Concrete Catholic: Marcel Breuer’s Saint John’s Abbey 

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Colors which you can hear with ears:
Sounds to see with eyes:
The void you touch with your elbows:
The taste of space on your tongue:
The fragrance of dimensions;
The juice of stone
—Marcel Breuer

On August 2, 1961, more than a thousand parishioners were welcomed into Saint John’s Abbey Church for the first time. Filing into the sanctuary in Collegeville, Minnesota, Benedictine brothers, monks, and students marveled at the cavernous scale and obscure geometry of their new spiritual home: a trapezoidal concrete shell, punctuated by soaring spatial bays, whose wildly-textured surfaces performed a shadowy dance as sunlight filtered into the room through gridded stained glass. After a five-hour long ritual—which included tracing Greek and Latin alphabets in ashes on the floor, sprinkling holy water on each of the interior walls, and consecrating the altar with water and oil—the church was officially proclaimed a House of God. Sitting in the front row among high-ranking clergy members, the church’s architect, Marcel Breuer, remarked: “This is the first building I have designed that has been made so sacred.” 

Public reception to the new church was mixed. For some, Breuer’s design was “the most exciting thing in church architecture since Michaelangelo’s dome.” Others disparaged it as an “ecclesiastic garage,” whose austere concrete surfaces grated against the gentle green contours of Minnesota’s lightly wooded hills. But whether you considered the Abbey a “mass-and-psalm factory” or a verifiable Gesamtkunstwerk, it undoubtedly inaugurated an important new vocabulary to the traditional language of church building. 

Unfolding over the course of eight years, the story of how Saint John’s Abbey Church came to be, and what it would come to represent, is a story about finding balance in the tension of opposites, and the experimental magic that grows in the friction between seemingly irreconcilable forces. It’s a story about disparate theoretical frameworks—architectural and liturgical—attempting to translate ancient spiritual principles into modern material forms. It is a story whose most obvious protagonists—the architect and the client—are overshadowed by the collaboration itself. But how did contemplative monks get to Minnesota in the first place? And what inspired them to commission this modernist monolith? 

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Benedictines are distinguished from other Catholic orders by their strict adherence to the Rule of Saint Benedict, a guidebook written by Benedict of Nursia in 529 CE. The text laid the practical and spiritual foundation for a proper monastic life and outlined the Order’s core values of stability, obedience, humility, hospitality, balance, and work. Soon after its establishment, the Benedictine Order became the model for monastic life across Europe, flourishing through the Middle Ages until the rise of the Franciscan and Dominican orders at the end of the twelfth century led to its relative decline. The Benedictines nevertheless remained an influential force in Germany, France, and Austria, their growth finally coming to a halt due to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The order was suppressed through the eighteenth century as a series of emperors across Europe—from Joseph II in Austria, to Napoleon in France—sought to suppress them, closing their monasteries en masse. By 1800, there were fewer than fifty active houses worldwide. 

The first decades of the nineteenth century saw an upswing in Benedictine activity, as King Ludwig I of Bavaria, a devout Catholic, began reinstating medieval and renaissance abbeys. In 1846, recognizing that Europe’s Benedictine frenzy was spreading to the United States by way of an ever-growing number of immigrants, Bavarian monk Boniface Wimmer left the Metten Abbey to establish a monastery in Western Pennsylvania, where a large community of German Catholics had settled. 

In 1856, a bishop in St. Paul wrote to Brother Wimmer, requesting that a delegation of monks be sent to minister to the influx of German-speaking Catholic immigrants flooding central Minnesota. The next year, Saint Vincent Archabbey secured a territorial charter to establish a seminary on the western bank of the Mississippi River. Two years later, the small monastery relocated several miles upstream to the town of Collegeville, on the north shore of Lake Sagatagan, where Saint John’s Abbey was officially founded.

The first permanent building on Saint John’s Collegeville campus was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a church. Built in 1866, the two story stone structure was just large enough to perform the basic functions of monastic life for the handful of monks in residency at the Abbey. Although modest, the small church was proof of concept that the Benedictines, temporally and geographically dislocated from their medieval church-building forefathers, could, through some mixture of collective labor and inherited knowledge, manifest a spiritually effective architecture to bring the Catholic Rhineland to the Minnesota plains. 

