We took my son to Mass the weekend before last, to the church I used to go to as a child. The Church of the Bug-Eyed Jesus, as my sacrilegious friend used to call it, was built sometime in the late fifties or early sixties on the site of probably an only slightly older church of the same name (not the Church of the Bug-Eyed Jesus, of course). The way you knew it was a new church was because the parish school and the sacristy were of the standard turn of the century Maine brick style – both constructed clearly to avoid being burned down the way Portland had been in the great fire of 1866, the way all buildings of the late nineteenth century around here were built, with granite windowsills and external stairways and a solid design that said this building will not come down except with high explosives. The new church, on the other hand, is midcentury modern, light and airy with thin curving walls, geometric without being boxy, with material chosen not so much for local access and heaviness as for color and harmony of form. As a church, it felt (and feels) universal in appearance – fitting for a Catholicism which claims divine universality – even as it sits comfortably across the street from an old gas station, the local walk-up ice cream stand, and a dry cleaner.
The church had been renovated since the days when I had been an actual practicing Catholic. The pews were now lighter colored wood, the doors actually sealed properly against the humid summers and Maine winters. There was air conditioning – that was new, thanks to climate change – and it seemed much smaller, although I’m sure that was because my memories were mostly imprinted when I was smaller and the church seemed much larger. The stained glass was the same, though, and the altar was still spare and clean.
The house I bought in Seattle – now the house of the ex-wife – I still call the Brady House. It looks like the house of the Brady Bunch on the outside, a split level with big picture windows on the right hand side as you face it, the double garage below to the left with an expansive driveway in large aggregate concrete. You enter through a double door (on the right side; the left side never opens except when you need to bring in new furniture), and six steps to the right lead upstairs to the main floor and six steps to the left drop downstairs to the ground floor. We redid the ground floor soon after we moved in, eliminating the wood-paneled maze of rooms that felt a bit sinister, like someone had created the office space in back more to hide sexual abuse than to use the ancient Xerox machine that the previous owners demanded we take possession of as part of the closing terms, and now it’s a very pleasant play room with a large flat screen television and enough open floor space to allow for an extensive Lego train layout. In the back – previously the piano room, now a kind of non-private guest room – the ex-wife has a fold out bed and her sewing equipment.
Upstairs, we had the walls punched out, and the layout was changed to allow for an open floorplan between the kitchen and the living room, and also expanded the hall space bathroom and master bath. The ex-wife, trained in universal design, wanted a space that would allow for our parents to shower without constraints if they were in a wheelchair; the result is an almost perfect open box in the hall bath where two shower heads can give you a tropical paradise shower experience, although you have to remember to move the toilet tissue stand behind a folding glass wall or you’ll destroy the roll. A tube skylight means that, in the middle of the night, the focused starlight from above will give you a ghostly kind of beam that lets you stand underneath the rain of water in a heavenly glow. Midday you never have to turn on a light, even though the room has no exterior exposure.
The church in Maine was why I bought the house that the ex-wife now lives in. Solid, simple lines, curves where they should be, the stained glass in a kind of Chagall style, more air above your head than you need (and when I was a kid, before air conditioning, more air than you wanted in the summer when it would stick with ocean humidity and heat and compress the space beyond tolerance), the church was the only element in my experience – in an almost pathologically conservative architectural world of 1970s and 80s Maine – that embraced cleanliness in design. Only later, when my parents would later take me to the Art Institute in Chicago and I’d look at the Chagalls, and when they took me to the Picasso traveling exhibition in Boston, and when they took me to the Museum of Modern Art in New York when I was eight, I’d get a chance to see the way art could exist in the space that the architect of the Holy Cross Church had imagined when he (I assume it was he; the building came from a time where architects probably were only “he”‘s in New England) drew the plan for a South Portland church.
The air of Maine in the summer seemed to create the church out of its own breath. Brick and granite were building elements for the winter, for the hours of darkness which stretched to try to eliminate the day. The summer, though – those were the hours I remembered most – in the summer the days extended into my bedtime, invaded my sleep when I wanted it most in early morning; the church had been built out of summer stone with that light in mind. The sunlight of summer was clean and needed no adornment or mortar or rough grey stone above the doorways. That sunlight demanded sharp angles in glass and easy humid curves of yellow stone. It demanded the mosaic wonder of the bug-eyed Jesus up front, even though after awhile the skinny white pine that I’m not sure was planted or grew up on its own in the space in front of the spire grew so high that it covered the bearded early 70s vision of Christ and started to become more of a symbol of the church than Him. The architect still used brick – keep in mind the school and the sacristy were traditional red brick Third Little Pig armor plated forts – but by using thin yellow brick, with curves, broken up by expanses of brilliantly colored stained glass and internally by stagings around the altar designed for tapestry, made the brick not “I’m afraid of fire” Maine conservative, but “I’m alive to the future” airy, light, open, ready to embrace a message of modern love and post-Vatican II grace.
