Stone by stone

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The portal of the chapter house at the Abbey of New Clairvaux in Vina, Calif., was completed in October and dedicated at a ceremony held Oct. 25.VINA, CALIF -- Cistercian architecture has been called the architecture of silence. Austere and simple, it shuns color, sculpture and decoration to focus on light, space, proportion and harmony. Contemplation is the object of the minimalist design; at its heart, the quiet of Cistercian architecture is meant both to reflect the nature of God and to move viewers toward recognition of their oneness with the Divine.

But inspiration does not come easily or inexpensively, as the monks at the Abbey of New Clairvaux in Vina, Calif., have discovered. Since 1994, the Trappist monks, formally known as Cistercians of the Strict Observance, have been mounting a valiant -- some might argue quixotic -- effort to reconstruct a 12th-century chapter house on the grounds of their monastery using centuries-old stones from a Cistercian monastery in Spain.

When completed, the chapter house, resurrected from Santa Maria de Ovila, 80 miles northeast of Madrid, will be the only example of Cistercian Gothic architecture in North America and one of the oldest freestanding buildings in the United States. The monks say the chapter house, the meeting room where monks gather each day to read a chapter from the Rule of St. Benedict and where events such as elections and ordinations take place, will be not only a cultural treasure but a spiritual one as well.

“It’s our heritage,” said Fr. Thomas X. Davis, abbot of New Clairvaux. For the abbot, who spent more than 20 years trying to obtain the stones of Santa Maria de Ovila for New Clairvaux, the chapter house represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rescue a treasure of the Cistercian past, one he believes will demonstrate the transforming power of Cistercian spirituality and architecture.

For Californians especially, the chapter house will command no less historical interest. A host of prominent names interlace the story of the Sacred Stones Project, as the Abbey of New Clairvaux calls its effort to return the Spanish chapter house to its original purpose. Key among them is William Randolph Hearst, who in 1931 purchased, dismantled and had shipped to California the church, cloister, chapter house, refectory, sacristy and monks’ dormitory of Santa Maria de Ovila, intending to use parts of them to decorate his 61-room Wyntoon Castle estate on the McCloud River. But with the advent of the Great Depression, Hearst’s grandiose plans fell on hard times.

A photo of the ruins of Santa Maria de Ovila in Span shows the monastery as it exists today.In 1941, the publishing mogul donated the stones from Santa Maria de Ovila to the city of San Francisco with the understanding that the city would build a monastery museum in Golden Gate Park similar to the Cloisters museum in Manhattan. Plans were drawn up to construct a museum near the de Young Museum in the park, but World War II and lack of funding kept the plans from being developed.

The stones, at one time carefully numbered and crated, were vandalized, damaged by fires, pilfered by passersby and used for landscaping projects in Golden Gate Park, where they lay for more than 50 years. Different schemes for how to best use the stones came up from time to time, but none went anywhere until the early 1990s when the Abbey of New Clairvaux took possession of the stones with the promise to start construction of the chapter house within 10 years.

Since then, the monks in Vina have encountered a daunting series of obstacles, both technological and financial, in their effort to restore to Cistercian soil the 800-year-old stones from Santa Maria de Ovila. Spiraling costs, the ravages of time and the need to meet modern building codes and California earthquake requirements while simultaneously being true to medieval construction methodologies have made the project more challenging than anticipated.

Five and a half million dollars have been raised for the chapter house and the adjoining atrium that protects it, but another $1.5 million is needed to complete what those involved in the construction describe as a gigantic 3-D jigsaw puzzle, one that melds both centuries-old stones and new concrete blocks to form a building that combines a medieval aesthetic with 21st-century state-of-the-art engineering methods.

Earthquake requirements

In late October, a milestone in the project was reached with the completion of the chapter house portal. The magnificent three-arched Gothic portal is a mix of about 60 percent old stones to 40 percent new ones. It uses 28 tons of rebar, 10 tons of roof steel and 39 cubic yards of concrete to form part of what architect Patrick Cole calls a “belt-and-suspenders” construction that will be entirely inactive while the building rests under standard gravity load but will support the massive stone structure in case of an earthquake. Should an earthquake hit Vina, the chapter house is built so the entire structure will rock rather than fracture. The abbot jokes that heaven and earth may pass away, but the chapter house will not.

