We are used to considering England and, in particular, London as one of the world centers of advanced technologies and modern architecture, a scene of cultural experimentation, and it seems that conservatism and adherence to traditions have long been a “brand” of the British. Today it is difficult to imagine that this country was once the last in the entire Christian world (not counting the Eastern Christian countries) to accept the possibility of modernizing religious architecture and worship. But this is a fact! St. Paul's Church in London's Bow Common (Bow Common), the first modernist church in Great Britain, was not built until 1960, when America and continental Europe have long had numerous examples of modernist church buildings: America F. L. Wright built churches outside the traditional style at the beginning of the 20th century (the building of the Unitarian Church, 1904), and in Germany, Dominicus Boehm has been developing projects for expressionist churches since the early 1920s.
Bow Common was built under the influence of the Liturgical Movement, which advocated reform of the worship process; as a result, the participation of parishioners in the church service became more direct and accessible to them, recalling the original essence of joint worship around the sacrament of the Eucharist - Holy Communion. Until that moment, not only the Divine Liturgy, but also the organization of the internal space of the church strictly separated the clergy from the laity, the privileged strata of society from ordinary parishioners. The Liturgy was a theatrical performance, performed in Latin and mainly by the clergy, and the faithful could only repeat them in certain places. In the spatial sense, the churches had a basilical, elongated structure, at one end of which the believers were located, at the other - in the choir - the priests performed the liturgy, and the altar, around which the entire process of service took place, was placed in the very depths of the choir.
In this situation, the Liturgical movement wanted to return the church to its origins - simplicity and spontaneity, and first of all - to the participation of believers in worship. But for such ideological and functional reforms, one idea was not enough. First of all, for their implementation it was necessary to develop an adequate architectural structure of the church and a way of organizing its internal space. But there was no need to “reinvent the wheel”: returning worship to early Christian principles, the Liturgical Movement turned the architects' gaze to the typology of the most ancient Christian buildings - to centric and central domed structures, and at that time this tradition was well preserved only in the countries of Eastern Christianity. This is the design chosen for the Bow Common Church by its architects Keith Murray and Robert Maguire.
Murray and Maguire were very young when they started working on this project, and they had no experience in implementing an iconic building. However, they were not completely newcomers. Maguire had previously failed the delivery of the church project at the Architectural Association school, as it was not traditional enough, and there was a new way of organizing the movement of clergy and congregation during the service. Murray, on the other hand, worked at the leading church design workshop at the time. And they were invited to the project by the vicar of the Bow Common Church, Father Gresham Kirkby, who was a radical socialist and himself followed the ideas of the Liturgical movement. Kirkby was a unique personality: an "anarchist communist" (by his own definition), he even went to prison for his participation in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and innovated the "Liturgy of the Hours" ten years before their official adoption by the Vatican, justifying this by the fact that that "Rome will still have time to catch up with us." Although he was an Anglican priest, he conducted worship at Bow Common according to the Roman rite. Murray, Maguire and Kirkby are significant and controversial personalities, the combination of which made this project possible.
Murray and Maguire began designing the church by asking, "What should the worship service be like in 2000, and what kind of building should we build to meet these requirements?" By combining three main tasks - the direct involvement of parishioners in the process of worship, Holy Communion, which means the altar, as the essence and center of the sacrament, and the "flexibility" of space suitable for different functions - the architects embodied them in a central domed structure, which is not only spatial, but, in this interpretation, and a voluminous replica of the early Christian churches.
Outside, above the main cubic volume of the church, a glass dome with a fan-shaped end hovers, and along the outer perimeter the building is surrounded by a low gallery. Such a three-part structure visually resembles the Eastern Christian central-domed churches, where, however, this three-part has a different structural logic (the main volume of the church is the zone of tromps or sails above it - the dome). Inside, the Bow Common Church is a single cubic space with an altar in the center, bordered by a low gallery along the perimeter. Its central part is illuminated from above by a glass dome, while the galleries remain in a mysterious twilight. Maguire called this structure of the church “all-encompassing,” meaning that no matter where the viewer is standing, he feels exactly involved in worship at the altar. In this way, the architects reproduced the basic architectural idea of early Christianity - a single centric space, gathered around a modest altar and crowned with a dome - but expressed it using the language of modern architecture. They used "industrial" red bricks for masonry walls, and in the interior the floor is paved with concrete tiles, which are usually used for sidewalks. Using inexpensive, simple, everyday materials, the architects wanted to emphasize the "everydayness" and accessibility of the church, blurring the differences between the everyday world outside and the spiritual, religious world inside.
Such a structure of a single, integral space meets the requirements of not only equal participation of all believers in the liturgy, but also the “flexibility” of the space, suitable for different, including new, functions. In this sense, the words of Father Duncan Ross, a former vicar of the church, are interesting: “I don't really think about what can be done in the church. The space itself dictates what events can be organized there. " It seems that the Bow Common Church is ready to accept any event: not only Anglican services are held here: Pentecostals gather here on Thursdays, they transform the altar area according to the requirements of their religion and feel "at home." In addition to religious events, meetings of parishioners, joint meals, concerts are held here. The church has provided its space for various exhibitions many times and even served as a refuge for fifty Vietnamese pilgrims for a whole week. In 1998, during an exhibition in the church, Father Duncan saw a man crying in the corner. Coming closer, he recognized the elderly man as the architect Robert Maguire, who had visited the church he had designed for the first time in forty years. At first, the priest thought that Maguire was sad to see the church as it was, how its functions and the way it was used had changed. But Maguire explained that he was touched by how his creation - completely unexpected for him - “came to life”, showed remarkable functional flexibility and develops on its own, in a way he never imagined. Flexibility and integrity are precisely the ideas that he and Murray sought to put into the structure of the church. But the essence of unity in modern religious life is not only joint worship, but also the fusion of everyday life with religious life. This is that modern model of the purpose and activity of the church as a social and religious institution in the West, which architects did not even think of in the middle of the 20th century. However, they were able to create timeless architecture that is relevant at all times.
The Bow Common Church is unique not so much for its architecture as for the method by which this seemingly inexpressive, modest structure solves its tasks. This building is an excellent example of how the ideas of two modernisms - architectural modernism and religious modernism promoted by the Liturgical movement - merged in the unity of form and function, form and content, external and internal. The liturgical movement “cleansed” worship from theatricality and bombast, returning it to its original essence and main function - the unity of believers in the service - just as modernism cleansed architecture of non-architectural, non-structural excesses, making it a reflection of its function and essence.