In 1879, the monastic community at Saint John’s began building a new church complex in a German-inspired brick idiom. Over the course of several years, brothers and clerics became masons and carpenters, working with a small group of hired laborers to fell trees, source granite from surrounding fields, and kiln-fired bricks from local clay deposits. The Romanesque Revival church—with its heavy massing, deeply recessed entrances, tessellated ornamental moldings, and blind arcades—was attuned to popular late nineteenth-century design sensibilities, while also referencing key tenets of the German Rundbogenstil or “round-arch style.” Reviving the building techniques of centuries-old Benedictine houses while remaining stylistically “in vogue,” the first church at Saint John’s solidified the Abbey as the farthest-flung branch of an ancient Catholic order, seeking to affirm its roots and proliferate its visual identity into the United States.

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By the mid-twentieth century, Saint John’s had transformed from a small outpost of German monks serving local parishioners to a full-service educational institution and the largest Benedictine community in the world. Their purposes were quickly outgrowing their self-built monastery. In 1951, enrollment in the prep school had outgrown the nineteenth century footprint. The new abbot, Baldwin Dworschak, convened a building committee to begin charting a hundred-year expansion plan. Thus, nearly seventy-five years after their first successful building project, Saint Johns’s leadership returned to the drawing board with a more difficult formulation of the same challenge: imagining an architectural identity for Saint John’s that was plastic enough to evolve with the protean aesthetic conventions of post-war modernism, while remaining faithful to the Benedictines’ centuries-long liturgical and architectural traditions. 

In a series of meetings between 1951 and 1953, the building committee’s five members—comprised of priests, monks, and students—set out to define the parameters of the ambitious project, which was to include additional monastic quarters for aging brothers, a new library, and several buildings for administrative offices and classrooms, in addition to a new Abbey Church. Reflecting on the legacy of building at Saint John’s, and the broader tradition of Benedictine architecture, one of the committee members, Father Cloud Meinberg, remarked: “The great builders of Benedictine churches in Europe were great builders precisely because they looked to the future, refusing to be bound by accomplishments of the past. Nothing could be more uncharacteristic of our order than to fall back upon the limitations of the past, no matter how successful.” In 1953, Abbot Dworschak sent letters to an A-list of modernist architects—Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Eero Saarinen, Richard Neutra, and others—describing the dual resonances, symbolic and aesthetic, that the Benedictines hoped to achieve with the new construction: 

The Benedictine tradition at its best challenges us to think boldly and to cast our ideals in forms which will be valid for centuries to come, shaping them with all the genius of present-day materials and techniques. The modern architect with his orientation toward functionalism and honest use of materials is uniquely qualified to produce a Catholic work. 

The abbot went on to explain that Saint John’s monastic community included not only the brothers in Collegeville, but also the communities of  “a far-flung set of parishes” under the Abbey’s purview in Mexico, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, and Japan. Thus, the task at hand was not merely to design a church, but rather to develop a symbol that would resonate internationally: to produce an “architectural monument to the service of God.”

Marcel Breuer was both an obvious and an odd choice for the Benedictines. By the early 1950s, he was a recognized master of steel, concrete, and glass—materials that had become the lingua franca of modern architecture. Breuer’s obsessions with contrasting material gestures grew from several furniture projects he conceived as a student at the Bauhaus, such as the Wassily chair, whose innovative use of tubular steel ushered in a new era of experimentation in furniture design. Two years later, Breuer designed the Cesca chair, whose balance of futuristic cantilevered geometry and finely-wrought handmade materials became a metaphor for the aesthetic sensibility he would eventually apply in his architectural projects. For Breuer, the point of “feeble compromise” between ostensibly opposite forces generated the most innovative designs—a belief which certainly qualified to deliver a meaningful answer to the Benedictines’ call.

On the other hand, he had never designed a church and was less experienced with large-scale institutional projects than some of the other architects on the list. Prior to 1953, his most notable contributions to modernism were a series of homes he designed across New England. As a Hungarian-born Jew who had never set foot in Minnesota, the geographic, social, and religious backdrop of Saint John’s Abbey was uncharted territory for Breuer. 

In the end, however, it was neither his architectural acuity nor his portfolio of past work that won him the project. Rather it was the architect’s quiet resolve and genuine curiosity about the Benedictine way of life. After an in-person interview with the building committee, Abbot Dworschak remarked that Breuer stood out to the monks “not only as an outstanding architect, but a simple, straightforward, sincere, and rather humble person.” Thus, it was Breuer’s office in New York that was chosen to realize a “comprehensive hundred-year plan” for the Abbey and University, which included redesigning and replacing twenty-two existing buildings. Over the course of eight years, Breuer realized eleven of the originally planned projects through a process of “shadow building”—a technique that involves erecting new buildings beside their replacements, and razing the old only once the new was complete. This was the process through which Breuer and his firm delicately approached their projects at Saint John’s, with the aim to avoid undue disruption to the rhythm of monastic life. 