Not surprisingly, the earthquake requirements, more complicated than initially anticipated, have boosted construction costs. (Some on the leadership committee for the Abbey’s Sacred Stones Project say the chapter house has been over-engineered, that Tehama County, in which Vina is located, was faced with a building project for which it had no experience and imposed overly stringent requirements.) And intrinsic to the project was the challenge of trying to rebuild the chapter house with the stones brought from Spain.

In 1980, Dr. Margaret Burke, a medieval art historian and a volunteer at the de Young Museum, performed a mammoth feat in cataloging all the stones from the monastery she was able to locate in Golden Gate Park, measuring and drawing each stone’s dimensions by hand. Dr. Burke was able to locate 50 to 60 percent of the stones from the chapter house and all of its springer stones -- the stones that begin the vaulting -- and from this concluded that reconstruction of the chapter house was feasible. Because of her work, the monks at New Clairvaux felt encouraged to pursue the restoration of the chapter house.

Master mason and restorer Frank Helmholz stands underneath a wood center, the false center used to support the stones while the portal is being built.Three kinds of stones are being used to reconstruct the chapter house: old stones, new stones and old stones that are being recut. Once the stones were transported from San Francisco to the abbey, a major challenge was to figure out how the chapter-house stones went together, for they were not only jumbled up with each other but with other stones from other parts of the Spanish monastery. “We had to basically start from scratch,” said Frank Helmholz, the master mason for the project, for the stones had long since lost the numbering they had when they were first shipped to the United States.

Like many of the people involved in the Sacred Stones Project, Mr. Helmholz seems dedicated and unqualifiedly enthusiastic about the task of erecting a Gothic edifice on the monks’ 590-acre ranch in Vina, a small town that has seen better days. The German-born stonemason divides his time between the project in Vina and work in Luxor, Egypt, where he is restoring the wall of an ancient temple with an archaeological team from the University of Chicago. His passion is sacred architecture, and for Mr. Helmholz the project at the monastery in Vina is unique both because of its connection to Cistercian and Spanish history and for the work itself.

“We’re rebuilding a whole portal. We’re rebuilding a whole vaulted ceiling. That’s something most stonemasons don’t do in all their career,” he said.

Santa Maria de Ovila was built between 1190 and 1210 as a Christian outpost in Moorish Spain. In 1835, it was suppressed by orders of the Spanish government and the handful of monks living there scattered. When Hearst purchased the monastery, it had fallen into disrepair.

That a Spanish Cistercian monas-tery is being rebuilt on the grounds of a modern Cistercian monastery is for Mr. Helmholz and many others a large part of the appeal of the project. “It’s a bridge to the past,” said Mr. Helmholz.

For the abbot of New Clairvaux, the person who more than anyone else is responsible for the reconstruction of the chapter house and whose interest in the stones dates back 50 years (see related story), the chapter house going up in Vina is a sign of Providence at work.

“Of all the things that could have happened, there’s this monastery in California that ended up with these stones,” he marveled. “Most people thought it could never be done.”

Ongoing challenges

The Abbey of New Clairvaux is located on property that once belonged to Leland Stanford, railroad magnate, governor of California from 1861 to 1863, U.S. senator and the founder of Stanford University. When Stanford was alive, the property, known as Stanford’s “Great Vina Ranch,” produced wine and was at one time the biggest vineyard and winery in the world. The wine was never as good as hoped, however, and eventually Stanford gave up his dream of producing excellent dry table wine and began producing brandy instead.

The stones from Santa Maria de Ovila lie in an old brandy barn on the monk's property.There in the old brandy barns on the property the stones from the Spanish monastery are stored. Standing surrounded by a sea of stones, Mr. Helmholz pointed to how each stone is assigned a number, its size measured and then charted on a spreadsheet. He composes each arch with both new and old stones, the old stones cut as little as possible to preserve the historical substance. Much of his time is spent on the computer, plotting out how the stones should fit together.

At a celebratory lunch on the abbey grounds the day the portal was unveiled, architect Patrick Cole spoke of the challenge posed by the vaulted ceiling, the next phase in construction of the chapter house now that the portal has been completed. While the geometry of the ribbing is well understood, he says the ceiling soffit stones will have to twist or warp as they go up the vaulting. Eight hundred years ago, the stones were chiseled to fit, but to do that today would obliterate the historical patina; how the team in Vina will choose to handle the issue is still an open question, one that Dr. José Merino, a professor of architecture at the University of Madrid and an adviser to the Sacred Stones Project, is coming to discuss in December.

