Spires and Towers in St. Andrews, New Brunswick by Ross A. Eaman

Architecture as Communication: A Medium Like No Other is an exploration of how architecture communicates meaning in people’s daily lives. Architecture, according to Ross Eaman, encompasses the multiplicity of communication as human interaction, preparing people for what they are about to encounter, signalling how they should act, and selectively enabling them to perform their expected role.

In the piece below, Ross Eaman discusses a recent trip he took to St. Andrews, New Brunswick, and the discoveries and observations he made while visiting.

SPIRES AND TOWERS IN ST. ANDREWS, NEW BRUNSWICK

Ross A. Eaman

On a recent return visit to St. Andrews by the Sea in New Brunswick, I noticed three quite different church designs while driving down King Street on my way to Bucca dell’Acqua, a wonderfully idiosyncratic bookstore at 213 Water Street. At 133 King, the Catholic Church of St. Andrews has two Gothic arch entrances and a corner tower with a high octagonal spire with a cross on top; at 115 King, St. Andrews Baptist Church has two large spires flanked by two smaller ones; and at 77 King, the Anglican All Saints Church (1876) has a large tower but no spire. While assuming that these different architectural features would have had certain deliberate meanings when they were designed in the late nineteenth century, their significance was lost on me a century and a half later. But as chance would have it, Bucca dell’Acqua had Henry Wiencek’s Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor, and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age (2025) prominently displayed. And in chapter two of his study of the relationship between architect Stanford White and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, which deals with the rebuilding of the Episcopalian Trinity Church (1877) in Boston, I found a likely explanation of at least part of the original intended meanings of the spires and towers on King Street in St. Andrews.

Even before Trinity Church burned to the ground in the Great Boston Fire of 1872, plans were being made for a colossal new structure in the Back Bay area. And in Wiencek’s account, Reverend Phillips Brooks and architect Henry Hobson Richardson were of one mind that it should be built in the Romanesque rather than the Gothic style of churches in medieval France. Richardson thought that Gothic spires seeking to lift congregants to the heavens distracted them from the church itself and preferred squat towers that did not soar. This view meshed nicely with Brooks’s middle or “broad” (rather than “high” or “low”) Protestant theology of bringing holiness down to earth. His progressive vision was also reflected materially in the inclusion of 350 “guest” seats at no charge in addition to a thousand rented ones for enrolled congregants. For both Richardson and Brooks, the styles of churches and their accompanying layouts were clearly a matter of communication. And their adoption of particular stylistic practices was based on these having already acquired certain conventional meanings – as evidenced by the Episcopalian equivalent in St. Andrews having opted for a tower a year earlier.

But how successful were Richardson and Brooks – and their counterparts in the same period who were responsible for the designs of the churches on King Street in St. Andrews – in imparting certain values through rule-governed practices? Wiencek, like many other architectural historians, is largely silent on this matter. But if communication is understood not simply as the sending of a message, but rather as what is actually received and assessed, then we cannot know what those spires and towers on King Street have communicated until we know how congregants (and others) have understood them. Which is the kind of thing that Architecture as Communication tries to illuminate through various theorizations (how we make sense of built structures and spaces) and case studies (where evidence of actual reactions and interpretations is available). While public reactions to church architecture are difficult to document, evidence of such reactions is more available in terms of houses, schools, parks, and a number of other built environments.

In “The Equalization Fallacy” (1994), Barry Targan reminded us that “because a work is open to many readings, it does not follow that it is open to any and every reading.” The parishioners at 77 King Street would thus have difficulty “reading” their church architecture in the same manner as those at 133 King Street. At the same time, however, the process of “decoding” meanings that have been conventionally “encoded” in built structures and spaces can also include an assessment of the intentions of those responsible for those meanings. We judge the features of buildings not only on the basis of how they affect us or others in using or observing them but also in terms of the agenda of those trying to influence or control people in this manner. Which still leaves us, of course, with the question of both the intended and received meaning of those multiple spires in the Baptist Church at 115 King Street. What was going on there?

Ross A. Eaman is adjunct research professor at Carleton University.