Chapel of St. Ignatius at 10 by Tom Kundig
Published in Arcade Magazine, Summer 2007. Tom Kundig served as the co-principal-in-charge of the Chapel project.
Seattle University’s Chapel of St. Ignatius was dedicated on April 6, 1997. Ten years later, Steven Holl’s building, designed as “seven bottles of light in a stone box,” proves its radiance.?
Making a good building is elusive; making a great building is virtually impossible. A great building, I believe, doesn’t really emerge until it exists for at least 20 years. The Chapel of St. Ignatius might be a great building.
Making a good building that might be a great building is not magic. It all starts with a terrific client. The Jesuits at Seattle University saw the chapel as their gift to the university and the community. That gift had to carry the message and tradition of this important order of the Catholic Church.
When a client’s short-list of architects includes Moshe Safdie and Steven Holl, clearly something extraordinary is afoot. The architect they chose, Steven Holl, did not come from the tradition of the Catholic Church. Early on, the Jesuits determined that they wanted to work with someone that wasn’t predisposed to the background of the church, but who demonstrated in their work a deep facility and desire to dig into philosophical traditions and translate them into a building. The Jesuits wanted someone who would learn the tradition of their order and the church, consider its future, and imbue the building with that spirit and meaning as their sacred gift. They found that in Steven Holl.
Ultimately, the philosophy and two-dimensional diagrams and symbols had to be crafted. What great building is not well crafted? Jim Smart of Baugh Construction was the superintendent for the project. Jim did not have a history of working on a project that had the intentions, both philosophic and crafted, of the Chapel of St. Ignatius. I was skeptical; I was wrong. To this day, I have never seen a more productive and balanced job site. Jim was the master of the poetry and ballet of assembling and crafting this building. This project was also his swan song. After the dedication, he and his wife road off into the sunset on their Gold Wing motorcycles.
Ultimately, the Chapel of St. Ignatius is about the Catholic community. It is the Jesuits’ gift to that community. There was a member of the building committee who was dogged about her concerns that the building‘s design was not a reflection of the Catholic Church. For two years she sincerely and forcefully expressed her concern that the chapel did not look or feel like a Catholic Church. After the morning benediction and sanctification of the chapel by Archbishop Murphy, the committee member came up to me and said, “I was wrong, this is a sacred place.”