Tag: architecture

Andrew Coleman works with wood, for now and for the future

Wood doesn’t last forever. That’s one of the things Andrew Coleman likes about it.

“God’s the one who made wood. Its properties are what they are because he made it that way,” said Coleman, the artist and owner of Coleman’s Handcrafted Sacred Art and Fine Woodworking.

Even a substantial and ornate wooden altar, like the one he built for Our Lady of Mount Carmel in St. Francisville, Louisiana, doesn’t have the lifespan of stone or metal — especially in humid south Louisiana, where Coleman’s workshop is based. But that’s not necessarily a flaw.

Some parts of the church will last for thousands of years; some of it is designed more for the here and now. That’s true for church buildings and for the Church as an institution.

“Even if you’re going to have a church built out of marble, you can’t do it without the use of wood,” Coleman said. You need both, and there’s a wider lesson about complementarity there.

This meeting of the eternal and the temporal gets played out throughout salvation history: Some of the things God does are permanent and unchangeable; some of them are meant for a specific time and place. Coleman, who founded the company with his wife, Ashley, four years ago, tries to keep both the temporal and the eternal in mind as he works.

After studying in seminary for a year, Coleman discerned he was meant for married life — specifically, marriage to Ashley, whom he’d known since they were kids growing up in Baton Rouge. His main goal, early on, was just to support a family, so he took a job as a salesman at a septic company owned by a fellow daily Massgoer. The job wasn’t glamorous, but it paid the bills.

But he did long to serve the Church more directly. He’d always been interested in woodworking, ever since he built a kneeler in shop class, and gradually he began to spend more and more time woodworking as a hobby. When his pastor at Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish in Baton Rouge said the church’s altar rails needed restoring, he made the time to get it done.

That part-time project changed his life. A friend of the pastor who was visiting saw his work and was so impressed that he asked Coleman to build the entire sanctuary for a new church they were building in Alabama.

“It was a jump! It was like two years of work, and I was like, OK, well, I’m quitting my job to do that,” he said.

He was ready to take the leap, but Ashley was less certain. She considers that caution part of her job, along with managing the business end of the company, including social media accounts and their newsletter, The Whittler.

“That’s our dynamic. Andrew is the dreamer and the idealist, in a very positive way. Andrew is like, ‘Let’s go!’ and Ashley is like, ‘How are we going to do this?’” she laughed.

As the couple described the complementarity of their business dynamic, they took turns managing their toddler son, who spent the interview playing with his favorite toy, a calculator. Ashley is expecting another child in March.

Since that first big leap into full-time woodworking, the Colemans have been busy with commissions for churches, mostly in and around Louisiana, where both Catholicism and family ties are deeply seated.

“We’re very, very embedded in our community,” Andrew said. Much of the work they do is for priests who were friends with the Colemans before they were even ordained.

Mixing business and friendship has the potential for awkwardness, but the Colemans are overwhelmingly grateful their work is so personal.

“These different pastors are willing to trust us with these big projects that maybe they wouldn’t have trusted to someone they didn’t know personally,” Ashley said.

They’ve hit a sweet spot….

Read the rest of my latest (and possibly my last) for OSV. 

Matthew Alderman finds ancient answers to new questions in church architecture

Matthew Alderman has a surprising weakness for neon haloes, the kind you might find lighting up the heads of stone saints in 1,000-year-old Italian churches.

“It can be quaint. I will take old, interesting kitsch over ’60s clip art,” he said. “At least it has honesty.”

But when Alderman works on church design, he tries to aim a little higher than honesty. Clients, weary of bland and barren sacred art and architecture, are ready for more.

“They want something transcendent that speaks to a higher order,” he said.

Alderman, 41, is a popular illustrator and heraldry expert, but his day job is with the venerable church architecture firm Cram and Ferguson, where he is the day-to-day design manager, working together with several other team members. The firm is known for its role in spearheading the revival of Gothic and other traditional styles. Its hallmark style provides a lively relief from the dreary errors of the past several decades. So much modern design is cold and sterile, bleak or banal.

But Alderman never wants to make a mere copy, or return to the past simply for the sake of returning. At the same time, he will never reject a design merely because it comes from a certain era, even a modern one.

“The artists who produced (church buildings) in the ’50s and ’60s did have a classical education,” he said.

There was a reason they made the design choices they did, even if the results come across as ugly, theologically dubious, or distasteful. But the generations that followed them were not necessarily educated or thoughtful, and the churches that came next were “copies of copies of copies.”

“They do not speak to us,” Alderman said. “It feels narrow and inauthentic.”

As he and his co-workers at the firm collaborate with painters, wood carvers, sculptors and the clients who commissioned it all, Alderman strives to see what can be learned from the past, and figures out how to make it work for the present. Rather than straining for design so artistically pure it becomes almost legalistic, or merely attempting to copy the work of great architects like Borromini or Gaudi, he tries to get inside their heads, identifying the essential principles that guided them. He asks himself how they would solve whatever problem is bedeviling him now.

“I have this particular style I’m trying to learn from, get behind it, think about what are the ideals, the first principles. It’s a wonderful challenge,” he said.

Alderman didn’t invent the idea of taking ancient principles of design and applying them in new ways. In the 19th century, portrait sculptors of great statesmen wanted to give their subjects the grandeur and nobility of emperors of the past, but they couldn’t show them wearing togas.

“They figured it out: Suits with overcoats wrapped around them,” Alderman said.

He mused that a contemporary artist could do something similar with images of modern holy men and women, like the soon-to-be-canonized Carlo Acutis.

“You have to find an ideal balance between producing something so contemporary it becomes distracting, and something not recognizable as a saint,” he said.

Hoodies have a nice drape to them, or perhaps you could show Acutis wearing the hospital gown he died in.

“The problem with images of modern saints is that we’re going off photographs,” he said, which tempts artists to slavishly recreate the exact details on record.

“They should look like them, but they shouldn’t be the only thing we’re using to recognize them by,” he said.

He’s seen a few portrayals of Acutis holding a laptop, which is a tool he used for evangelization, but he’s not sure if it works.

“Maybe the decoration on the border could look like circuit boards,” he said. “There are so many ways to attack this.”

He takes similar problems under consideration in architecture, trying to find a balance between the wisdom of the past and the actual requirements of the present. Some elements of church architecture are immutable: The overall design should always focus attention on the most important things, the crucifix, the tabernacle, the altar.

“It should be building to that crescendo,” he said.

But while you achieve that goal, there is endless room for variation. The relative newness of the Church in America is fertile ground for creativity, even playfulness — and even a chance to right some wrongs of the past…Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. This article can also be found in the most recent print edition of OSV. 

Image: St. Paul Catholic University Center, photo by Father James Bradley. (Courtesy of Matthew Alderman)