An unbuilt cathedral in Monrovia, Liberia

Arthur Swift and the architectural partnership he founded have something of a mixed legacy. Established in London in 1953, Swift & Partners expanded quickly, opening offices in Dublin and Edinburgh.

Specialising in large-scale public housing and mixed-use urban development, Swift & Partners were firm believers in the utility of concrete, even when the public baulked at the harsh and uninviting cityscapes they created. In the Irish capital the partnership is primarily known for the Ballymun towers, the modernist housing estate that became synonymous with urban blight. (There were literal shouts of joy when the towers were demolished.)

Liberia, meanwhile, was in need of something less prosaic than housing: a new Protestant cathedral for the nation’s capital. From Ghana’s independence in 1957, one after another of Liberia’s neighbours achieved sovereignty from their former colonial rulers. Though Liberia had enjoyed a unique status as Africa’s only independent black republic for more than a century, it still shared in the wave of optimism that accompanied the birth of these new West African states.

The Protestant Episcopal Church in Liberia had been long established, American Episcopalians having consecrated one of their own as bishop for this part of West Africa in 1851. What better way for this smaller but socially prominent denomination to affirm its place at the heart of the republic than through a modern cathedral in the centre of the capital?

Swift & Partners delivered a striking and idiosyncratic proposal. The site was severely constrained — a mere eighty-two by one-hundred-and-thirty-two feet — yet they contrived a luminous polyhedral glass spire atop a many-sided concrete shell with raked, theatre-style seating for eight hundred worshippers. The main altar lay below, opening to a lower plane that could seat an additional two hundred, with the bishop’s throne and choir rising behind the altar.

The approach was suitably processional: a broadening flight of steps ascended over a reflecting pool. Beneath, a lower level would contain a chapel, baptistry, classrooms, and functional spaces for the clergy.

While the model accurately depicts the poured-in-place reinforced concrete exterior, there were also plans for tiled mosaics to decorate the exterior walls, while coloured glass in the spire would filter light down into the body of the church below.

The cathedral plan, with its congregation encircling the altar, translated into architecture the ideal of a united people worshipping under one roof — a civic theology for a republic that claimed to prize both progress and order.

It is a striking and curiously beautiful design, but also too clever by half. The raked seating is immensely appropriate for a lecture hall or a theatre but less so for a church. In a place for liturgical worship it is less than ideal for the worshippers as a whole to look down on the altar of sacrifice where, as Anglican theology holds, God is made physically present.

While the African sun can be unrelenting, Swift & Partners’ proposal provides for natural light to reach the body of the church only through the coloured glass of the spire. There is no need for cathedral interiors to be bright — ideally there are rich gradations of light and shadow — but it strikes me this proposal would be unduly dark inside.

The architects explained they were inspired by words from Columbia University engineer Mario Salvadori that described the ideal church as “a jewel which represents the integration of feelings, of form, of structure, of all that makes for a complete expression of religious feelings in the materials of architecture”.

As it happened, Swift & Partners’ jewel remained uncut. Their proposal was set aside, and in its place came a new vision from within Liberia itself. Aaron Milton and Winston Richards — both Liberian architects — designed the church that was eventually built as Trinity Cathedral. Their work was more restrained: a rectilinear concrete frame that hints at Gothic precedent while retaining a trace of geometric abstraction. It retained the modernist idiom but translated it into something quieter, sturdier, and arguably more grounded in local sensibility.

I can’t help but like Swift’s plan, flawed though it is. The arboreal form of the design is delightful, but it would have served better as the Sheldonian of some West African Oxford than as a cathedral church of a diocese. A striking and beautiful modern work, but far from the ideal of a church.

The Belarusian Church in London

Belarus was heavily affected by the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the neighbouring Ukraine back in 1986 when both countries were part of the Soviet Union. In the thirtieth anniversary year of that event, the Belarusian Catholic community in London dedicated a new chapel built to a striking modern design but evoking the folk churches of the old country.

Founded in 1947 as the White-Ruthenian Catholic Mission of the Byzantine-Slavonic Rite, the church grew out of the postwar migration to London of Belarusians who had served with the Polish army during the Second World War.

Succeeding the chapel of Sts Peter & Paul in Marian House, the new chapel is dedicated to St Cyril of Turau and All the Patron Saints of the Belarusian People.

In terms of church hierarchy, this mission is under the wing of the Ukrainian Catholic eparchy in Great Britain, part of the eastern-rite Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church which is in union with Rome. (more…)

Though the painting is just a hundred years old, Gwelo Goodman depicted the scene as if in the late seventeenth century — when the Groote Kerk was first built.

While the body of the church was replaced in the 1840s, the elders of this most senior Nederduits Gereformeerde gemeente wisely kept the stunning baroque pulpit, the work of the Cape’s greatest sculptor Anton Anreith.

Anyone remotely interested in the important affairs of the church and the world should make themselves aware of the new ecclesial news site, Vatican Insider. The site offers English translations of the significant journalistic output of the Italian newspaper La Stampa and includes commentary from Andrea Tornielli, John Allen, and others. V.I. already has an interview with Mons Georg Ratzinger and a look at church-state relations in mainland China, amongst other things. Definitely one to add to your daily perusing.

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