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Developing a plan for the Abbey Church required balancing the competing needs of three distinct groups: Saint John’s monastic community, its educational community, and the broad swath of local Benedictine parishioners in the towns the Abbey served. First and foremost, however, Breuer had to follow through on the basic set of programmatic requirements the building committee asked for: a choir large enough for two hundred priests, a monastic wing with dozens of individual prayer rooms, a one hundred fifty-seat chapter room, and a spacious sanctuary, among other requests. Abbott Dworschak and his colleagues also felt strongly about specific symbolic elements they wanted Breuer to implement in keeping with the Benedictine virtues of simplicity, stability, and hospitality. For instance, it was important to the monks that the high altar be centered in the room, separated from the “reredos”—the decorative screen traditionally placed behind the altar, and the “Ciborium”—the liturgical vessel that holds the consecrated body of Christ.

While he would oblige these wishes, Breuer also approached the dual symbolic and programmatic missions with his own ideology of aesthetics. Balancing competing tectonic and spiritual aims, Breuer decided that the trapezoid was the geometric form that would best connect both sides of the Breuer-Benedictine Venn diagram. This shape can be read as a metaphor for the church itself: paradoxically subtle and severe, quiet and subversive in its obliqueness. Thus, Breuer’s trapezoid became for ecclesiastical modernism what the gothic arch was to medieval architecture: a symbol equally representative of structural, technological, and conceptual motives. 

In his final plan, the length of the Abbey Church was divided into twelve pleated folds that decrease in all dimensions (width, depth, and wall-thickness) as they span successively shorter segments of the sanctuary, forming a series of progressively smaller concrete shells, like shallow transepts, that define the church’s interior and exterior shape. Incredibly, this pattern of semi-enclosed shells is what provides the structural support (or the “elbows”) for the soaring open volume. Breuer dramatized the concrete shell further by disconnecting it from the ground, placing the folds that compose the walls and roof atop a row of ground-level windows. This hovering illusion of suspension served both practical and liturgical ends. The feature allows for light to filter into the sanctuary without puncturing the rhythm of concrete shells with pesky windows while also relieving the Abbey Church from the oppressive heaviness of traditional German monastic architecture.

Historic American Buildings Survey, Creator. St. Johns University, Abbey Church, St. Johns University, Collegeville, Stearns County, MN. Collegeville Stearns County Minnesota, 1933. Documentation Compiled After. https://www.loc.gov/item/mn0190/. 

Breuer recognized that the church’s geometry was a far cry from the ubiquitous Latin Cross shape of traditional Benedictine churches, which are canonically configured on a north-south and east-west axis. The denial of tradition and convention in favor of a single guiding idiom created an identity for the church that was, in Breuer’s words, “basic, dominating, and so visually obvious that it almost appears simple though including infinite complexities.” Although the bell-shaped plan and the choice of concrete were novel departures from tradition, the sober textures and modest-yet-massive effect they conjured proved to be deeply resonant with Benedictine values. Breuer understood concrete’s unique utility to create an architectural whole, claiming that “no other material has the potential for such a complete and convincing fusion between structure, enclosure, and surface.” Concrete’s material malleability lent itself particularly well to the expressive aims of the Benedictines, as it could take nearly any shape. The material emboldened Breuer to sculpt a work whose form and scale directly corresponded to the urgency of its spiritual meaning, suspended in “the minute great form and the great small particle” throughout the church.  

In many of his post-war projects, Breuer gave careful consideration to designing the secondary, auxiliary, and supporting elements of his buildings. Instead of relegating these components to their functional requirements, Breuer elevated them to become part of a broader architectural argument. The staircase, the railing, the fireplace, the door handles, and the exhaust vent were not only basic infrastructure for Breuer but opportunities for signification: parts that could be meaningfully designed to resonate with the building as a whole. 

Breuer believed that the special power of a devotional space was dependent on its spatial amplitude, and he felt that the materials and means of construction by which the sanctuary was framed must be clearly shown as “a dominant visual fact.” For the ancillary structure at Saint John’s, Breuer resurrected the traditional bell tower “in new forms to fulfill contemporary needs.” The resulting structure—a 112-foot-tall trapezoidal campanile adorned with a cross and bells atop a parabolically-arced base—was placed directly in front of the church’s north-facing facade to become a monumental gateway into the church, framed against the “immense southern sky.”

