dom (1968) at Neviges, south of Essen, what
the brief could have been other than ‘enjoy
yourself, loudly, mein Kumpel!’ An exhorta-
tion Gottfried Böhm (son of) obeyed with
relish in the mid-1960s.
Böhm’s hyperbolic expressionism, cin-
ematic rather than architectural, is over-
whelming. It alludes to penitents’ hoods. Its
forms are threateningly zoomorphic and
geomorphic. The play of beams dense with
particulates and inky shadow is melodramat-
ic. Whether so restlessly aggressive a build-
ing is appropriate to contemplation or to any
celebration other than that of human inven-
tiveness is questionable — but the same
might be said of the great Gothic cathedrals
that are more monuments to man’s engi-
neering capabilities than to a wrathful god
and carnage at Golgotha.
The Mariendom, Claude Parent and Paul
Virilio’s bunker-like Sainte-Bernardette du
Banlay (1966) in Nevers, Walter Förderer’s
deliriously swooning churches at Héré-
mence (1971) (see p27) and Chur (1969)
in Switzerland, the Wotruba Church (1976)
in Vienna and Richard Gilbert Scott’s Our
Lady Help of Christians (1967) and Church
of St Thomas More (1969) in eastern Bir-
mingham belong not merely to the age ofbrutalism but to that of architectural deter-
minism, which held that places and spaces
can condition behaviour.
It fails to survive rational scrutiny, but
that is not to say that it was without foun-
dation. The question is how? It would be
astonishing had such a radical redefinition
of places of worship not touched worship-
pers in some way or other. It has most evi-
dently touched them by turning them into
non-worshippers, though there are evident-
ly many further causes of non-observance
(court reports passim).I have not voluntarily attended a reli-
gious service since the age of seven. My
reaction to communicants is to pity them:
those wafers! That ‘wine’! The twee canni-
balism! The sheer credulity! But the fate of
those buildings where they submit to and
share their folkloric rites and supernatural
delusions is important. Brutalism, too, was
pretty much a faith. In its ecclesiastical form
it usurped the faith it was meant to serve.
A concrete cuckoo. It was an emphatically
physical form of architectural sublimity, an
expression of man’s imperiousness and of
the conviction that technology would ena-
ble us to prevail.
Half a century on such unalloyed opti-
mism seems to embarrass us. And the build-
ings that signified that optimism are being
fought over. The vandals are winning. Here
are just a few of their rubble-strewn secular
triumphs: Imperial College’s halls of resi-
dence, Owen Luder and Rodney Gordon’s
mighty oeuvre in Gateshead and Ports-Brutalism touched worshippers by
turning them into non-worshippersArchitectural Mecca: Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, by Le CorbusierDAGLI/ORTI/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK