This article first appeared in Our Sunday Visitor magazine. Subscribe to receive the monthly magazine here.
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.”
Chasing first principles
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.
Fertile ground for creativity
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. One project dear to him that the Cram team is working on is a shrine dedicated to the little-known martyrs of La Florida. It’s a group of nearly sixty Christians — including missionaries, Spanish laypeople and Indigenous people — who were killed over the course of nearly two hundred years, including in the Apalachee Massacre in 1704. “The British and their allies tried to destroy (the native Catholic) Apalachee culture,” he said.
Alderman grew up in the region and is half-Hispanic but never learned much about this history until recently. So, as part of the effort of the cause for their canonization, he has helped design a shrine that is recognizably Spanish but infused with native motifs. In a way, he explains, the design imagines what it might have been like had the mingled Apalachee-Spanish culture survived to commemorate their martyrs. “It’s what they would have built if they had the resources,” he said. “It’s a kind of alternate history exercise.”
The team strives to infuse tradition with freshness even in a building that they don’t get to design from scratch. “We did a church in South Carolina, a renovation. You could drop a bomb on it. It’s solid concrete, a block from the ocean,” Alderman said. That was what they had to work with. The firm completely redid the interior, adding carved wood, stained glass and statuary, keeping to traditional liturgical themes, including saints and angels surrounding the altar. “But there’s a lot of opportunity for fun that’s richly symbolic,” he said. “Because it’s a church dedicated to St. Andrew, who is the patron of fishermen, we worked in a lot of heraldic animals: dolphins, fish, crustaceans.” He recalled that the laurel is a symbol of victory; he wondered what its underwater equivalent would be. He chose a type of seaweed called sea laurel, and worked it into a carved wreath around the Lamb of God on the freestanding altar. The altarpiece design also included a carved frieze of little dolphins. Dolphins were, in the early centuries of the Church, occasionally used as a symbol of Christ and, more frequently, of Christians. Alderman said the back-to-back dolphin design looked something like a giant fleur-de-lis, a symbol not only of Mary but of Christ. These subtle meanings aren’t necessarily going to be obvious to a Mass-goer who isn’t in the habit of thinking symbolically.
“Sacred distraction” can be very fruitful, Alderman said, as long as what distracts you is something good, true and beautiful and brings you back to the action of the Mass. When he’s not involved in project design, Alderman loves drawing sacred images, and often takes commissions from parents whose children have picked a confirmation patron saint who’s so obscure they can’t find any images of him or her. Portraying sacred faces, especially the face of Mary, is a little tricky. “Creating a face for Mary which respects a variety of cultural backgrounds and reads as both modest and beautiful is a challenging balance,” he explains. “There’s a lot of cultural baggage, and I haven’t quite mastered that yet.”
The need for humility
Not all of his work is sacred, but he faces some of the same challenges in all his projects, whether it’s decorative headings for legal documents or heraldic design. “What symbolism do I use? There’s always a process of trying to keep things fresh but not merely faddish, trying to pack in as much symbolism as appropriate, but also trying to find a style which is appropriate to the subject matter,” he said. “Sometimes there’s a process of trying to cram a bunch of stuff in, and then winnowing it out,” he said. Alderman frequently mentions the need for humility. He might cringe when he enters a church where the designers, chasing tradition, stuffed every possible space with statuary and decoration without considering balance or harmony.
But he understands where they’re coming from: It’s an attempt to correct the sterility that dominated architecture for so much of the 20th century. While he loathes an ugly “resurrexifix” or a lumpy, barely-identifiable statue of Mary as much as the next fellow, he also recognizes that the minimalism of contemporary art was itself a reaction, an overcorrection to the claustrophobic sacred jumble of 19th-century designs. “Churches were loaded with every possible statue, with clutter everywhere. It was Crazy Aunt Gothic,” he said. The constant cycle of correction and overcorrection is a hamster wheel we can dismount, with attention. “I think people are wanting to dip back into the past without necessarily refighting all the polemics that got us here,” he said. “We can pick and choose what works best.” But part of that process is to approach the project with humility. “You have to go into this not patronizing or snide,” he said. “We’re all trying our best.”
