Saint John's Abbey: Benedictines and Breuer

In the woods west of Saint Cloud, on a campus that feels like it belongs somewhere between Bavaria and the future, sits one of the most important works of twentieth-century religious architecture in the United States. Saint John's Abbey at Collegeville was founded in eighteen fifty-six, when five Benedictine monks arrived from Pennsylvania to establish a monastery in the Minnesota Territory. They brought with them a tradition more than a thousand years old: ora et labora, pray and work.

For a century the community grew steadily, becoming one of the largest Benedictine monasteries in the world. By the nineteen fifties, the abbey needed a new church, one that could hold the entire monastic community in worship. Abbot Baldwin Dworschak wanted something bold, something that would endure for a thousand years the way the great medieval abbeys had endured. In nineteen fifty-four, he hired Marcel Breuer to design it.

Breuer was a Hungarian-born architect trained at the Bauhaus, one of the most celebrated modernists of the century. He had never designed a church before. What he created at Collegeville was his masterwork: a massive church completed in nineteen sixty-one, built almost entirely of raw concrete poured into bold geometric forms. The facade is dominated by a freestanding bell banner, a great concrete slab pierced by openings for the bells, rising like a sail or a monastic banner above the Minnesota pines. It is simultaneously ancient and utterly modern.

Breuer went on to design several other buildings on the campus, including a library, science center, and monastery residence. Together they form one of the most coherent examples of Bauhaus-influenced institutional architecture anywhere in America.

The abbey church is still a working house of worship. The monks pray the Divine Office seven times a day, just as Benedictines have done since the sixth century. Students from Saint John's University attend Mass here. Visitors come from around the world to sit inside that concrete nave, where the morning light comes in at angles Breuer calculated to move across the altar in a slow liturgical arc. He designed a church that does theology with geometry, and it works.