“Anxiety as captured in concrete”: A New Cathedral, 1960 – Reviewed

C. H. R. Bailey, south perspective view. A New Cathedral, 1960, Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, 2017. All images courtesy liverpoolcatholic.org.uk

Ed Montana-Williams finds that the competition to design a new cathedral for Liverpool in 1960 received architectural ideas not of veneration, but of commemoration; referencing Cold War anxiety, rocket-like structures and concrete bunkers…

God officially died in 1960 — or so it must have seemed to sections of the architectural profession who entered a competition in which they uniquely chose not to praise God, but to bury him.

This is the inescapable conclusion one draws from visiting the excellent exhibition A New Cathedral, 1960, currently on show at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool. Produced by Dominic Wilkinson, Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the Liverpool School of Art and Design, the exhibition brings together, for the first time in over half a century, the entries from the architectural competition to design a Roman Catholic cathedral for the city. As part of the building’s wider Golden Jubilee Celebrations, it is a rare example of an event which even the most secular-minded critic can appreciate.

The designs, aided by a series of recently constructed scale models by students at Liverpool John Moores University (pictured, below), convey an overwhelming sense of the sepulchral vogue within ecclesiastical architecture in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. These are structures not of veneration, but of commemoration; structures within which a deity could be safely contained.

“The use of abstracted and curved forms appear less concerned with organic aesthetics, and are more akin to those designed by military engineering”

Perhaps reflecting the age of anxiety during which they were conceived, the enclosed nature of the structures, their sheer scale and exaggerated verticality do not echo the soaring elements of the Medieval Gothic cathedral builders, but rather resonate more with the bunker or silo of the then-contemporary Cold War. The use of abstracted and curved forms appear less concerned with organic aesthetics, and are more akin to those designed by military engineering – like the blast walls used to mitigate the shock waves and firestorms of an atomic bomb.

This anxiety as captured in concrete is perhaps the single most dispiriting feature of A New Cathedral, 1960. The age of concrete offered architects the ability to adopt a freer, more sculptural approach to their work than any previous generation of builders and draughtsmen. Yet, in considering Denys Lasdun’s and Ansell & Bailey’s proposed silo-like structures, the material is used only to decoratively enclose a space, entombing it. Whilst C. Entwhilstle, Hancock and Glover & Borys seemingly offered only three differing types of blast shield. Thus, one is inevitably drawn to the conclusion that they are less places of contemplative spiritual meditation, more the redoubtable retreats and refuges from the (at the time very real) forecasted nuclear Armageddon.

LJMU Architecture student models. A New Cathedral, 1960, Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, 2017. All images courtesy liverpoolcatholic.org.uk

A notable exception to such a pessimistic outlook is perhaps C. H. R. Bailey’s ode to the Space Age (pictured, top): a Flash Gordon grouping of rocket-like structures, the means by which mortal man could now escape the bonds of Earth and touch the heavenly firmament. Whilst more prosaic eyes may consider their resemblance to a 1950’s jelly mould, less benignly they also remind one of a cluster of readied missiles.

In looking at the drawings and models on display, one is struck by modern architecture’s perpetual paradoxes, if not hypocrisies. That of Louis Sullivan’s oft quoted phrase, the alleged mantra of modernism: “Form ever follows function”. Yet, again, it is conveniently sidestepped in favour of manifestations of anxiety and uncertainty. The internal spaces of several entries repeat this reluctant approach to the form’s function; resembling tiered amphitheatres, lecture halls, theatres or even cinemas. They are the modern auditoriums from which the audience can witness the theatre of the church, once a week if they’re regulars, at Christmas and Easter for the somewhat less-inclined punter.

“The Second Vatican Council dictated that mass should be celebrated in the round, making Gibberd’s response the stand-out entry in the competition and clear winner”

Despite a background in town planning, the father of Harlow, Fredrick Gibberd, was more attuned to the Modernist mantra. His success in securing the commission was in no small part a result of his heeding the brief – always a good start for any architect – to design a cathedral. His form was attributable to its purported function: a place of worship. Whilst it maintains elements of traditional ecclesiastical form, most impressively the lantern, his radical approach to the use of space coincided with a happy coincidence of liturgical change. The Second Vatican Council dictated that mass should be celebrated in the round, making Gibberd’s response the stand-out entry in the competition and clear winner (pictured, below).

One might also speculate that there were other forces which conspired to favour Gibberd’s approach. Giles Gilbert Scott’s Anglican Cathedral at the other end of Hope Street perhaps served as a cautionary tale to the folly of continuing to rely on what was already an out-moded idiom. The ‘old’ cathedrals were themselves dead: faded, decaying and ruinously expensive relics of a bygone age. Scott’s gigantic monument – which took 75 years to complete, from 1903 to 1978 – served to finally close the chapter on Victorian Gothic revival and its derivative tropes. Thus Michael Jerome’s Germanic Romanesque hulk seems oddly out of time in a Post-War competition, as does Oliver Hill’s classically inspired, domed Neo-Pantheon, whilst H. Woodhall’s steepled tower is an unhappy melding of a traditional form executed in modern materials.

F. Gibberd, model West view. A New Cathedral, 1960, Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, 2017. All images courtesy liverpoolcatholic.org.uk

The desire for a modern approach is evident in the inclusion of Sir Basil Spence, the architect of Coventry Cathedral, as one of the competition’s three assessors; the other two being Archbishop Heenan and a second architect David Stokes. Spence, on securing the commission to build Coventry Cathedral, had faced critics, most notably from the competition losers – the husband and wife team of Alison & Peter Smithson. They held that Spence’s scheme was insufficiently modern, blending as it did elements of the old Gothic remains of the destroyed cathedral. Unencumbered by the same peculiarities of site, Gibberd enjoyed a freer hand at Liverpool Metropolitan than Spence had at Coventry.  Though somewhat confined by the original crypt, as laid down some half a century earlier by Sir Edwin Lutyens, Gibberd’s mastery was to create a site-specific wonder, which quickly became an icon. More recently embellished with external glass and steel panels reminiscent of those proposed by both Wharfe and Ash, which echo the lantern glass of John Piper (whose work will be the focus of an exhibition at Tate Liverpool next month).

Despite being tagged by the now all too familiar, if not inevitable, Post-Modernist tendency to nickname a structure – in this case, Paddy’s Wigwam, or the Mersey Funnel – the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral remains a cogent symbol of the better endeavours of British, Post-War Modernism. Gibberd’s masterstroke reminds us that God remains discernible in the detail.

Ed Montana-Williams

See A New Cathedral, 1960 at Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral until November 2017

Cathedral open 10am–4pm — FREE

Images, from top: C. H. R. Bailey, south perspective view; LJMU Architecture student models, in 3D print; F. Gibberd, model West view. All images from A New Cathedral, 1960, Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, 2017, courtesy liverpoolcatholic.org.uk

Posted on 25/10/2017 by thedoublenegative