Sometimes, to make good architecture, you have to be a little crazy. For over two centuries, follies have been places for architectural experimentation. For much longer, the design of religious structures has been one of the discipline’s central tasks. Now these two have come together in the design of 10 chapels constructed on an island in the Venetian Lagoon. Erected as the Vatican’s first “country pavilion” (yes, the Holy See is a sovereign state) for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, these buildings are both experiments in architecture and expressions of faith … although they succeed better at the former than the latter.
That is perhaps not so surprising, as follies were original structures without a function—and pagan in nature. Starting in the early 18th century, they were erected in English (and some French and German) country estates as expressions of the owner’s learning and wealth. Recalling ancient models, such as Greek temples or medieval castles, they were, at best, a place to take tea and, at worst, an expression of the owner’s wastefulness and lack of engagement with the real world—hence their name.
Modern-day follies are more public, but just as seemingly wasteful. They come out of the intersection of sculpture, architecture, and site described by the late critic Rosalind Krauss in her 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” We know them generically as site-specific installations or land art, and you can find them either standing temporarily in public spaces, or in either private or public sculpture gardens. In our experience-oriented economy, their function is to provide a phenomenon, like the light effects James Turrell creates in his “Skyspaces.” They open up the possibility of a moment of spiritual escape grounded in the connection between a physical place, a human frame, and a much larger world.
They are, in other words, modern pagan chapels.
Now, the Catholic Church has appropriated some of their logic in an exhibition curated by the historian and critic Francesco Dal Co (together with Micol Forti) and located on the grounds of the Fondazione Cini, behind Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore on the island of the same name. Dal Co chose a particular model when he challenged his eclectic (and largely non-Catholic) architects to design their contributions: Gunnar Asplund’s 1920 Woodland Chapel, a place of contemplation and mourning set in a patch of human-planted forest in the Woodland Cemetery on the outskirts of Stockholm.
The first of the chapels you encounter when you enter the patch of park where they are located is a composition of stone slabs designed by the Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, Hon. FAIA. He should have won his Golden Lion for best project at the Biennale for this building, not the photographs of a luxury hotel the jury chose to award instead. In part, this is because his contribution is also the most traditional of the designs. Keyed into each other, rough and without ornament, the walls the blocks compose slide by each other to invite you to turn, enter, and encounter an altar that is also stone block, with a light pouring onto past the cover of a slab that shelters the main area of the chapel. The structure’s abstraction and simplicity creates the sense that this is indeed the sort of elemental architecture that should be at the beginning of the discipline. It is a statement of first principles and maximum effect achieved with minimal means.
Equally effective, but less pure in form and materials, is Chilean architect Smiljan Radic’s contribution. In contrast to the horizontal reach of Souto de Moura’s chapel, it is a cone, tapering to the top and constructed of plaster on a lath you can see on the inside. An outsize glass plane balances on top as the roof, while a barn door, as tall as the building, balances over a slit to open and close the space. Inside, you find a single tree trunk, stripped of its bark, balancing on a concrete block that serves as an altar. I assume this central figure is meant to represent a conflation of the cross and the altar, but it comes off rather like a tokonoma, the household shrine in a traditional Japanese home.
Other architects took the Woodland Chapel model more literally. The Japanese architect Terunobu Fujimori did so most successfully, designing a shed structure, its roof extending over the entrance and held up by six stripped-bark tree trunks similar to the one Radic used. Once you enter through this classical temple front, you find yourself in a space with white walls and a wood timber structure. The beams and posts come together in the chapel’s front to form a cross. Fujimori covered both this part of the timber and the wall behind it with specks of gold leaf and lit the area with twin skylights to create an abstraction of the glitter you might find in the Byzantine chapels in nearby Ravenna.
Norman Foster, Hon. FAIA, contributed an open lattice of wood held together by steel, providing a refined version of the expression of structural gymnastics on which he has based his career, while lesser-known architects such as Andrew Berman, FAIA, from New York and Flores & Prats from Barcelona created simpler plays on geometry and light. The most bombastic of all the designs is by Javier Corvalán. It consists of a tilted, plywood-clad steel ring suspended overhead, tilted, and held up by a buddle of more steel forming a tripod that also supports a steel-and-wood cruciform. While the religious symbolism is there, the design appears more like an attempt to infest Catholicism with the emblems and gravity-defying ambitions of Russian Constructivism.
The most ethereal of the structures, in contrast, is from Carla Juaçaba—the only woman who entered a project as a sole designer and not as a member of a team. Her polished chrome cross stands in a field and extends horizontally to parallel lines balanced on wood beams. All you see is the emblem of the cross and the indication of pews facing this emblem. Juaçaba implies space only through signs and lines.
Taken as a group, the chapels showcase a great deal of variation and inventiveness, both in terms of space making and material use and construction. They also push liturgical elements honed over the ages forward in new and often abstract, and thus perhaps more spiritual, directions. Their success is at least in part the result of the Church having spent a great deal of money on these calling cards for their faith. No doubt much of the cost for these complicated constructions was carried, out of allegiance to Catholicism (and a chance to show off their wares), by the construction companies that receive equal billing on the chapels’ labels. Yet, you cannot but wonder whether these are indeed follies. Each of them might have a function, but it appears to be notional. They cannot be replicated and they were very expensive to build.
As a non-Catholic, I could not help wondering why the Church chose to present itself through such refined and small-scaled, but big-budget, constructions at a time when they must be confronting large bills and shrinking congregations. The contrast with, for instance, the equally inventive but much cheaper and more mass-oriented structures designed by Tatiana Bilbao and associates for the pilgrimage route of Peregrino in Jalisco, Mexico, over the last few years is especially telling. There, the work is also very much part of its site and provides moments of spirituality, but is made out of rough-and-ready, easy-to-maintain materials for large groups of humble faithful. (I would hate to see some of these Venetian chapels after a year of sun and rain.)
On the other hand, the Catholic Church has done architecture a favor, providing it with a research and development opportunity, as it once did, that I hope will find less crazy applications on the mainland and in the mainstream.
