Making Religion Modern

1:00 - 3:00 pm
Goldsmith Lecture Hall (GOL 3.120)

confirmed participants:

Richard Kieckhefer

Richard Kieckhefer received his doctorate in the History Department at Austin in 1972, and since 1975 he has taught in the Religion Department at Northwestern University, where he holds a joint appointment in History. Most of his research has focused on the late Middle Ages. He has published work on mystical theology and sainthood, on witchcraft and magic, and related aspects of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century religious culture.

In the area of church architecture his work has been chronologically more encompassing, particularly in his book Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley (Oxford University Press, 2004). This book deals with historical, theological, and liturgical dimensions of church-building. One chapter analyzes the buildings and theories of the twentieth-century architecture Rudolf Schwarz, while another deals with current issues in church design. Kieckhefer's ongoing research in the area of church architecture remains divided between medieval and modern topics. Apart from his interest in twentieth-century churches, he is engaged in a long-range study of church-building and its transformation in the late Middle Ages, particularly in Germany and England.

Nora Laos

Nora Laos, an architectural historian, received a PhD in Art History from Princeton University and her Master and BS in Architecture from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has taught architectural history in Versailles, France for the University of Illinois, School of Architecture's Study-Abroad Program and presently she teaches at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture of the University of Houston.

Professor Laos is a medievalist by training. She has published an article on a French Romanesque copy of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and her dissertation focused on the origins and medieval reconstructions of Early Christian baptisteries in Provence, France. At the University of Houston she teaches all aspects of architectural history and her latest work is concentrated on contemporary chapel architecture in eastern Texas. Most recently she published an article on two chapels designed by O'Neil Ford (ARRIS, 2007), and is preparing a book on the topic, tentatively titled: Twentieth-Century Chapels in Eastern Texas: History, Spirituality and Art.

Timothy Parker

Timothy Parker is an architect with a graduate degree in philosophy whose major research areas include ancient Roman architecture, historiography of modernism, theories of interpretation, and modern religious architecture. He is currently in the midst of research for his dissertation, "The Modern Church in Rome: Architecture, Theology, and Community, 1945-80." His overriding aim in this project is to address the struggle for modern identity as manifest in architectural, theological, and liturgical forms and ideas. Parker received the 2006 Carter Manny Award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. He has presented research at two meetings of the College Art Association and will present a paper at next year's meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians. A review essay will appear in the next issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. In whatever venue, Timothy is committed to interdisciplinary work that is theoretically provocative yet grounded in concrete practice.

Francesco Passanti

Francesco Passanti is Research Fellow at the University of Texas in Austin, School of Architecture. He is preparing a book on Le Corbusier, focused on the construction of his architectural position during the years 1907-1925 that straddle the first World War. Passanti studied mechanical engineering at the Politecnico di Torino in Italy, and history of architecture at Columbia University in New York. He has taught history of architecture in the program of History, Theory, and Criticism within the architecture school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has lectured at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, and other places in this country and in Europe. His most recent essay on Le Corbusier appears in the exhibition catalogue Le Corbusier before Le Corbusier (Yale University Press, 2002).

Robert Proctor

Robert Proctor has been Lecturer in Architectural History at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art, since 2002, having previously studied at Edinburgh University, and studied and taught at Cambridge University. His work on twentieth-century churches began through research on the architectural firm of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, whose archive of post-war work is held at the Glasgow School of Art. The firm carried out a large number of Roman Catholic churches in Scotland in the 1950s and 1960s, whose connection to liturgical change is explored in Proctor's article, "Churches for a Changing Liturgy: Gillespie, Kidd & Coia and the Second Vatican Council," in the journal Architectural History in 2005. In April 2007 he is chairing a session at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Pittsburgh, entitled "The Twentieth-Century Church: New Interpretations," and he is planning further work on Roman Catholic architecture in post-war Britain. He has also written more widely on Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, with conference papers in Vancouver and Edinburgh, and an article on the oral historiography of post-war Modernism.

Robert Proctor's work on church architecture continues alongside an interest in French architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His PhD at Cambridge University explored the department store in Paris in this period, on which he has also subsequently written, and he has more recently specialised in French art nouveau. An article on Rene Binet's debt to the scientist Ernst Haeckel appears in the Journal of Architecture, December 2006, and he has an introduction to a new edition of Binet's Esquisses décoratives due for publication in 2007.

Moderator: Francesco Passanti

What do we make of modern religious architecture? Insofar as modernity is a secularizing phenomenon and religious institutions have been hostile to most varieties of modernism, it is understandable that this problem has received little attention. Religious architecture is still largely identified as modern on formal terms, leaving its identity with respect to theology and liturgy unaddressed. However, study of religious architecture that incorporates the broader questions surrounding the relation of modernity to religious practice promises a richer understanding of modernism. For instance, Roman Catholic theology and liturgy developed modernizing reform movements that, with varying degrees of coherence, converged in the years following the Second World War, most notably in the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). What happens to our conception of modernism in religious architecture when these other histories are taken into account? In what manner were decisions made to build churches in a modern idiom? How did appeals to early Christian practice function to give reform movements classicizing qualities? More generally, how can particular examples of modern religious architecture be interpreted such that "modern" applies with equal scholarly perspicacity to the architecture and to the religious practice?