June 2008 Archives

CHAPTER I

Its been a while now but I can still remember that mute disbelief that met the pope’s inaugural address, and his proclamation launching the third Vatican Council. Paying homage to the Church’s past as the provider of meaning and security in a world of ever present toil, death and physical suffering; he made the point that we didn’t live in a world like that anymore, we had different burdens and expectations. Death and pain had long disappeared into quarantined buildings, people could fly anywhere in the world if they woke up bored one day, bodies had become objects to be changed and perfected at will, and nature was no longer a mystery but just another dissected, analysed, categorised and preserved specimen of science’s triumph. The world was full of endless choice, and was busy satisfying people’s every whim in boundless ways, and yet the Church was still performing ceremonies crafted for people a thousand years ago. He made the case that the Church had to go out and transform itself as much as the world around it had changed, and that this needed to be done not only in its liturgies, but also in its physical form, in the immediate presence of its architecture so that the lay could tangibly see and experience the Church’s will to change. For this to happen he announced that he had set aside a parcel of land in Rome itself, so that construction could begin immediately on the Vatican’s newest experiment, on what was to become the Physical register of the Church’s will to change, the newly founded Church of Perpetual Experimentation in EUR.

Organising this project was the Council’s first Committee, the Committee for the Architecture of Ecclesiastical Engagement, a panel of priest’s whose job it was to travel western Europe both interviewing a broad spectrum of society, from media moguls and billionaires, to young athletes and hoodies; and researching the current paradigms governing people’s daily lives and its architecture. With this material they hastily set about proposing, discussing and deliberating upon a whole range of liturgical and sacramental transformations, and it was here that the architects were brought in as the link in the chain between the innovations and their imminent construction.

For them it was a bit like working on several competitions at the same time, only that the programmes with which they were working were being argued out and typed up almost at the same time as they were throwing themselves onto their computers to design them. This led to the architects influencing some of the liturgical developments, such as the spaces for Spectacular Mass. The committee wanted performances of Mass that would be as varied as the choice of bands on MySpace, but where the priests had just proposed a stage-and-audience set up, the architects developed a participatory landscape of multiple and moving performance parades. Altar-floats were developed to be the centre of the moving events, Spectacular Vaults were designed to provide a suitably vivid backdrop, and underground backstage facilities were arranged for visitors to get involved in the construction of scenography for the productions above.

CHAPTER II

The committees ideas poured out, from Recorporation, a replacement for baptism where the body and soul were reclaimed from an age where people’s bodies had been fragmented and turned into a list of impossible goals; to Multi-Naves where the Church sought to create true public spaces where people could escape from the all seeing eyes of the CCTV camera; to Mausochapeleums, combined mausoleums and chapel-towers that would be built and funded by wealthy and famous members of society, bringing money and celebrity glamour back into the church and onto the skyline.

It was demanded that each of these be given a durable form, and using the latest in technology and the entire palette of local materials the team developed an approach that could be applied to whatever the committee dreamt up. A range of complex construction units were designed along the themes of the programmes within. The first two of these were for the Recorpistery, and the vaults above Spectacular Mass, and they pleased the committee so much, that they sent a representative to the country’s biggest milling-machine company (where the units had been manufactured) and managed to haggle several machines from them gratis. For the priests on the panel these construction units were like revisiting the way that cathedrals used to be built from masonry, and having the machines on-site was like having all the stone masons chipping away at their blocks. For the architects however these machines were like the proverbial candy-shop, and they were the kids, for the freedom they afforded in terms of shape led to the excesses of the Multi-Nave area, the over articulation of the Holy Auction route, and the wildly ornate Mausochapeleums screaming out over the city.

Even while construction pushed ahead on the site, even while new material was being constantly lifted in, even as new vaults rose onto the skyline, even with all this activity visitors came not only from all over the city, but pilgrims began to add the site to their list of places to visit, and the various finished and half finished spaces were alive with praying, celebrating, chanting, muttering and declaiming devotees. Each one came either expecting to be indignant and horrified or thrilled and pleased, but they all came nonetheless because the sheer novelty of the experiment was magnetic.

CHAPTER III

Although the novelty of the project attracted visitors in the first place, once they arrived their experience of the contrasting assemblage of architectures and liturgies kept each occupant moving around the spaces, encountering various ceremonies and rituals in an endless proliferation of routes. The site had been rapidly filling-up with programme; worshippers could walk directly out from the gloomy depths and the initiatory rite of their, or someone else’s recorporation, and into the glaring display of the Spectacular Vaults and a performance of Mass, look up and see a Publi-Martyr displaying his abstemiousness in a Publimartyrium, and then pass immediately through to join the crowds arriving for HolyAuction, the committees pilgrimage for an age of possession.

These navigable juxtapositions in space and ceremony were the way in which the priests made the experiment accessible. In their research they had found that people were used to, and even expected the simultaneous intake of multiple inputs, people were used to the appearance of choice. And it was through the discontinuous assemblage of their Church, through the way that the visitor could always see, hear -and if they wish- experience more than one, and probably three or four ceremonies and spaces at the same time, that the committee created the Church’s contemporary transformation of its old, mono-directional hierarchy. The Church was breeding an Ecclesiology of simultaneous difference through assemblage.

CHAPTER IV

So within a few years the committee had developed a whole range of doctrines, the architects had evolved a method to rapidly put them into the site, and the priests were precisely choreographing their use of the spaces to embody their experiment of contemporary Ecclesiology; and when the site became full they seized the moment to determine the final nature of the Church. I say nature because it couldn’t stay the way it was, its very mandate from the Pope was to be the “physical register of the institution’s will to change”, it was called the Church of Perpetual Experimentation after all. But they also couldn’t wipe away what was before and begin again as the committee, and indeed everyone involved had had everything built from durable construction units with the intention that every stage of this great experiment would last, marking itself in posterity.

The choice seemed to be between piling the new innovations on top of the old or requesting a new site from the pope. Seemed to be that is, until the priests fell upon the logic that they could extend the experiment’s spatiality of simultaneous difference through assemblage, from just being between the simultaneity of events and spaces occurring at the same time, to a simultaneous difference of all events and spaces that have occurred in the past and are happening in the present.

They began to take apart and then re-assemble the construction units from ceremonies that the Committee was replacing, and incorporating them into their replacement spaces. Through this the priests added the history of the experiment to the manner in which the visitors experienced it. Now anyone could not only stand in the Church and experience multiple spaces and events at the same time, but also see and be in the presence of every space that had come before it.

Pilgrims began to come back time and again; and whilst they were trying out the new liturgies which had been dreamt up, they would all try to outdo each other in spotting the re-assembled fragments embedded in the building around them, viscerally reminding them of past visits when they had enjoyed discarding the sagging breasts that had haunted them for so long, or winning a real Vatican authorised relic at Auction. Through this re-assembling, the committee managed to create continuity in time through an experiment which demanded rapid alteration. In The Church of Perpetual Experimentation, discontinuity in space and form created a spatiality of simultaneous difference. This spatiality of simultaneous difference allowed for the church’s formal continuity in time, and this was all achieved through the unceasing act of perpetual assembly.

It is perpetual because they are still going at it.

The Pope died a long time ago, and generations upon generations of Committee innovations are embedded in the structure of the building; but the priests still keep inventing, the architects still keep designing and most importantly the people still keep coming. It has become the one site in Christendom where people go both to remember the past, and to be surprised by the present.

The cranes have never stopped turning above that plot of land in EUR, and many of us who visit so often, hope and believe that they never will.