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The sounds that one associates with places of worship are those of an angelic choir or the intricate patterns of a Bach fugue. Some churches have, however, been enjoying success with the rather more unexpected pairing of doom metal bands and church organs.
The aptly named David Pipe, Cathedral Organist in the Diocese of Leeds and Assistant Director of Music at York Minster, has been instrumental in bringing the two together because, as well as being the founding Artistic Director of the Leeds International Organ Festival, he has invented a new genre of rock and organ music which he calls Organic Doom.
Pipe performed on an 1860 ‘Father’ Willis organ at a recent gig to the music of Pantheïst (a ‘funeral doom band’ whose lead singer wears a cassock) and Arð (whose album Take Up My Bones is about the translation of St Cuthbert’s remains from Lindisfarne to Durham Cathedral). When the gig was featured on Radio 4’s Sunday Worship programme, churches and cathedrals around the UK got in touch to invite them to repeat the performance.
On reflection, this is perhaps not such a novel development. The rapid rise of Methodism in the 18th century was due, in part, to Charles Wesley’s canny use of contemporary melodies for his hymns. Ralph Vaughan Williams did the same when compiling The English Hymnal (the folk song ‘Our Captain Cried All Hands’ provided the melody for ‘To Be a Pilgrim’, for example). Evangelical churches have been using rock instruments to attract young people to their services since the 1960s, and rock and soul music have in turn benefited greatly from the influence of gospel singing.
Organic Doom, then, is just a short step further out into the wilder realms of modern musical fashion, and one that David Pipe hopes will rescue Britain’s pipe organs from decline, as well as attracting new audiences (in his words, ‘guys in black T-shirts and braided beards who would never darken the doors of an organ recital’). Can we, perhaps, look forward in future to hymns that feature death metal growls?
Breaking down barriers
In London, the Warburg Institute – dubbed ‘the world’s weirdest library’ because of its idiosyncratic cataloguing methods and focus on arcane knowledge – has reopened after a £14.5m transformation that has included the creation of a new public gallery. The inaugural exhibition, called Memory & Migration, explains that the founder, the art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929), wanted to break free of the usual academic approaches to knowledge, which he saw as restrictive and narrowly specialist. Instead, he spent his life thinking about iconography and the themes and images that recur in many different epochs, from prehistory to the present day.
Warburg’s vast collection of books and images, which came to London in 1933 when the Institute and its staff fled from Nazi Germany, therefore has a unique cataloguing system, designed to encourage researchers to make serendipitous connections. One panel in the exhibition recreates the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne on which Warburg spent the final 30 months of his life, consisting of 63 wooden panels, covered with black hessian, on which he pinned a constantly changing selection of 1,000 images as he looked for connections across different eras and sought to refine his ideas about global cultural history. Though he never completed that encyclopaedic task, the photographs that he took of these boards at various stages have helped to inform the way the collection is arranged.
Warburg was especially interested in pre-Enlightenment ways of understanding the world – magical arts, divination, and necromancy – and this is reflected not only in the collection, which includes rare books on astronomy, astrology, sorcery, and the occult, it also shaped aspects of the building’s design. The emblem of the Warburg Institute, which appears above the entrance, is an image of cosmic harmony based on the work of Isidore of Seville (AD 560-636), the bishop whose attempt to compile and systematise all human knowledge was the basis for the medieval university syllabus and led Pope John Paul II to nominate Isidore as the patron saint of the internet in 1997.
The new lecture theatre also has a symbolic aspect: the elliptical ceiling was based on a sketch that Albert Einstein sent to Warburg showing the orbit of Mars. For Aby Warburg, the bipolar form represented the continuous oscillation and interchange between thought and research.
Designs on the Jubilee Line
The design of the Warburg Institute building is attributed to Charles Holden (1875-1960), the architect best known for his many London Underground stations, built during the interwar period. The Twentieth Century Society and SAVE Britain’s Heritage are currently campaigning for the listing of the 11 stations of the Jubilee Line extension, which all opened in 1999 and which Henrietta Billings, Director of SAVE, describes in a letter to the Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy as ‘public architecture at its best, designed by some of the greatest architects of a generation’.
There is particular concern about Southwark Station, which was turned down for listing in 2017, but is now being reassessed by Historic England in light of plans to demolish the concourse as part of a major redevelopment of the site. Southwark was designed by the late Sir Richard MacCormac, of architects MacCormac Jamieson Prichard (MJP). The Twentieth Century Society describes it as ‘one of the undoubted masterpieces of the Underground network, combining engineering sophistication with dramatic, intricate use of space and light to create a station that, like the celebrated 1930s stations of Charles Holden, is efficient, humane, and beautiful’.
The Twentieth Century Society is also campaigning for the listing of London’s former City Hall, the glass-clad home of the Greater London Authority, completed in 2002. The GLA has since moved to The Crystal, in Newham, and the Society argues that the plans for the building’s redevelopment, including the removal of the helical staircase that links all the floors through the full height of the building, will see ‘every element of architectural significance stripped away’. The Norman Foster design was strongly informed by Foster’s renovation and adaptation of the Berlin Reichstag, completed in 1999, and was intended as ‘the architectural embodiment of the democratic values of transparency, accessibility, and openness’.
Cooling towers now considered cool
Following the shutdown of the last coal-fired power station in the country, at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, in Nottinghamshire, the Twentieth Century Society is arguing, too, that the UK’s last remaining cooling towers should be saved for future generations, quoting Sir Antony Gormley, who has described these formerly unloved structures as a ‘man-made volcanos’ and ‘silent sculptural giants… the Stonehenge or Avebury of the mid 20th century’.
The Society estimates that there are 45 cooling towers left of the 240 built in the 1960s. They disagree with Historic England’s view that they ‘do not have the architectural interest requisite for listing’ (instead, Historic England prefers preservation by record: ‘working closely with power companies to ensure a photographic record is secured before loss’). The Society points out that the landscape is dotted with the remnants of power-generation infrastructure from previous centuries, from smock windmills to mill chimneys and gasholder frames, and they argue that the towers are simply the latest example, ‘a majestic and invaluable part of our 20th-century industrial heritage’.
Cooling towers have been preserved in other parts of the world. One forms the centrepiece of the Wunderland Kalkar theme park in Germany, with a climbing wall on its concave outer surface and an amusement ride that emerges theatrically from within the tower. In Venice, a 1938 cooling tower in Porta di Venezia has been converted into a museum and viewing gallery, offering panoramic views over the lagoon. The cavernous interior spaces of another example, at Vilvoorde, on the outskirts of Brussels, now hosts the annual Horst Festival, which stages sonic and artistic installations. The three cooling towers of the Inota Power Plant near Budapest (used in 2017 as a film location for Blade Runner 2049) host the INOTA music festival, mixing video projections and electronica. A new book exploring the architecture and cultural impact of cooling towers will be published next year – Sherds will report in due course.
