To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the consecration of the church of St Francis of Assisi in Qawra, which was designed by Richard England, the Franciscan Friars and the community prepared four days of celebrations the highlight of which was on Friday 9 August. After the 6:30pm thanksgiving Mass, Prof. England delivered a talk on the creation of sacred spaces and his visual insight when he designed the Qawra church.
The following is the talk delivered by Professor England.
"I wish to start by first of all by asking you to focus on the figure of Christ, the work of the sculptor Censu Apap which is found on top of the altar. Please observe that this is not the face of a crucified Christ but Christ who vanquished death. After more than 60 years in the profession of architect, which I prefer calling a vocation, in all the work of sacred spaces which I had the privilege of designing (over 45 if you count not just the churches and chapels but also the pavilions for the Pope's visit, the meditation gardens and mortuary chapels) I never included the crucified Christ.
I remember the first church I designed, the church of Manikata, with an empty cross, and when Archbishop Gonzi visited the church he had asked me "and where is Christ?" and I had replied "Christ is risen. Christ died as Man and rose as God. His victory over death is the very foundation of our Christian faith. Allow me a poem on this theme. In the sacred spaces I designed I realised that many roads lead to God, I chose architecture.
NAILED TO A CROSS
BATTERED AND BLEEDING
A MAN DIED
FOR THREE DAYS
HIS SCARRED AND LIFELESS BODY
LAY TORPID IN THE TOMB
THEN AS THE SUN ROSE ON THE THIRD DAY
HIS BODY STIRRED
HIS SPIRIT SOARED
AND
RADIANT AND RESPLENDENT
A GOD AROSE
ANNOUNCING TO THE WORLD
"I AM THE RESURRECTION"
HE WHO BELIEVES IN ME SHALL BE REDEEMED.
Allow me now to continue in English. Since the beginning of time man has erected edifices to worship, made offerings and paid homage to his gods. The history of sacred architecture is a reflection of man's understanding, vision and respect of his gods in time. Both the Divine and what happens in our afterlife remain intangible and unknown. If only Lazarus had spoken! It remains a truism that man knows least about what matters most. The whole history of architecture may in fact be read through sacred buildings, tombs, cenotaphs and memorials. When building for his gods or for the afterlife man's buildings attempt to defy time while when constructing for his own existence, he is conscious of his temporality and the edifices are transient and temporary. Buildings to worship or placate gods manifest man's constant respect and fear of the Divine which has always been difficult to define even more so as comprehended in our Christian faith. God's own definition of Himself to Moses "I am that I am" although hinting to His eternal no beginning and no ending leaves us none the wiser. No human language or lexicon can actually define God. Human language fails us. My late friend, the paragon Malta intellectual mind, Peter Serracino Inglott once told me that since man cannot find words adequate for a Divine definition, he thought the best way to refer to God was "Shiss-Emm". "Shiss" implies the void and silence of no adequate vocabulary and "Emm" the sound we use when we are at a loss for words. Perhaps it is a truism to say that it is easier to define what God is not rather than what He is.
My own journey of creating sacred spaces utilized what I term my silent spaces as thresholds to the creation of my edifices of sacrality. In these my philosophy was and still is to create spaces which besides accommodating materialistic requirements focus on enriching the spirit and enhancing the soul of their users, an architecture woven in dreams attempting to elevate the ordinary to the extraordinary. Perhaps, an odyssey to manifest an architecture which cuddles; an approach best summed up by T.S. Eliot's words "I don't want reality, I want magic" and Jorge Luis Borges' "my business is to weave dreams".
