Why is Sunday night different from all other nights? By coincidence of the calendar, it’s both Christmas Eve and the last night of Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights. If ever there was a moment to examine how buildings enhance our sense of the sacred, this is it. Fortunately–or should we say blessedly?–two inspiring spaces are at hand.
The Joan and Stanley Golder Chapel at Temple Jeremiah in Northfield and a basement hall at Old St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Chicago are modestly scaled, but together they send a powerful message about architecture’s ability to endow religious experience with dignity, serenity, joy and meaning.
At Temple Jeremiah, Chicago architect H. Gary Frank used a wall of rough-hewn limestone to evoke one of Judaism’s most memorable places, the Western Wall of the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem. How beloved is the chapel? So beloved that congregation members complain when they cannot worship in it. That happened one recent Friday night when they were relegated to the synagogue’s main sanctuary, which offers poor sightlines and acoustics, in order to allow outsiders to attend services in the chapel.
At Old St. Patrick’s, Chicago architect Lawrence Booth transformed a prosaic church basement, still remembered for its black-and-white linoleum floor tile, into a poetic room crowned by crisp white ceiling panels. How elegant is the basement? Elegant enough that Booth’s own daughter had her wedding reception there, and Dad didn’t have to twist her arm.
Of the projects, both of which are two years old and wearing well, the chapel is the more ambitious architecturally and, in a way, had more obstacles to overcome. For Judaism is a religion that celebrates words more than images. Its cathedrals, it has been said, are made not of brick and mortar but the thought and counter-thought of the Talmud’s rabbinic commentaries. Though there is a tradition of grand synagogue architecture, an equally strong view holds that a synagogue should resemble a house of learning rather than the Kingdom of God.
The 125-seat chapel accommodates both vantage points. It is at once noble and intimate–a grand house, as it were.
Funded by patrons in honor of their 40th wedding anniversary, the chapel is an addition to a Reform synagogue on Northfield’s Happ Road between Willow and Sunset Ridge Roads. The original synagogue, completed in 1972, was composed of bland, brick-faced boxes. Among its functional problems was one common to American Judaism–huge throngs of people in attendance during Jewish New Year services, but a need for smaller quarters at other times when attendance shrinks.
So the chapel was something of a godsend, not only for the synagogue, but for Frank, a promising young architect who specializes in houses. The budget, which he declines to disclose, was clearly sizable, evidenced by both the rich materials he used and the consultants he hired–acousticians Kirkegaard and Associates of Downers Grove, now at work on the renovation of Orchestra Hall; and the celebrated New York furniture designer Dakota Jackson.
For all that, the chapel’s exterior–a brick-faced box set alongside the main entrance–is deferential to the point of dull, uncritically mimickingly the synagogue’s undistinguished architecture. Inside, however, the chapel assumes its own identity, at once drawing on Jewish visual traditions and freshening them.
What strikes one immediately upon entering is the chapel’s front wall, made of huge blocks of Kasota stone, a hard, dense form of limestone (as opposed to softer Indiana limestone) that was quarried in Kasota, Minn. The size and texture of the blocks give this small room an underlying monumentality, as if someone had sliced off a section of the ancient Temple and made it the fourth wall of an otherwise modern chapel. That, of course, is the point: a declaration of tradition for Reform Judaism, the least traditional branch of American Jewry.
A bit cool-looking in photographs, the blocks nonetheless convey a sense of warmth, their rough edges compelling the visitor to run a hand across them. Their time-worn sensibility continues in the chapel floor, where irregularly shaped, honed Kasota stones evoke the age-old streets of Jerusalem.
But the chapel is no theme park, dripping in nostalgic sentiment. It’s a contemporary fusion of form and function, driven as much by what you hear as what you see. That’s where the acousticians came in, improving Frank’s original plan for a simple rectangular room with sophisticated refinements that minimize echo and reverberation. Side walls splay outward at a 3-degree angle. The rear wall has a nearly imperceptible curve. The ceiling rises in four tiers. A wall angle within the organ niche was altered to 105 degrees from the original 90.
The raised platform for the clergy was designed as a thrust stage that increases the congregation’s sense of participation. To improve sightlines, pews were angled toward the lectern and finished with understated blue fabric cushions, a welcome departure from the visual cliche of velvet. The pews’ custom-designed, curved arm rests, by Jackson, subtly harmonize with the curved walls throughout the chapel.
That flourish essentially foreshadows the visual focal points Jackson designed for the chapel’s front–the Ark, which holds the Torah scrolls; the Eternal Light, symbolizing God’s everlasting presence; as well as the lectern. Even here, Frank played a key supporting role, introducing a skylight that bathes these features in heavenly light. Yet the starring role clearly is Jackson’s and it reflects his early years as a magician, when he took the name Dakota Jackson while performing in Fargo, N.D.
So the heavy ark almost appears to levitate, as if it were held up only by a brass peg leg. In fact, it is supported by steel plates that connect to a steel column and beam tucked away behind the Ark. The lighter-than-air quality of this illusion is enhanced by a pair of mahogany poles that appear to support a curving wood canopy above the Ark.
The chapel extends and enriches the Jewish visual tradition, the permanence of its stone working in vivid contrast to the playfulness of its Ark. The Eternal Light serves as a visual grace note, its wispy leaves lyrically playing against its solid bronze stem, its blue handblown glass symbolizing the sky.
At Old St. Patrick’s, architect Booth designed a very different sort of space, but he, too, has relied on illusion. For by lowering the ceiling of the church basement from 12 1/2 feet to 10 feet, he actually has made it seem taller. This bit of magic was wrought with custom-designed, lightweight plaster panels and their effects of light and shadow.
The basement remake was the first part of the ongoing $5 million renovation of the landmark Irish-Catholic church at 140 S. Desplaines St., constructed in 1852 and Chicago’s oldest religious structure.
Because he was not operating in the hallowed sanctuary, famed for its stained-glass windows and their Celtic motifs, Booth had a certain aesthetic freedom. He was able to replace the linoleum tile with maple flooring and cover the old glass-block windows with an attractive decorative screen. But one thing clearly could not go: the forest of columns that help support the church.
Booth had no choice but to work with the columns, which give the room less than ideal sightlines. So, in cooperation with associate Margaret Ketcham, he designed the plaster panels to work with the posts, arranging them in a groups of four. The panels hang from the real ceiling, with rib-like extrusions curving upwards from a point. Their collective effect is comparable to the soaring ceilings of French Gothic cathedrals, though Booth in no way suggests that the panels express the building’s structure, as Gothic ceilings did.
Previously lit with fluorescent lights, the basement used to have a certain harshness. Now, ceiling track lights and clusters of four lights around the columns give the hall a gentle glow. It’s still austere, but paintings depicting the stations of the Cross, by artist Marilyn Propp, provide the soft colors and iconic power the room needs. Here, as in the synagogue chapel, art and architecture express the essence of the link between space and the sacred.
