If its a sunny day on December 25th Marcel Breuer’s Annunciation Priory’s bell banner in Bismarck, North Dakota, will cast a cross-shaped shadow at noon on the stone front of the chapel. This article was first published Winter 1986 in
North Dakota Horizons Magazine. Things have changed but some things remain the same, such as the beginning.
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A renowned architect, and an innovative prioress
defied the odds to build a masterpiece
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Seven miles south of Bismarck, North Dakota, far removed from the architectural epicenters of the 20th century, is an American classic. It was created by world renowned architect Marcel Breuer, an innovative prioress, and a small band of Benedictine nuns. It is one of a very few buildings of such distinction in the region. The place -- Annunciation Priory.
The origins of the Priory are as dynamic as the surrounding landscape of rolling hills and Missouri River valley. In the autumn of 1954 prioress Edane Volk dispatched two sisters to St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. The Benedictine monks there had commissioned Breuer, one of the most influential architects of the Bauhaus period, then living in New York City, to design their chapel, library and future building plan.
The challenge: Could Marcel Breuer ( pronounced like broiler without the l ) design a cluster of buildings in one of the most remote parts of the country that could withstand some of North America’s harshest climate yet nobly reflect the Benedictine philosophy of prayer and work, and at a price the fledgling order could afford? Breuer met the challenge.
Prioress Volk no doubt assumed the Lord was on her side but she was also an astute businesswoman. In making her request she’d calculated that she could clip considerable expenses because St. John’s was paying the architect’s expenses as far as Minnesota. The short additional trips to North Dakota would save precious resources if Breuer would be so kind as to arrange them while in Minnesota. He was and he countered that perhaps he could design them a “little jewel” on the prairie in the process.
'Many people in Bismarck at that time thought, Who are these sisters to get this fancy New York architect? They’d be broke before they begin,’ Sister Volk recalled. They were all wrong.
Madonna & Child sculpture at entrance to chapel
In the late 1940s St. Benedict’s Convent in St. Joseph, Minnesota, missioned 140 nuns to North Dakota to establish a new Benedictine motherhouse to meet the rising need of teachers and nurses for religious schools and hospitals in the region.
Originally the plans were to build the Priory on land the sisters owned in Dickinson. But when newly appointed Bishop Hacker took office in Bismarck, he made inquiries about locating the Priory in Bismarck, closer to the Catholic establishment in the state.
When a Bismarck farm family, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Swenson, donated a tract of land seven miles south of the city, Bishop Hacker had second thoughts. Such a remote site could prove to be too much of a challenge for a group of women. He too was wrong. The sisters wanted a remote place, away from city activity, in keeping with monastic tradition but also close enough to Bismarck to enable them to participate in their work and the community.
“Father Michael Marx was then on leave from St. John’s and teaching in Bismarck. He encouraged me to consider Breuer as architect of our Priory,” Sister Volk said.
Glory, who were we to go talk to this great architect from New York City!” But Marx encouraged her.
The sisters had made several visits to new priories in the region, studying architectural styles. They knew they most wanted a priory that would enhance their lives as Benedictines and would suit the site near Bismarck.
“When we heard about Breuer’s philosophy of contemporary architecture-that buildings show a connection to their surroundings and not just be a replica of the past, as well as his study of the Benedictine Order and his previous monastic work, we were convinced he could build the Priory,” Sister Volk recalled.
“He inquired about our daily schedule, where we ate, what we did for recreation, how we prayed; not just work but our spiritual needs,” Sister Volk recounted. “Benedictine life-what does that mean?” he would ask. He wanted to get that into the buildings.” Breuer asked the sisters their ideas of what they wanted in their home. “He was very perceptive of our needs and never tried to push his ideas on us, he never confronted people. Instead, he’d say, ‘Well, Sister, we’ll work that out.’”
Marcel Breuer drew up a 100 year plan including, in the first stage, a girl’s high school (now part of The University of Mary) completed in 1959; the second stage, providing the permanent chapel and convent for the sisters, completed in 1963; and the third stage, the building of The University of Mary, ongoing. The first and second stage combined, cost just over $3,400,000 - a modest sum for such a treasure.
State Highway 1804 skirts the Missouri Rver south of Bismarck. It meanders past large ranch homes with good -sized swatches of pasture stocked with well-bred horses. Off in the distance, on a prominent river bluff, stands a tall concrete banner that recedes from view as the road curves, leaving one wondering what that prominent, unusual object is. A half mile futher on it reappears, in the near distance. A simple wooden roadside sign says, “ University of Mary and Annunciation Priory.”
