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8 responses to “New Visions needed”

1. 

   richard

   March 23, 2011

   nice – like the covered market church

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2. 

   Tomek

   March 24, 2011

   WE were just discussing this issue at home the other day. We’ve arrived at the conclusion that what Christchurch needs is immediate action. There is no point in devising some great master plan—that will only take too long and will not turn out the intended way anyway (that’s just the nature of the universe). What the businesses of the CBD need is immediate action. It can be a temporary solution, it doesn’t have to be awesome but it has to be soon.

   Once those businesses are operating again everyone concerned can return to the big round table and carry on planning the future. But without those businesses the won’t be much of a future.

   -t

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3. 

   richard

   March 24, 2011

   you’re right Tomek – cities grow from commerce not architectural egos – well the good ones do

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4. 

   Guy

   March 24, 2011

   So… a dictator is best? Cos when you’ve got committees involved, everything takes ages… Look at Gaddafi – he’s a man who gets things done! And Mubarek – the man of Action. Only took 40 years for a committee to oust him…

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5. 

   Guy

   March 24, 2011

   Or rather, what I meant to say, was that a “temporary solution” is often the most permanent solution. The world is littered with examples of “just leave it there for now, and we’ll sort it out later” but when later comes, there’s no time or money to sort it out then. London after the Great Fire, Warsaw after the firebombing, probably Rome as well – urban fabric formed not by planning, but by leaving things as they were in the “short term” and thinking they would sort it out later…

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6. 

   richard

   March 25, 2011

   perhaps not dictators, but there’s thousands of years of trading which has produced many cities – I’m guessing initially from informal trading and commerce – rather than legislated or dictated marketplaces. I think the evidence is Canberra – there’s a city that doesn’t work – no trade origins there

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7. 

   mimimus

   March 25, 2011

   seriously richard? So Canberra doesn’t work. One planned city. Hauptmann made a travesty of Paris, John Nash destroyed London with regent street, and his son ruined Bath. Washington Dc is a disaster of a city. Houston Texas on the other hand, with it’s lack of land use planning and complete market domination is a fantastic place.

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8. 

   Guy

   March 26, 2011

   There’s an interesting article here about the role of God in the Christchurch earthquake. Quite long – some snippets here:
   http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/christchurch-earthquake-2011/4812656/Act-of-God

   ….
   “Makeshift services and mobile congregations have become the norm in Christchurch, in some cases since September. People talk of church groups meeting in parks or on beaches, at least while the weather holds.
   “For the cathedral community to come together again was immensely powerful,” she says. “There was huge emotion. The buildings may be down but the church is not out.”
   ….
   As for whether the news about the cathedral can be considered a miracle, Matthews has given that some thought. “I believe in miracles – let me be very clear about that – but would I use the word miracle?” she says. “No, I think it’s a sheer gift.”
   ….
   But what attitude should the Anglican Church take to its own buildings? Besides the cathedral, there has been major damage to St Luke’s on Kilmore St, St John’s on Latimer Square, Holy Trinity in Avonside, Holy Trinity in Lyttelton, St John’s in Okains Bay and St Cuthbert’s in Governor’s Bay. There has also been damage to suburban churches in Merivale, Riccarton, Shirley, Opawa, Mt Pleasant, New Brighton and Redcliffs. Minor damage to churches in Woolston, Linwood and Aranui means that they should be repaired reasonably soon.

   Damage to Christchurch churches in the September 4 earthquake was estimated at $100 million. Ansvar Insurance, which insures many of the city’s churches, expects the damage after February 22 to be much greater than that. Damage to the Christ Church Cathedral alone would be in the tens of millions, according to Ansvar Insurance New Zealand manager David Leather.

   The likely rebuild of the cathedral is a symbolic act that has received a lot of attention in conversations about damaged buildings, but clearly some hard decisions will have to be made about Christchurch’s other Anglican churches.

   It might be too soon to have those discussions in public, but both Matthews and Patterson seem uncomfortable with the notion that this disaster could be an opportunity for the Anglican Church to rebuild for the smaller, more mobile congregations of the 21st century. As congregations are declining, do we need as many churches?

   Matthews answers with a question: do they have too many churches or not enough people going to them? Patterson says that if you are building for the future, you don’t want to build for a worst- case scenario.

   “Churches, for all their spiritual meaning, have historically been an event. The High Mass, the choral singing, the pageantry. If we start tearing down the beauty and building mean little churches, then we’ll be in trouble.

   “You want to walk into a church and feel your spirit soar. If we were better humans, we could do that by walking outside and we wouldn’t need it. But we need some help and churches help us.”

   Patterson worries that in pragmatic discussions about rebuilding the city, we could lose sight of the need for beauty – the kind of unusual beauty that the now-damaged stone churches lent the city.

   “Beauty embraces us in our suffering,” Matthews says.

   …
   With the heavy concrete dome of the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament making the building still too unstable to approach, the diocese office next door on Barbadoes St has also been off- limits.
   ….
   As with the Anglican cathedral, the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament is the high-profile casualty, but many other Catholic churches have also been damaged. A final prayer service has already been held at St Mary’s in New Brighton, which is to be demolished. Historic churches in Sumner and Lyttelton have likewise been hit hard.

   “I’ve heard people say that the Lyttelton one is so significant as a heritage building that it will have to be restored,” Jones says. “That’s not what the church has said but what I’ve heard heritage people say. But I don’t think the Sumner one, Our Lady Star of the Sea, can be restored.
   ….
   While the churches have good-sized congregations, “the real issue is whether they are the right places to have churches”.

   What would be the great symbol of earthquake damage to Christchurch’s Presbyterians? Your first answer might be the Knox Church on Bealey Ave, where the wooden frame still stands but the brick skin has largely fallen off. That church is probably repairable, says Presbyterian moderator The Rev Martin Stewart, but the old, grand St Paul’s Trinity Pacific on Cashel St, deep inside the cordon, is “gone”.
   …….
   A fire did damage first, then two earthquakes. “We have built the wrong kind of building, with the wrong kind of materials, for this landscape,” Stewart says. An English building style was imported with spires responding to an old view of where God was to be found.

   “As tragic as it is, with the loss of these buildings, we also have an opportunity to say ‘Hang on a minute, what does it mean to be the church?’ Not just now but for the next 50 years.”

   Future church buildings might be spaces that work for worship but are also community resources, he says. But how about as a place of beauty?

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