But the biggest challenge the Sacred Stones Project faces is not architectural but economic. Located in California’s Central Valley, the Abbey of New Clairvaux is three hours from likely donor prospects in San Francisco and two hours from Sacramento. The abbey is neither a parish with members who could help support the project nor a school with alumni who could be tapped for donations. It is a small community of two dozen monks who make their living farming, reportedly the last monastic community to do so in the United States.

“We knew it would be a big project, but we didn’t know how complicated it would be,” Fr. Davis said. “I thought the most difficult part of the project would be the transportation of the stones from Golden Gate Park to the monastery. It turned out that was the easiest.”

Obtaining funding, said Fr. Davis, has been by far the biggest hurdle to completing the project.

Supporters point out that even before ground was broken in 2003, the abbey had to spend more than a million dollars assembling a project team, trucking the stones from San Francisco, sorting the stones, preparing engineering studies, setting up a stone shop, acquiring a one-of-a-kind stone saw and buying new limestone from Texas to pair with the historical stones. Almost inherently, the project is both ambitious and complicated with its mix of old limestone and new and the need to preserve as much of the historical building blocks as possible.

And the project has grown. Initially, the idea was simply to reconstruct the chapter house. Now the master plan calls for the construction of a cluster of buildings adjoining the chapter house and atrium, including a cloister, archival library, library annex, pastoral center, novitiate center and church. These buildings will involve a simpler, more contemporary use of stone. Though less expensive to build than the chapter house, excluding the church they will eventually add an estimated $6 million to the project, said Fr. Davis, who views the other buildings as both responding to the needs of the community at New Clairvaux and offering a context for the chapter house. He likened the situation to the arrival of a beautiful antique that forces its new owner to redecorate.

“We couldn’t just let it sit out there in the field,” Fr. Davis said. “Once we had the chapter house, we realized the cultural and spiritual implications of it and that we needed to have the ancillary parts to make it more user-friendly for the people who come.”

The result, if and when it is finished, will be a monastic complex that could be a major draw for visitors.

John Poimiroo is a former director of tourism for the state of California who serves on the leadership committee of the Sacred Stones Project. Mr. Poimiroo believes the chapter house will become a tourist destination, one that will draw people and give them an interaction with the monastery and with the Catholic church they would not otherwise have. Some will come to have a spiritual experience; others will come for architectural and historical reasons.

“A lot of people will come here to see a great structure -- to see a real Gothic chapter house,” he said. “I think a lot of people are going to be in awe. They’re going to be in awe of the history of how people in the 12th century would build these great structures.”

Objective beauty

Awe and a sense of wonder are what the monks hope to achieve with the erection of the chapter house. While closed during monastic ceremonies, it will be open every day of the year to the public. Fr. Davis speaks of an experience of beauty that those who see the chapter house will have -- an impression “of how beautiful God must be.”

It will be a different kind of beauty, he said, from that found in most churches where stained glass windows, sculpture and painting represent the saints, Jesus and Mary in images and pictures.

Two workmen put in place the stone facing on the chapter-house portal.“Monks pray in a very simple way without using too many images,” Fr. Davis said. “Islam picked up the same idea -- that we don’t represent the Divine by any human form. Their buildings are very simple in many ways. It expresses a form of prayer. Cistercian monks have the same kind of approach to prayer in their buildings.”

Beauty today is seen as subjective, as residing in the eye of the beholder, but St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a towering figure in Cistercian history under whose leadership monks built hundreds of abbeys and churches in 12th-century Europe, placed beauty at the very heart of life. Beauty was something that could lift a person above himself into “the beyond” -- into contemplation.

Being lifted above oneself is different from being taken out of oneself, Fr. Davis noted. The distractions of life take people out of themselves, he said, but the spareness and quiet of Cistercian architecture, its emphasis on proportion and the subtle play of light, are meant to do just the opposite, centering people so that they become more interior and discover God within their hearts.

There are two approaches to God, he noted. One resorts to words, images and metaphors to describe God. The other says the unknowability of God is such that God cannot adequately be described with any of these.

“In truth, God is really beyond both of these approaches: There is simply the Divine Presence,” Fr. Davis observed. He believes that an authentic Cistercian structure like the chapter house will convey that to monks and visitors alike.

“We shape our buildings; thereafter, they shape us,” Winston Churchill once said. Eight hundred years earlier, the Cistercians had the same thought. Today the Trappist community in Vina is putting Cistercian principles into practice, restoring to life a building that they think has the power to transform those who see it.

Margot Patterson is an NCR writer and editor. Her e-mail address is mpatterson@ncronline.org.

National Catholic Reporter December 12, 2008