The earliest definition of architecture comes from the Roman architect Vitruvius "commodity, firmness, delight". It is the added delight which Vitruvius describes as "Venustas" that elevates construction to the realm of architecture. In the case of sacral architecture however, something more is required for one is now measuring against the immeasurable. Space is mood manipulative and ambiences react on all of our senses. In sacred architecture, a building must affect not solely our physical senses but react on our spirit. It was Axel Munthe who correctly stated that "the soul needs more space than the body". To evoke the spiritual a sacred building must be conceived more as a theatre for the spirit rather than a stage set for the body. What the necessary qualities for spiritual enlightenment are, remains difficult to establish. Silence, light, spirituality in order to create a sense of hierophany Mircea Eliade's words for a vocation of the sacred. The silence necessary is not one of emptiness but a silence pregnant with sacrality close to St Benedict's monastic silence. Light is necessary as it remains a powerful evocation of God. In the making of sacred spaces the architect must augment his professional skills with an overlay of faith for faith in the words of C. K. Chesterton "is like the sun, we cannot look at it directly but everything else is seen more clearly because of it". I still firmly believe that buildings give back what you put into them.
Our contemporary modernity is a time orphaned of the spiritual relegating the sacred and elevating the secular while welcoming the immense scientific advances it is necessary to remember that while science tells us how, it fails to tell us why. Perhaps in the making of today's sacred spaces one should revert back and reuse the methodologies of the ancients when architects were high priests, magicians and alchemists who utilized number, sacred geometry and its forms as the very basis for their edifices. It is sad to acknowledge that despite our progress the ancients seem to know something that we somehow seem to have forgotten.
The natal typology of this very church was based on a combination of the three basic geometric forms. The first is the circle symbolizing unity and infinity. It has been stated that "God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere". The second is the square, ideogram of completeness and the triangle as a representation of the trinity of Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. I firmly believe that over and above these references the most important overlay in the making of a locus of sacrality is love. It was Mother Teresa who said, "it is not so important what you do, but how much love you put in the doing". I am firmly convinced that the love poured out in the making of a building is assimilated by its materials and sensed by its users.
It was Antonio Gaudi the designer of the Sacrada Famiglia who once wrote that the "greatest challenge for an architect remains the church" as in an architecture of sacrality the architect is evoking the unseen in what is seen and has the arduous task of elevating the materialistic to the spiritual. Today we live in an age where spiritual values have been suppressed and overcome by secular materialistic overlays. Cathedrals are no longer raised to the Divine but more to mammon. It seems that we live in an age where we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The problem now is that of how to bring the Divine into today's society. Our own islands in the last years have regretfully witnessed construction cranes and the towers of Mammon eclipse the spires and domes of Faith. This elevates the problem of not only how to address the design of contemporary sacred spaces but also the necessity to revalue the whole concept of religion. This is the time for the church to move forward and have its spaces reflecting and relating to the zeitgeist of the age. The church of today as an institution must think outside the walls of its gathering spaces to focus on global social problems and produce a dynamic sacral response to current prevalent mass media barrage. Reaching out beyond the threshold of its internal spaces as if to manifest what Pope Francis has termed "a compassionate church". This means that contemporary prayer spaces should be more modern in spirit rather than modern in style. Pope John Paul II proposed that contemporary sacred spaces should be arenas carved in beauty overlaid by an intuition of mystery.
I have purposely refrained from mentioning any one of my particular projects but allow me to refer to a work regretfully rejected by the Authorities which I still have a particular penchant for. This was a project featuring the alchemy of the three monotheistic religions which I termed the Triangle of Peace, a Christian chapel, an Islamic Mosque and a Jewish Synagogue. An arena for the three faiths to share a friendly handshake.
As an architect immersed in a Roman Catholic milieu I consider myself particularly fortunate that in my career I have been involved in the design and building of a considerable number of prayer spaces. In all of my sacred projects I have evoked, prayed and requested Divine help and guidance, for I believe in the words of Psalm 127:1 "if the Lord is not helping the builders, the building is of no purpose". My attempts to achieve sacrality in my edifices is best described by paraphrasing C.S. Lewis's words "while others were building ships in their bottles, I was attempting to build a lighthouse".
Designing sacred spaces for the Divine perhaps remains a reflection of the arrogance and egotism of man. God Himself had humbly abstained from constructing an edifice for man opting instead for a garden. Perhaps therefore the ideal sacred space that one could conceive would be a non-building where the floor is the earth, the walls are the wind and the ceiling is the sky.