Sister Emannuel, "Scrubbing the porch of the Lord."
Turning off the highway onto the Priory road there is no doubt that this is the rugged landscape of the American West. Sage brush, prairie grasses and roses grapple for moisture amidst the rocky glacial debris. Shelter belts and fields of crops cut straight lines in the countryside yet there is a wildness about the site that arriving at the parking lot does not dispel.
Breuer’s bell banner stands off center, in front of the long fieldstone cloister walk that establishes the Priory’s souther parameter. This is in keeping with Benedictine tradition of placing the cloister to the south, and the church to the north.
Three bronze bells are suspended from the banner, one named Hilary, in honor of Bishop Hilary Hacker; another named Joseph, in memory of Monsignor Joseph Raith; and Mary, the smallest bell, in honor of the patroness of the community.
The bell banner exemplifies Breuer’s mastery of concrete. Varieties of concrete have been used since Roman times but not until the late 19th century invention of reinforced concrete did it become a staple building material, valued for its strength, speed of assembly, versatility and modest cost.
The Priory bell banner soars 100 feet into the air, a huge pennant perched upon a two-way cantilever support. Its strong sculptural form creates bold shadows on and around it. No other building material is capable of such height, shaping economy and durability. Stone, brick--impossible. Metal, wood--maybe but too expensive. Breuer delighted in using grainy patterned wooden frames to cure his concrete forms, imbedding them with the wood’s pattern and personality.
“Some people around Bismarck were sure the bell banner would topple over in the first good blizzard,” one of the sisters recalled humorously. It has long since weathered that test. It is a particularly suitable prairie structure--large, visible from a great distance across the rolling farmland and, of course durable, to withstand fierce extremes of weather. Its dramatic spiritual form heralds the religious community that resides within earshot of its bells.
Marcel Breuer was born in Pecs, Hungary, in 1902. he attended the art Academy in in Vienna and later the Bauhaus School of Design, in Dessau, Germany, where he became a professor. It was at the Bauhaus that he established himself as one of the primary design influences of the 20th century, along with Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus founder, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
The Bauhaus School espoused a radically different approach to design and building that stressed the importance of an object’s use in determining how it should look. Form follows function was their credo. They strived to mimic the sleek aesthetic of machines. A car engine, for instance, is purely functional, not glitzed up with superfluous detail. Objects were made of durable, economical, often industrial materials, such as stainless and tubular steel, concrete and canvas. These materials were transformed from ugly ducklings into beautiful functional objects such as the Breuer chair, made of tubular steel. Breuer’s chair is an apt example of successful Bauhaus principles.
Two Breuer-designed chairs
Hindsight shows something got lost in the translation. What had initially been intended to produce unpretentious, honest forms quickly became a good excuse to build on the cheap. Cities around the world show this to be true, with their repetitive plethora of glass and steel boxes for buildings and mind-numbing interiors for rooms.
This makes the presence of Annunciation Priory exceptional. A scant 25 years after the closing of the Bauhaus (which existed for barely a decade, from the 1920s to the early 30s) the Priory was designed and built thousands of miles from the origins of its principles while maintaining all of its best ideals.
The Bauhaus was closed with the rise of Nazism. Gropius and Breuer soon settled at Harvard University, where they taught at the School of Design. Together they created one of the first International Style (what streamlined buildings are called) structures of note in the country, The Gropius House, in Lincoln, Massachusetts, in 1937. Mies van der Rohe went to Chicago, where he began work on the Illinois School of Technology.
Gropius stayed at Harvard, while Breuer spent the 1940s perfecting house designs, as ‘...the shelter as simple, expressive geometry in fieldstone, glass and taut white surfaces, cantilevered over the countryside or precisely placed in fields and on hills,” as noted by architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable in her book, Kicked Any Good Buildings Lately?
By the 1950s and 60s Breuer was receiving the meatiest of commissions, such as the UNESCO Building in Paris; the Whitney Museum in New York City; Housing and Urban Development headquarters in Washington DC; and closer to home, St. John’s Abbey, in Collegeville, Minnesota.
These structures established the now familiar Breuer trademarks of ‘...powerful, repetitive patterns of precast facades, artfully sculptured columns, Y-shaped buildings, folded and fanned concrete and elevated sculptural shapes, which push reinforced concrete technology into the realm of abstract art.
