Reitor Braga da Cruz
Universidade Catolica Portuguesa
FAX 351 21 726 05 46
I am outraged that the Catholic University of Portugal has committed an act of treachery that is unseemly for an institution of that name. The information concerning how the recent changes in the architecture program hardly add luster to the institution’s name.
I am also outraged about the outcome of the changes. The result is the eclipse of one of rare programs in architecture and urbanism that has already exhibited its excellence and its substitution with one that cannot be more than mediocre.
And I am outraged by the about face the University has taken in instituting a program that is inimical to every value defended by an institution whose name proclaims it to be a Catholic university.
One of my most prized accomplishments when I was Chairman of the School of Architecture here at the University of Notre Dame was to assist Professor Sebastião Formosinho Sanches and Dr.Pedro Paraiso in establishing the program in architecture at the Catholic University of Portugal. In anticipation of the program’s inauguration, the intentions of the program were discussed in meetings here in South Bend between José Cornélio da Silva and both the President “Monk” Malloy and the Provost Nathan Hatch. The University of Notre Dame was delighted to play that role. Under my predecessor as Chairman, it recognized that traditional and classical architecture can provide the most sensible and responsible basis for training people to enter the profession of architecture. The result is a program that moved from a middle position among the more than 100 schools of architecture in this country to a place firmly in the top 10 according to the evaluation of practicing architects of every kind in this country.
It is appropriate for a Catholic university to support this educational philosophy because it is congruent with Catholic teaching. Our curriculum, like the one that was instituted in Viseu, seeks to extend traditional knowledge and constantly reinvigorate it to enable it to address ever-changing conditions. This is the architecture that is appropriate for serving the Church which, like the practice of traditional and classical architecture and urbanism, in its teaching and its liturgy embodies tradition and continues to reinvigorate that tradition to serve ever changing conditions in which man lives in God’s world. I stress this parallel between architecture and the Church in order to stress that an explicitly and proudly Catholic university is the proper setting for this way of teaching architecture.
It is therefore outrageous that the opposite approach to architectural education has been substituted for one that is appropriate for a Catholic institution of higher learning. The intention of the alternative architecture, which is Modernism in its most visible form, is to destroy tradition and replace it with a mere extension of an individual’s ego and the mindless response to the imperatives of material forces embodied in technology and economics. This is not only the recipe for mediocrity (since the student, and eventually the professional architect, has nothing more than his own capacity to guide him). It also makes a mockery of the linkage between the good, the true, and the beautiful that the Holy Father places at the center of our quest for knowledge of God in Fides et Ratio (for example, at 21.2; and 34). Careful reflection would reveal that Modernist program that provides the foundation for the Modernist architecture that is being instituted at the Catholic University of Portugal cannot survive the condemnation of the errors of philosophy that the Holy Father presents in the same encyclical at 86 through 90.
The Holy Father opens that encyclical with the reminder that the admonition “Know yourself!” stands at the heart of the Catholic’s life of faith. The program José Cornélio da Silva instituted was based on that admonition. It also provided a means by which the student would conduct his life so that he might fulfill that admonition in a profound way, one that is informed by tradition, as is the teaching of the Church. Such a quest is fundamental in our program here at Notre Dame. It was available in Viseu, but now it will be replaced by its nemesis. In its place will be a Modernist architectural education that projects the most superficial knowledge of oneself into the world in the form of buildings that serve mere sensate satisfaction and do not address, indeed, deny the validity of, the engagement of the Christian in the civil and religious life of the community in communion with the profound mysteries embodied in Catholic tradition.
It is, then, not merely the means that have been used to institute the new program but the content of the new program that are to be condemned in the sharpest possible terms. This is an act that will be seen as filled with the most profound shame. It is not too late to undo this unfortunate act. It will be difficult to restore the status quo ante, but surely the cunning that went into its dismantlement can be turned to reinstituting it. With its restoration will come a restoration of the seamless unity we seek between the Church and the world as it can be rendered in traditional and classical architecture and urbanism, and only by traditional and classical architecture and urbanism.
Yours,
Carroll William Westfall
Frank Montana Professor of Architecture
Carroll William Westfall
Frank Montana Professor
School of Architecture
110 Bond Hall
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
(574) 631-6138
FAX (574) 631-8486