Already the world’s largest Benedictine community at the start of the 1950s, St. John’s Abbey saw an influx of students from the G.I. Bill which strained the capacity of their existing facilities. In March of 1953, Abbot Baldwin Dworschak sent a letter to eleven leading architects which outlined the need for a comprehensive building plan and explained the abbey’s intent in seeking a leading modern practitioner for the work: “The Benedictine tradition at its best challenges us to think boldly and to cast our ideals in forms which will be valid for centuries to come, shaping them with all the genius of present-day materials and techniques. We feel that the modern architect with his orientation toward functionalism and honest use of materials is uniquely qualified to produce a Catholic work” (Architectural Forum, July. 1954). Of the nine architects to respond, Marcel Breuer was the fifth and last to be interviewed, selected for the “humility and clean-lined simplicity of [his] basic architectural conceptions,” which the monks found “especially appropriate to monastic buildings” (Architectural Forum, July. 1954). Maintaining a close working relationship with the brothers, Breuer’s office developed a phased plan for the campus, mutually informed by the ambitions and convictions of the architect and client. The church was the most direct and salient product of this collaboration, tailored to the principles of Benedictine liturgy and embodying the nascent hallmarks of Breuer’s institutional work in the decades to come. 

The Abbey Church continues to serve both the monastic and student communities at St. John’s, as well as the parishioners from the surrounding community.

A 2015-16 Getty funded report found the concrete structure and granite cladding of the church to be in sound condition, but the bell banner suffers from substantial chipping, spalling, efflorescence, and rust staining in various regions. 

As of 2024, the St. John’s community is in the process of planning and fundraising for surface repairs to the bell banner and plaza, an energy-efficient overhaul of the church glazing, and modernization of electrical and HVAC systems.

The main hall of St. John’s Abbey Church has a roughly trapezoidal plan with a subtle curving inflection to its legs as they approach the narrower south face of the apse. Folded plate concrete construction of the roof, east, and west walls form a clear-span shell, raised on either side by nine perpendicular slab piers, between which windows open onto the surrounding cloister gardens. Faced with granite on their exterior surfaces, each pleat of the corrugated wall structure increases in width, depth, and thickness as the span widens to the north. The church connects at its south face to a separate Breuer designed monastery wing, which also forms the southern end of the covered cloister walks which flank the church, faced with rough fieldstone on their exteriors and staggered flue tile screens facing inward. A single story 150 seat chapter house with a skewed quadrilateral plan connects off the east walk. The rear of the nave is trapezoidal in elevation, faced with a honeycomb concrete screen and stained glass infill. The wall is fronted by an enclosed baptistry atrium, surmounted by the 126’ detached bell banner, which partially shelters the granite forecourt before the baptistry doors.

The church is arranged along a sacramental axis, with the plan structured to organize the key rites and hierarchies of the Catholic liturgy. The processional doors beneath the bell banner lead parishioners into the baptistry, and through a wall of confessionals, before entering the church proper. A freestanding balcony, cantilevered from four sculpturally treated concrete piers, ensures all 1,700 potential congregants are seated with intimate and unobstructed views of the centrally placed altar and four granite communion tables at its fore. The sanctuary platform is elevated by four steps and paved with the same waxed red brick found throughout the nave and ambulatory spaces. Curving choir stalls enclose the altar, divided by an abbot’s throne at the far south of the center axis. A crypt, accessed via stairs in the baptistry, houses a 450 seat parish chapel for the preparatory school, a 104 seat brothers’ chapel, 34 small devotional chapels, and a relic shrine. 

Carried on four curving legs, the concrete bell banner raises a trapezoidal plane inverted to mirror the north elevation of the church to its rear. A lower horizontal perforation carries five electronically controlled bells on a cantilevered platform, above which a vertical excise frames a wooden cross. 

The folded plate structure, cantilevered balcony, and sculptural bell banner were poured using wooden board forms. The repetitive hexagonal screen of the north wall was poured using modular metal formwork. 

Craft labor available through the monastic workshops allowed Breuer to pursue a total design, reflective of his Bauhaus background. Through the monks’ work in wood and stone, the hand of the designer extends to screens, fixtures, pews, altars, and other furnishings which define key elements of the sacred space. 

The tubular cavities formed between the folded plate ribs of the church ceiling and flat roof deck house HVAC and lighting equipment.

St. John’s Abbey comprises 2500 acres 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis. The main campus is located on an isthmus between two small lakes, with the monastery south of the church facing onto the larger of the two from atop a hill. The bell banner entrance to the church faces north onto a small plaza, around which Breuer’s campus library and science building, as well as a 1928 red brick Romanesque auditorium, are grouped. To the east, beyond the chapter house, is an abbey guest house building designed by VJAA architects in 2007. Further east are the preparatory school dormitory and classroom buildings designed by Hanson and Michelson in 1963. Beyond the western cloister walk is a quadrangle composed of late 19th and early 20th century Romanesque buildings, including the Abbey’s original 1868 church.   

Marcel Breuer’s built work up to 1953 consisted predominantly of modest residential projects, but his commissions for St. John’s Abbey and the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris transformed his office into a leading powerhouse for large scale institutional design. He had presented speculative schemes for sizable concrete buildings earlier in his career, but a number of technical hallmarks characterizing his mature concrete work did not begin to develop until his collaboration with Pier Luigi Nervi at UNESCO. He shared with Nervi an aspiration to develop concrete’s greater architectural potential, as the Gothic masters had done for masonry, and approached his commission at St. John’s as an avenue towards this lofty ideal (Bergdol 49,54).

