Environment and Art
2002 Reston, Virginia
2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002
Seminar Convener 2002
Thomas Slon (project architect at Arthur John Sikula Associates; member of the American Institute of Architects)
Seminar Participants 2002
William Seth Adams, Alan Barthel, Cortlandt Bender, Richard Butler, Andrew Ciferni, Mark Joseph Costello, Peyton Craighill, John Gallen, William Graham, Philip Horrigan, Walter Huffman, Conrad Kraus, Dennis Krouse, Vicki Lumpkin, Ken Meltz, James Moudry, Giles Pater, Robert Rambusch, Jan Robitscher, James Ross, Ronald Miller, Arthur Sikula, Thomas Slon, Richard Vosko; (visitors) David Caron, D. Foy Christopherson, J. Patrick Ellis, Terrence Hogan, Richard Hurley, Daniel McCarthy, Martin Rambusch, Karina Ramins, Deborah Sokolove, Thomas Stehle
Seminar Report 2002
It was the consensus of the members that our time at Reston was to be spent not traveling to various sites, as is our custom, but staying at the conference site and engaging in an exercise that would hopefully issue in a common vocabulary and test assumptions with regard to liturgy and design which may or many not be shared by members. Prior to the seminar a small gathering of members proposed as a starting point for such an exercise to explore the data and experience of the primitive liturgy, defined loosely as that which preceded the era of the basilica. In preparation for the seminar attending members were asked to read Paul Bradshaw’s Early Christian Worship.
The first session began with three members of the seminar presenting the three divisions of Bradshaw’s book:
- Andrew Ciferni—sacred time and the programmatic needs for the Sunday practice;
- William Seth Adams—the early and varied practices for the baptism of converts; and
- John Gallen—the practice of the Eucharist. Thomas Slon followed with a slide presentation on the art and architecture that corresponded to these practices.
The members of the seminar then divided into assigned subgroups for discussion based on the presentations and their potential application for present experience and practice. Each group then reported salient points in their conversation, including:
- Baptism and meal are central to the Christian experience of liturgy;
- Architecture and design significantly affect the experience of both baptism and meal;
- Gathering is the first element in “re-membering”;
- Liturgy is meant to be transformative and our work is to “midwife such transformation” and to facilitate “increasing the pain” which leadership is charged with and responsible for.
James Moudry, at the request of the convener, volunteered to begin the Saturday session with a summary of the previous day’s discussion. He highlighted the following points:
- All the previous day’s discussions had a keen pastoral emphasis and concern;
- While the Word is a liturgical event, we are not in the business of sacralizing [sic] objects or events, but people;
- Liturgy is a celebration of an existing reality, an acting out of what God is doing now;
- The problem of greatest concern is how to make the assembly become the mystagogic icon and not merely to play into and cooperate with a community’s complacency;
- People gather in worship space for the transforming worship event and so the architecture that houses this event must be an expression of the community’s risk as well as the agent of the community’s risk.
Daniel McCarthy began the second Saturday session with his presentation on the ambo in post-Constantine basilicas. Apropos to the discussion on “the primitive liturgy” the following points were made:
- The primitive liturgy had a domestic quality which it lost almost immediately after Constantine;
- While the Word is an event, a place central to the event and an architecture for the event were established for practical/acoustical purposes as well as for symbolic reasons;
- The placement of the ambo in the central nave and the altar near or in the apse is opposite our current inclination to place the altar in the center of the nave and the ambo off to a side;
- The location of ambo and altar and the location of the baptistery outside the main worship space demonstrated the “stational” quality of the liturgy, now all but lost in present arrangements and practice.
The closing discussion emphasized the following:
- History helps correct the “anything goes” attitude evidenced in some of the liturgical work done immediately following the Second Vatican Council;
- Caution ought to be exercised in positing an “ur-liturgy,” a pristine model to which all liturgy must aspire and be measured against;
- Liturgy is a transforming event, but it is not about transforming congregations into liturgists, but about transforming communities to be more who they already are, the Body of Christ, by virtue of their baptism.