The only other examples of true mid 20th century architecture in Maine were high schools, and they veered more towards utilitarianism or the social experiments associated with Brutalism than with the clean simplicity of van der Rohe or Saarinen. I went to a high school that looked like a US Air Force base from 1952 – not so much midcentury modern as Cold War fallout shelter chic funded by the Eisenhower administration. I went to high school math and track and speech and debate events at Mount Ararat High School, in Topsham, which was built in the fading days of midcentury modernism and which made me appreciate the Church of the Bug-Eyed Jesus and long for the real thing. Mount Ararat had an open plan in a hexagon style, with corkboard fake wall separators that created “classrooms” dynamically and badly. I remember one math meet – memorable mostly because one of my teammates called in an order for delivery pizza from a payphone which arrived in the middle of a round, which we paid for and instantly became the heroes of the event, and because my friend discovered that if you dropped black licorice into a two-liter bottle of Moxie you’d create a kind of chemical explosion that would require custodial help to clean up – where we got lost in the maze of hexagons and corkboard, and a helpful teacher told us that the floorplan made it easy for the school to change its layout as high schoolers found new ways to learn. It was unconvincing; I longed for straight lines, precast concrete, plexiglass windows, and gunshot straight hallways.
My son has taken to referring to his messy t-shirts as Jackson Pollock designs; he in fact creates Jackson Pollock-like artwork with acrylic paints, dripping the paint onto midsized sheets of white paper and adding sometimes ice cream sprinkles, sometimes pencil markings, sometimes photocopying all of it on the printer in the basement and then drawing over all of it in marker and pastels. They are beautiful in their way and they don’t fit in the faux Cape Cod house of my parents, but because they don’t fit they seem more artistic than anything else here except the paintings from friends, dead and alive, which are on the wall and taking up space waiting to travel with me to my next home.
Modernism was about cleanliness and intentional destructive messiness all at once and I don’t think I’ve found a more congenial art form yet. Impressionism and modern realism can seem trite and contrived to me, and while I appreciate what artists in that vein tried and are trying to express, it seems like a dead end. Modernism itself is a kind of shooting star: either you get it really right, like Holy Cross in South Portland or the similar designs across the upper midwest of the same era, or you get it wrong and you end up with execrable bank branches and tower blocks in Croydon and the skyline of Lexington, Kentucky. But impressionism and modern realism are a kind of repeatable mediocrity with less on offer to stand out, but enough quality to make it unkillable (and yes, brilliance exists there too – don’t take this as a condemnation). Modernism is dead, nowadays, but the examples of greatness remind me why people try new things in art and architecture. I love the Eames-inspired couch in my ex-wife’s house that I bought for far too much money and is now hers, sitting underneath an abstract impressionist work from a friend of hers which still takes my breath away, sitting in front of two enormous glass windows under a shallow ceiling that has just the right proportions, against a planar, perfectly laid yellow brick fireplace, with glass frontings and a beige-yellow mantle – the color chosen by my ex-wife – which holds the entire room together. All of it is a work of art, even as the individual elements are also works of art. There isn’t much – and there is a lot of six-year old boy clutter distracting you when you behold it – but that not much is ideal.
The odd thing is that a Catholic diocese in South Portland, Maine, has something almost as perfect, built in an era of rampant anti-communism and paranoia, in an era where the Church was slowly closing in on itself and learning to protect pedophiles and deny love to all and sundry. Somehow, though, in that context, it built a slow, lazy, steady curve, against which a rocket-tall straight milk carton spire rose up with a simple, unadorned cross on top, with a primary colored mosaic with a Christ with dark brown eyes, a light brown beard, and stark blue tears gazed upwards at Cubist angels aboves, and inside nothing but long flat tan bricks and light and space. Somehow a Church that was collapsing back into a premodern sense of entitlement and hierarchical privelege found room to create a church that remains a modernist masterpiece, that I went to every week for most of my childhood, from which I extracted a message of love and – I think almost with the assistance of the physical space – managed to ignore all the detritus and irrelevance that could have otherwise kept that message hidden and unintelligible.
I’m not Christian in any sense of the term – well, I don’t believe in Christ as a savior, so while I suppose I’m aligned with Christ as a messenger of love, while I embrace love as essence, love as being, I’ve sort of disqualified myself in the basics of the religion. I’m a modernist, mostly, but without really believing in anything except our responsibility to allow one another to be who we want to be, in freedom and without interfering with one another. A mild extension to that is wanting a world where we’ll open ourselves to one another in love, and see others in the light that they most want to be seen so as to give them the love they need and desire. What I find in modernism – in its best expressions, in its architecture when it really hits the mark and in its design especially, its furniture and its everyday objects like radios and tea sets and silverware, and more rarely in its paintings and objets d’art when they really take a step back and let go of the ego of the artist – is that world. I found it in every day life as a child, or at least, in every Sunday (or vigil Saturday) life. The messages spoken in the building I went to Mass in every weekend may not resonate any longer, if they ever did; the building still sings to me, and I’m glad I went back with my son for another Mass. The words have changed, the building has better features and better HVAC. But the bones of the place are as lightly solid, and as beautiful, and as perfect as they always were.