It's likely, too, that religious thinkers began reconsidering the use of buildings lacking ornament as a way to inspire their flocks, opting instead for tried-and-true statuary and spires over swoopy rooflines.
Many of these swoopy designs can teach us a great deal, however, about the changing ideas of faith in the period after the Second World War. Some, like the one in Edmonton, may yet help us determine if those ideas are worth preserving.
Dave LeBlanc hosts The Architourist on CFRB Wednesdays during Toronto at Noon and Sunday mornings. Send inquiries to
dave.leblanc@globeandmail.com.
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