Widening to accommodate the congregants and narrowing to focus on the altar, the trapezoidal plan of the church proved an effective form in meeting the monk’s desire to more effectively involve the whole congregation in their service. Breuer had shown a prior affinity for trapezoidal auditorium buildings in his 1930 Kharkov Theater project and 1936 Garden City project, but it was not until his coordination with Nervi on the likewise trapezoidal Unesco Conference Hall that he pursued an integrated synthesis of structure and envelope, optimized to carry and express the demands of such an enclosure. The precision flexibility of folded plate construction was ideally suited to freely span the varying dimensions of the church, additionally meeting Breuer’s demand that, “the means of construction by which the large space is framed and roofed-over must be shown as the dominant visual fact of both the interior and exterior and must grow out of contemporary building technology” (Arts & Architecture. February, 1962). The fluid dimensions of the bell banner and modular repetition of the hexagonal screen, meanwhile, prefigure Breuer’s later work with calculated curving forms, as at St Francis de Sales in Muskegon MI, and rhythmic precast compositions, as with the IBM Research Center in La Gaude France. 

The unprecedented crisis of identity surrounding the church’s role in 20th century communities significantly complicated the practice of Christian architecture, laying new burdens of social consequence on those involved in the activity. Put succinctly by clergyman and architectural critic Peter Hammond: "One cannot hope to design a satisfactory church unless one is prepared to face fairly and squarely the question of what a church is for: and the answer to this question is by no means so simple, or so universally recognized, as is commonly supposed" (Architectural Forum. December, 1963). Designing for a monastic community with codified needs, Breuer enjoyed a unique degree of freedom from this contemporary uncertainty; yet still, while working within the ancient tradition of the Benedictine order, his innovative design was labeled, “the most relevant of major American churches to the current age of reform,” by Architectural Forum Senior Editor Donald Canty (Canty). 

“Bringing the altar back to the people,” was a key focus of the 1960s Vatican II reforms, but the Benedictine community at Saint John’s had championed progressive liturgical reform since the 1930s (Bergdoll 46). The relationship between liturgical practice and social hierarchy has always played a defining role in the development of Christian architecture. Far from the rood screen politics of the Middle Ages, however, Saint John’s plan was conceived foremost to embrace the laity, although certain hierarchies of order are retained as a matter of basic liturgical function. The sacramental axis, central altar, exposed choir, condensed nave, and replacement of the altar rail with communion tables, all contribute to a shared feeling of common ritual among the whole congregation. 

The sober yet humanistic monumentality of Breuer’s Church at St. John’s Abbey laid the aesthetic groundwork for his mature idiom of heroic concrete building, and its consequent influence on wider postwar trends towards permanence and plasticity in concrete design. Although he was yet to develop his rich vocabulary of precast panels and faceted columns, the church demonstrated the depth, nuance, and lyricism he could achieve through careful control of contrasts and hierarchies, even within a greatly restrained formal and material palette.

The bell banner represented a remarkable development, not only in blurring the lines between sculpture and architecture, but confronting modernist trepidations towards explicit symbolism with a bold reimagining of the traditional church bell tower, in terms contemporary to both its purpose and material nature. Both a literal call to prayer, with its electronic bells, and a static beacon of the church’s place at the heart of the community, its imagery as a processional banner is by no means subtle; and Breuer in fact doubled down on the analogous appearance with his banner for the Annunciation Priory in Bismarck North Dakota soon after. 

St. John’s Abbey was founded in 1856 by a group of sixteen Pennsylvanian Benedictines, responding to the call of Saint Paul Bishop Joseph Crétin for a larger ministerial body to serve the growing population of German immigrants in Central Minnesota. Saint John’s College, later joined by separate preparatory and seminary programs, was founded one year later and came to constitute an integral part of the Abbey’s mission along with the operation of missions in Puerto Rico, Mexico, the Bahamas and Japan. When the monks first commissioned Breuer to develop a new campus master plan, the architect proposed a system of “shadow building” which would have progressively replaced the historic 19th century campus buildings in the academic quadrangle adjacent to the church, with new facilities on the same interconnected plots. The demolition scheme was eventually abandoned, leaving the community with a rich heritage of both 19th and 20th century architecture, including the Breuer designed church, monastery, library, science center, and dormitories.  

Rejuvenating the Catholic image while steering the course of his own professional transformation, Marcel Breuer’s design for St. John’s Abbey Church relies on neither shocking novelty nor puritanical austerity, but a simple vision of community and dignity unashamed of the modern world. The banner is both an extraordinary plastic gesture and a new breed of semiotic device, signaling Breuer’s confidence in the maturity and readiness of architectural modernism to embrace new levels of meaning and reference. The church is a fruitful synthesis of rational and spiritual motivations, its space, function, and symbolism interacting with both diagrammatic clarity and ineffable mystery. Saint John’s marks a key turning point in American religious architecture and embodies the progressive reforms which reshaped Catholic worship in the 20th century.

“A Benedictine Monastery.” Architectural Forum, July. 1954, pp. 148-154.

“A Master Plan for the Next 100 Years.” Architectural Register, Nov. 1961, pp. 131-142.

Bergdoll, Barry, and Jonathan Massey. Marcel Breuer: Building Global Institutions. Lars Müller Publishers, 2018.

Canty, Donald. “Strength or Banality? A New Reformation Challenges Church Design.” Architectural Forum, Dec. 1963, pp. 68-72. 

CSNA Architects. “Getty.” Final Report July 2016 - Saint John’s Abbey Church, Getty Foundation, July 2016, www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/pdf_publications/pdf/concrete_biblio.pdf. 

“St. John’s Abbey - A Master Plan.” Arts & Architecture, Feb. 1962, pp. 18-20, 28-29.