Wojs (pronounced “voice”) harangues his students on the subject of contemplation. He assigns them Second Vatican Council documents to read. He sends them to church for research. He pleads with them to discover the deeper meanings within Christian symbols. He pairs up his fourth-year studio students and assigns each team of two the task of designing a Catholic Church to grace the West Donlands, a former industrial wasteland on Toronto’s waterfront about to be redeveloped for mixed residential and commercial land use.
“The point of this course, it wasn’t designing a church,” Wojs told his students on one of their last meetings this spring. “It was approaching the sacred.”
The starting point for Wojs’s students is less than zero. Most are religiously indifferent. None could claim to be steeped in Catholic tradition. There’s a smattering of atheists, at least one Buddhist and a couple of Jews. Even the nominally Christian among them admit they were unfamiliar with exactly how a Mass proceeds from beginning to end before taking the class.
Yet all of these graduating architecture students chose Wojs’s course knowing the only project available was four intense months spent designing a Catholic Church.
“I’m not afraid of challenges,” said Sivan Arbel.
Arbel grew up in Israel, the daughter of atheist Jewish parents. Over the past few years she has become a believer. Her conviction that God exists puts Arbel at odds with her studio partner, Julia Mozheyko — also Jewish but decidedly atheist, from Belarus.
Mozheyko and Arbel spent their spring semester designing the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Beginning with an image of an unborn child nestled in the womb of a pregnant woman, the pair chose “protection” as its theme.
“Choosing a female character for the name was perhaps not a coincidence coming out of two female architects,” said Arbel. “Both of us really feel that we actually have a lot of discussions about the role of the mother and how important it is in our lives, in the lives of children in general. When we thought about protection initially we thought that’s who we have to go with.”
They read, along with the rest of the class, Sacrosanctum Concilium — the Second Vatican Council document on liturgy. They attended Masses at a couple of churches and consulted extensively with Toronto church architect Roberto Chiotti of the firm Larkin Architect. The whole attraction of the project was that it demanded so much — so much engagement with the tradition of Western architecture and so much serious thought about what architecture means for individuals and communities.
“In four months in this studio we were both exposed to a lot of different topics,” said Arbel. “I don’t think that either one of us can now say that we’re the experts.”
The goal for all students in Wojs’s course isn’t to pass, or even to learn a little more about how to design a building. Each of them hopes to graduate with something for their portfolio to impress potential employers.
“It’s one big project spanned across the entire semester. You have the opportunity to produce a really finished building,” said Taylor Slade. “There’s a whole conceptual thought, the depth of conceptual thought, that’s calling out to you. It’s asking you to define and interpret what a sacred space is.”
Slade and Andrew Chee designed the Church of St. Cecelia, basing their entire design on music, specifically on the rhythm of the Salve Regina.
A spare and austere building in concrete, if the Church of St. Cecilia were ever built it would probably strike most Catholics as both radical and traditional. From the outside this big concrete box doesn’t look like a church. On the inside, its soaring ceiling and simple layout appears gothic and traditional. Slade and Chee wanted to provide people with an opportunity for introspection, knowing the West Donlands neighbourhood will one day be crowded with young people living in 600-square-foot condos and working in open plan offices full of cubicles, said Chee.
“If your life is just going to work, I think this is the perfect place for you,” Chee said. “It’s a place of solace, a place of meditation.”
Chee has an aunt who goes to Mass regularly, but he hasn’t yet had a chance to show her the church he and Slade designed. Slade attended Mass for the first time in his life while researching the project.
“I noticed a lot of things that I probably wouldn’t have noticed before, especially a lot of the sensory aspects of Catholic liturgy,” Slade said. “I never knew, or I wasn’t expecting, that there would be so much singing. When you walk in the building you get the smell of incense right away.”
For atheist Justin Oh the encounter with the sacred in Wojs’s studio class was more like a head-on collision. All of Oh’s classmates are in awe of his intense work ethic. Oh’s design partner, Tae Kevin Kim, names Oh’s work ethic as the number one thing he learned from the course. Even the professional architects brought in to critique the final designs are in awe of how much detail and thought has gone into Oh and Kim’s project.
