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1997
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Contents © 1997
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

Saint Patrick

If there are any principles of good church architecture that Saint Patrick Catholic Church in Carlsbad has not flouted, it would take a detective to find them. Presumably, the building is structurally sound: it has stood at the corner of Adams and Tamarack for many years. But apart from that...

The exterior view of a church ought to tell you it is a church. Virtually nothing at Saint Patrick's conveys that bit of fundamental information. The structure consists of giant blocks of plaster-covered masonry clustered together at various angles. Not a single Christian symbol adorns these blocks, except for the cross at the top of the featureless tower. But since the tower stands at the extreme rear of the church, wedged into the angle of the two streets at the southeast corner, both it and its cross are invisible from most viewpoints. From the front all you can see is the flat tops of several windowless walls.

The only "decorative" element on the blocks (whether these walls face front, to the side, or at an angle) is an incised rectangular outline a foot from each edge, emphasizing the abstract, cold, and unspiritual quality of the exterior design. Furthermore, from no point around this lifeless pile is it possible to grasp the building's overall structure. The normal Catholic church facade welcomes you into God's house; this one simply ignores you.

Since the exterior has given no suggestion, it comes as a surprise that the interior of Saint Patrick's is in a fan shape, broader than it is long, with wings reaching out far to the side. The liturgical purpose of such a floor-plan in a church is to draw the worshipers together and to lessen the distance between each of them and the altar. It also has the visual effect of softening straight lines by providing for curved walls and pews, and offering opportunities for complex treatment of the ceiling.

In Saint Patrick's, the only beneficial use made of the shape is the curvature of the benches, splayed out around the focal point of the altar, with the floor gently slanting down toward it. Otherwise, the shape's inherent architectural implications are contradicted. The ceiling, at a few different levels, is merely flat, and dull. The walls are at right angles, rather than curved or on the bias. As a result, the interior shows the rigid rectangularity of the conventional basilica-form church, but without the directionality of the basilica, which directs the eye and heart along a straight, narrow path toward the altar and the crucifix. The floor-plan is stiff in its outlines and flabby in its breadth: it has the worst of both architectural worlds.

At the same time, the architects tried to add a note of basilican drama with what turns out to be the building's most striking feature. At either side of the center aisle, going from the altar wall to the entrance wall some 20 feet above the floor, there are two immense, open-beamed structures, like the trusses of a bridge. The large horizontal beams and smaller vertical and diagonal struts, all in brown wood, are connected by metal plates with exposed bolt-heads. The intention seems to have been to suggest the side-walls of a basilica, while still leaving the distant wings of the church visible below and through these structures. However, the raw industrial style, and the fact that not a single design feature of the trusses is echoed anywhere else in the building, suggests instead that we are looking at a desperate patch-work added at the last minute to keep the church from falling down. In fact, we are probably looking at something the designers considered a bold and innovative architectural idea. Bold it is -- bold, and botched.

Far to the left and right of the altar area, the walls are pierced with arrays of stained-glass windows, each arranged in 12 squares that form a cross. The form repeats that of the 12-part frosted-glass skylight over the center aisle. It is an interesting idea, but the shape of the array, symmetrical in all directions, is visually soporific. The abstract, Mondrian-like (or linoleum-like) designs of the windows themselves, in understated shades of mauve, olive, and cream, are meaningless as religion and add no excitement to the dead beiges and grays of the walls and ceiling. A chapel to the right of the altar leads to a far more successful window in a different style: still abstract, but with sweeping arcs as well as impulsive diagonal lines, the colors vivid (blue, red, and yellow predominate) and inspiring. But behind the main altar, the large, stepped, rectangular array of stained glass is thoroughly blocked from daylight, presumably by the tower that stands behind.

Is there anything unqualifiedly good to be said about Saint Patrick's as a work of art and architecture? Yes, the church's stations of the cross -- by Tricia O'Neill Gill -- are magnificent. Displayed on the interior side-walls as though in a museum (which is where works of this quality belong), these are large, cast-paper bas-reliefs, suspended on tall cloth rectangles. The coarsely modeled forms partly emerging from their rough, undifferentiated backgrounds, are short on narrative information but stunning in their emotional expressiveness. Station Nine, for example, shows nothing but the X-shape of the cross, with Our Lord's suffering face and tensed hands in the angle at the bottom. The sense of His being weighed down with the cross and with grief is powerful. Gill's reverent sculptures remind us that we are in a Catholic church -- something the architects and the other designers seem generally to have forgotten.

-- Sean-Michael de Carvalho

Saint Patrick (1943)
3821 Adams Street
Carlsbad