The first reaction of most visitors to Madonna del Castello is astonishment that such a thing even exists. The sanctuary hovers over the parking lot on spindly legs like some giant beetle ready to march out into the streets of Swissvale. It is beautiful, impressive, and a little terrifying.
The church shows very clearly both how modern architects used modern innovations to solve difficult problems, and why the Diocese of Pittsburgh is eager to get rid of these buildings. The Second World War drew a sharp line in church architecture. Before it, a large church was built to last for centuries with proper maintenance. After the war, modernist architects were quite aware that they were building for a generation or two, not for the centuries. The postwar building boom demanded large facilities put up quickly and inexpensively, and modern materials and techniques served the purpose.
This church had a particularly tricky problem to solve. Its growing Italian congregation needed a fairly large building, with room for offices and classes. But the lot they owned was steeply sloped, not suitable for any kind of traditional church building. The architects, Belli & Belli of Chicago (who also designed Immaculate Conception in Bloomfield), responded by making the lot’s liabilities into assets.
By raising the sanctuary on stilts, they gained extra parking area and a porte cochere for dropoffs sheltered from the weather. Modern technology made it possible. You walk straight in from the drive to a lobby with an elevator, which whisks you up to the sanctuary.
That is, it does when the elevator is working. But the elevator has been broken for some time now, and it’s two floors’ worth of steps up from the parking lot to the sanctuary.
The cornerstone of this church was laid in 1965; now, six decades later, the building is coming to the end of its two generations of usefulness. It could be preserved with some updates, but it would cost money. Thus, with a dwindling congregation, this is one of the seven churches in St. Joseph the Worker parish scheduled to close this month.
Meanwhile, it is possible to enter the sanctuary at ground level in the rear, but you can’t park there. The ingenious technological solution to the lot problem has become a nuisance. Multiply that nuisance by the number of buildings of similar age in the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, and you can see why the people who look at spreadsheets are not happy.
Father Pitt does not know what the future holds for this building, but we can at least remember it with these pictures. They will remind us of an era when modernism was still something exciting, not a collection of shopworn clichés as tired as Victorian crenellations and curlicues.
In the nave, a central skylight runs from front to back. This is not a dim church, even in cloudy weather; it was meant to be flooded with God’s own light.
Although the modernism of the design is striking, in its form this is a very traditional church, arranged for traditional Christian liturgy, not—as many modernist Catholic churches are—like a theater.
The “nave” of a church, the main body of the sanctuary, is so called from its resemblance to a ship (Latin navis); but in no other church in the Pittsburgh area is the resemblance made so obvious.
Each of these huge beams is itself a distinguished work of modern sculpture.
We believe the large window behind the altar was by the Hunt Studios of Pittsburgh, but corrections are welcome.
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