 Instead of a “bell tower,” Breuer called it a “bell banner,” the structure’s geometry and scale resembling the banners carried by brothers during ritual processions. Using reinforced concrete “vertically cantilevered out of the ground,” Breuer designed a form that was both symbolically abstract and dutifully referential to Benedictine traditions. Just as he tweaked the square to create trapezoids, Breuer obscured the dogmatic and alluring “straight line” to create subtle curves, which he likewise inscribed throughout his design for the church. The curve, described by one of the monks as curved “just enough to recede into infinity,” forms the germ of movement that animates the bell banner as a whole. Its gentle, sloping arches create an illusion of something very much alive, and from an elevated view, recall the floating figures in Henri Matisse’s Dance. As Breuer conceived it, the ancillary bell banner would be an intermediary between the internal world of the church, and the external world of the Midwest—increasingly punctuated by highway interchanges and sprawling tracts of suburban development. 

Although Breuer was largely critical of mid-century commercial attitudes, of the “specialized propaganda” of modern advertisement, the bell banner’s scale and semiotic force appear as an immense “monastic billboard,” visually and symbolically projecting the Benedictine order across the tallgrass prairie of central Minnesota. Perhaps more generously, the bell banner can be read as a synecdoche whose monumental and anthropomorphic expressions correspond to, and embody, the new aesthetic logic Breuer developed in his design: a richly layered exclamation point that emphasizes and energizes the symbolic mission of the church. 

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More than sixty years after it was consecrated a “House of God,” Breuer’s Abbey Church endures as one of the largest Benedictine communities in the world. Though the project has been widely accepted as an early exemplar of ecclesiastical modernism, it retains a somewhat reticent position in the broader canon of post-war Modernist architecture. The great Chinese-American architect IM Pei suggested that, if it weren’t for the Abbey Church’s remote location, it might be considered one of the greatest examples of twentieth century architecture. 

Whatever its canonical position in the course of modernist architecture, Breuer’s intervention at Saint John’s created a blueprint for translating traditional Catholic aesthetics into modern material forms, and presciently anticipated major updates to the structure of monastic life that were to be implemented by the Second Vatican Council. In the years following its completion, the geometric and material movements Breuer introduced in Collegeville—simple and dignified, rather than ornate—would be played like an architectural “score” in the design of several other Benedictine monasteries in the Midwest. The story of Saint John’s Abbey Church is thus a kind of creation myth: an origin story that illustrates the advent of a new symbolic language formed by the dialogue between liturgical and architectural forces, and forged for an uncertain moment of rapidly-emerging modernity. A story about the storytelling capacity of architecture itself, the building is narrated not by Breuer, 

or by the Benedictines, but by “the eternal laws of geometry, gravity, and space.”  

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WORKS CITED 

Bergdoll, Barry. “Marcel Breuer and the Invention of Heavy Lightness.” Places Journal, June 2018. Accessed 10 Dec 2023. https://doi.org/10.22269/180612. 

Bergdoll, Barry et al. Marcel Breuer: Building Global Institutions. Lars Müller, 2018. 

Breuer, Marcel, et al. “Marcel Breuer Design and Architecture – An Introduction.” Marcel Breuer: Design and Architecture, Vitra Design Museum, Weil Am Rhein, 2003, pp. 14–20. 

Breuer, M. (1961). Marcel Breuer: The buildings at St. John’s Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota. Walker Art Center. 

Breuer, M. (1963). Abbey and University Church of Saint John the Baptist (3d ed.). 

Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1950). Information: A Reader, edited by Eric Hayot, Lea Pao and Anatoly Detwyler, New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2021, p. 163. 

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McCarter, Robert. “Marcel Breuer: Last of the first moderns / first of the last moderns.” Theatron, vol. 15, no. 4, 2021, pp. 69–76. 

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Poros, John, and Marcel Breuer. “Sun and Shadow: IBM Le Gaude.” Marcel Breuer: Shaping Architecture in the Post-War Era, Routledge, New York, NY, 2023, pp. 110–126. 

Roberts, Rebecca. “Marcel Breuer.” Moma Now: Highlights from the Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2019, pp. 128–129. 

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Stoddard, W. S. (1958). Adventure in architecture : building the new Saint John’s (1st ed.). Longmans, Green. 

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