Coventry Cathedral, 1962: Redeeming the Scar into Modernity

• Main Author: Michel Morel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2012-12-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: Coventry; architecture; Blitz; frailty; heritage; heroism
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/1327

Architecture at its best is incarnate equilibration; even more so in Coventry Cathedral where the ruins of the older place of worship were literally built into the modern construction completed in 1962. Contrary to Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church where three new buildings were erected in physical separation around the ruins of the older church, Coventry’s fragile Gothic remains have been welded to the new cathedral, the use of Hollington sandstone providing a supplementary element of continuity. Spence’s cathedral stands as a compendium of modernity associating among others Epstein, Sutherland, and Britten whose War Requiem was premiered there a few days after the consecration. It is consequently made to interlock in an oxymoronic relation with the former cathedral, a perfect incarnation of a tradition that both Burke and Eliot conceive as abandoning nothing en route. Such an architectural tie-up turns the scar of the Blitz into a continued artistic act of memory, the balance of the whole depending on a tenuous but heroic conjunction through which the ruins live on and the contemporary building seems to delve back into the historical heritage that made it possible.