Marcel Breuer's St. Francis de Sales church...  

Dear DesignAddicts,

I have been away for quite some time, but I have recently been re-reading John Ruskin's "The Gothic" and "Grotesque Renaissance" and revisiting and rethinking and re-seeing Brutalism in modernist architecture for perhaps the third go-round in my life.

In turn, I have stumbled into Marcel Breuer's St. Francis de Sales Church in Muskegon, Michigan. It may be old news to many, but it was like a bolt of lightening in the night striking a Gothic Spire in me.

Attached is a web page that hints at its brilliance. Having seen and run my hands over Ronchamps, and now having experienced this remarkable building, I am now inclined to say that Marcel Breuer is the heavy weight, Brutal champion of the world. And that what he did is nothing short of an episode of The Gothic in the 20th Century.

It is almost scary what Breuer did with this church. He did not just do a modernist spin on Gothic. It is as if he rekindled a Gothic world view in himself and, as if transported through some kind of wormhole in space-time, showed up in the early 1960s Michigan and set about using then contemporary materials and engineering and machines to build what a truly Gothic individual would build in 1964.

Ronchamps and so much of Corbusier's (and other's) brutalist buildings look like the work of 20th Century architects trying with great talent to express through modernist form language a 20th Century equivalent of the Gothic spirit.

I argue St. Francis de Sales really is a Gothic POV church built in the 20th Century.

And the fact that it is built in the American upper midwest makes it seem even more startling. This thing alludes to nothing. It is what it is. It looks like what it is made of. It is savage, and grotesque, and suffused with impenetrable mystery. It is unapologetically not part of any Mediterranean sensibility. This is directly grounded to some sensibility indigenous to Northern Europe I thought long extinct, and only imitated.

There are no degrees of freedom from the Gothic here. This is the Gothic without need for buttresses.

This is the Gothic built from then modern materials and engineering capabilities.

It is an astounding accomplishment by an architect.

As you were. 🙂

http://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/church-of-st-francis-de-sales-by-marcel-breuer/view/?service=1

http://www.sfnortonshores.com/guided_tour/page1.htm