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| Priory cemetery Summer 1984 |
On a warm summer’s day, Sister Edane Volk recalls the events of 30 years ago, when she was prioress and worked with Marcel Breuer to create Annunciation Priory. She is dressed a newer, modified habit and although retired, has just finished a day of volunteer work at a Bismarck hospital.
“Breuer was a very talented man, yet he had great humility. He was soft spoken, and never talked of the other great things he did, like that UNESCO Building. He’d say, ‘Yes, I helped with that.”
Breuer lived for a time with time with the monks at St. John’s to enable him to more fully understand their lifestyle. Sister Volk did not know what religion he was only that he was buried a Lutheran, in 1981.
At the Priory’s entrance, behind the bell banner, is a fieldstone and white concrete cloister walk, a courtyard and a terra cotta flue tile screen that establishes a sense of monastic seclusion.
The convent and school wings jut out from the flue tile-fronted main building. To break the monotony of the two wings, Breuer produced a checkerboard pattern of screens alternating with buff-tone brick. Unlike conventional screens that fit the windows these are set in a framework about 12 inches from the building.
Light and shadow are important components of the Priory, most notable the bell banner. Once a year near Christmas the shadow of the cross in the banner is cast onto the front of the chapel, 100 feet to the north.
The bell banner’s shadow cast at noon on Christmas day photo Greg Becker
The Priory, which includes the convent, dormitory,space for religious retreats, communal dining and meeting rooms, is made of simple concrete block walls, vinyl and brick tiled floors and plaster ceilings, for the most part. Simplicity is the rule. The windows are many and the walls are white with the occasional accent of Chinese red, moss green, yellow an a memorable shade of blue affectionately referred to as “Breuer Blue.”
The only ornamentation are the larger than life-size photomurals of Gothic paintings, including works by Duccio, Giotto, Frencesca and an anonymous work of the “Annunciation.”
The chapel is the heart of Annunciation Priory, an intriguing combination of modern elegance and ancient simplicity. It is a large space with no interior supports, relying instead on master engineering and an hyperbolic parabaloid-shaped roof with exterior buttresses. Imagine a wide W with outside supports for the lateral thrust of the outer lines of the W.
Priory Chapel's paraboloid-shaped roof with bell banner in background
The exterior is bare concrete, fieldstone and copper-sheathed concrete for the roof. The interior is a striking contrast of light and dark: Dark-stained simple pews and floor with walls and ceiling painted white. A Breuer compromise, and a good one. At St. John’s Abbey Chapel, Breuer also used concrete but left the interior its natural fieldstone grey, a color he felt was too “masculine” fro a women’s chapel, so he had the Priory painted white. As Breuer said, “Form follows function...but not always.”
Two grand floor-to-ceiling stained glass windows flank either side of the chapel, in amber, rose and blue, that change shades with changing daylight. These windows serve to visually separate the choir and the Nave.
The alter is Cold Spring, Minnesota blue granite, and completes an axis line through the granite vestibule fountain to the bell banner. The wall directly behind the alter is gold-leaf covered ceramic tile and radiates a lush warmth during mass from the glow of tall candles.
Sister Denise, the Priory building manager, affirms the characteristic resident’s belief that “There’s something about this place that’s special.” She qualifies her assertions with the manager’s eye for the accounting books, “However, I’ll be speaking to Mr. Breuer in heaven about all those windows and the flat roofs-such heating and re-roofing bills!”
Sister Miriam recalls the stonemason who faced the local fieldstone for the chapel and cloister walk, “Peter Teminson was originally from Latvia, or Lithuania. He was a coal miner, who served in the American Army during the war and afterwards settled in Bismarck. He faced all that stone himself, with a sledge-hammer. He knew how to hit them too, he never had to swing twice. When Teminson returned to visit the completed chapel he was so move by its beauty that he hugged the stone walls.
Breuer also designed the original administration classroom building of the University of Mary, which is about a quarter of a mile to the northeast, by way of a footpath along the bluffs of the Missouri River. It is only the Catholic university in the state, is co-educational, and just this year reached university status. It has also made good use of local fieldstone which comprises walkways and portions of buildings.
Annunciation Priory represents the missionary spirit of the Church, the pioneer drive of the settlement of America and the best of modern architecture. The great thought that went into its design is enhanced by its remoteness.
“Breuer couldn’t get over the great open space out here,” Sister Volk recalled, “it’s surprising how many visitors come here on a summer’s evening. We feel we have a special place here for people, at Breuer’s little jewel.”
Lathe walkway showcases Breuer’s use of shadow for design variety