Oh starts off his presentation citing declining church attendance figures. He’s convinced the Church will dwindle to virtually nothing in the relatively near future. He wants his design to be ready for this eventuality.
His reading of Sacrosanctum Concilium has Oh convinced that what really matters is the body of Christ — the community. Oh and Kim’s church is called The Church of the Holy Community.
The first paragraph of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy gave Oh his direction, “to foster whatever can promote union among all who believe in Christ; to strengthen whatever can help to call the whole of mankind into the household of the Church.”
Oh and Kim arrange the congregation sitting around the altar, facing each other — as in many Benedictine churches, though Oh had never heard of the Benedictines.
“From my perspective, it’s plainly obvious that it ignites a better sense of community. You feel more intimate with the people around you if you can all see each other and you’re sharing that same experience,” he said. “I would like to think as a student I’m practising a type of architecture that could influence this type of feeling in the Church.”
Kim and Oh’s Church of the Holy Community incorporates a cafe, a generous church hall, a garden that invites the surrounding neighbourhood onto church grounds and an underground chapel for private prayer or small gatherings.
“Churches should make better design choices to integrate the community into the liturgy,” Oh said.
Is this young atheist trying to reform the Church?
“I wouldn’t say I’m trying to reform the Church. It’s more based on my understanding of the practice and the liturgy that I come up with a suggestion about how it might be practised in the future.”
Oh and Kim have not designed the sort of multi-purpose, community-hall-with-an-altar one might expect. The Buddhist and the atheist combined to invoke a sense of the transcendent.
“At its simplest, the easiest way for me to describe it, is I get the sense that there’s this overwhelming presence that comes upon you. The way churches were built in the 16th century, they were grand buildings, huge, large spaces that ultimately overwhelm you,” said Oh. “I think I understand that in that there’s obviously a hierarchy when you compare the community to God. When it came to designing the church it was all about that hierarchy. It was about establishing this feeling of this larger presence upon you. In the chapel for instance, the underground chapel, it was all about igniting the silence in yourself.”
The final critique — full of praise for the detail and thoroughness of execution — faulted the Church of the Holy Community for failing to provide an experience of community. The panel of judges thought the church would make an interesting pilgrimage site, monument, columbarium or mausoleum.
“I kind of think the Pharaoh should be buried here,” said Chiotti. “It might make a good pilgrimage site… You’re so ruthless about it. I love it.”
Despite the dedication to community in the name, Oh and Kim have delivered a building best experienced alone.
Where Oh and Kim have clobbered us with their insistence on transcendent silence, Slade and Chee’s Church of St. Cecelia was faulted for falling short of a really transcendent experience of the sacred. Where Gregorian chant flows freely with no set metre, Slade and Chee have transformed the Salve Regina into a rigid grid that confines their design.
“Maybe if you had a little more time, maybe the epiphany would have happened,” said Chiotti.
Wojs praised them for engaging in a search for the sacred, but faulted them for failing to take their design to the limits.
Mozheyko and Arbel faced the opposite criticism. Once they started designing they couldn’t stop. There were too many materials, too many bits and pieces of detailed design. They subjected worshippers to a kind of carnival of architectural tricks. They latched onto water as a symbol of baptism, but then put it everywhere with a ribbon of water surrounding the sanctuary under a clear strip of plexiglass in the floor. Interior walls are made with blackened, charred wood.
“Black is the colour of death,” noted Regis College art history professor Fr. Peter Larisey after he had a chance to review the design.
Arbel and Mozheyko betray their initial image of the pregnant Mary with a building full of hard angles and discordant surfaces. If anything defines a womb it is its organic elasticity. The 12 pillars which surround the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s sanctuary taper nearly to a point at their base, making for an image of instability in a place dedicated to the eternal and the true.
But whatever the failings of the student designs, Wojs’s class represents an encounter between the sacred and the secular quite unlike our usual fear of irrational conflict between presumed opposites. Neither do we have a shouting match between believers and unbelievers. The secular and even atheist students have tackled the sacred with respect for its power and persistence in our lives.