Guest Article: The Aspiring New Architectural Practice of Daniel P. DeGreve, Architect

Guest article by Daniel P. DeGreve, Architect.

Daniel P. DeGreve, Architect is an architectural firm in the process of being launched an hour north of Columbus, Ohio, and will include full planning and design consultation services specializing in Catholic sacred architecture and sacred furnishings. During my professional career that spans over twenty years, I have been privileged to work for and study with some of the leading classical architects in the United States who specialize in the design of new Catholic cathedrals, churches, monasteries, academies, schools, and chapels, as well as renovations, restorations, and reappointments of existing churches. I will offer a customized approach to planning and design consultation that is tailored to meet the full-service and select, a la carte needs of clients, including fellow architects who do not specialize in Catholic sacred architecture providing design services to Catholic institutions.

New pedestal for Saint Dominic Shrine - 2025

I am trained in and committed to the contemporary practice of classical and traditional sacred architecture, and have a love for the usus antiquior and the Dominican rite, as well as the reverent celebration of the Pauline liturgy, for which I regularly sing chant and polyphony as a gentleman baritone of my parish’s schola. I believe the embodiment of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in architectural form and fabricated artifice must firmly adhere to good proportions and the reciprocal integration of parts and whole, which are the foundations for harmonious design. While the employment of worthy materials and ornament are also fundamental to making beautiful architectural forms and fabrications, I believe there are ranges of material allocation and expression that can be adjusted to meet different budgetary constraints without compromising the dignity of a design conceived with pleasing proportions and integrity. The range of expression in sacred architecture is analogous to the musical textures of chant and polyphony in sacred music. I admire elegance, understated simplicity, and an authentic, modern emulation of ancient models. 

My interest in the traditional architecture and liturgy of the Catholic Church has been lifelong, and it began when my parents first started taking me to church with them at a very young age in the early 1980’s. The lovely, late nineteenth-century Gothic Revival interior of the small, simple, well-proportioned parish church where I grew up spoke to me despite its whitewashing, subsequent yellow-washing, and partial Modernist reappointment dating from the late 1960’s through the 1980’s. 

2010 (Before): The interior of Saint Joseph's Church

With my wandering eyes, I traced the plaster ribs to their points of convergence at foliated pendant bosses and ball-flowered corbels that appeared to me like brooding grotesque faces speaking of the beauty of God’s house in a language I did not understand, yet intuited. In the florally inspired geometric patterns of the stained-glass windows, I would search and find that most noble shape of the Cross repeated here and there, and which most poignantly was suspended alone above the marble altar with the carved image of the Son of Man. On the reems of perforated computer paper my father used to bring home from the office, I began drawing imaginary churches based on real churches I visited as a child. On the white side of the paper, I would draw the front and side of a church. Then, I would flip the paper on the opposite side and draw the interior of the church. This love of drawing, and a formative sojourn in Italy with my parents when I was ten years old, signaled for me a path leading to a professional vocation in architecture.

2012 (After) - The new interior of St. Joseph's Church

Thirty years and two architectural degrees later, I was blessed to have had the opportunity to briefly return home and serve as the architect – a collaborator with pastor, artists, contractors, and parishioners – to envision and coordinate a transformative renovation of the church where I had received the Sacraments of Initiation. With restored plaster, layers of decorative paint punctuated by simple, custom-designed, patterns and bands, and a new retable altarpiece to reconcile the clashing design of the 1985 crucifix tableau, the once muffled stones of Saint Joseph Church once again cry out to the King of Glory. In the apse, there is once more a vertical axis crowned by the oculus window of Christ depicted in heavenly benediction surmounting the depiction of Calvary. Below this, is the altar, where the Sacrifice on Calvary is re-presented at Holy Mass, and the Tabernacle, rightfully returned to the sanctuary, where the living Presence dwells.

While the provision of a new altar rail was not included by the pastor in the project program, I am hopeful that an altar rail will be added someday, for there is no more beautiful or fitting way to make a Holy Communion and to appreciate the reality of the Presence than on one’s knees, whether at an altar rail, rood screen, or, as is frequently the case today, in the aisle. I have also contemplated the design of a modular, three-stepped predella to be scribed to the narrow, three-stepped marble predella of the altar in order to allow Holy Mass to be celebrated ad orientem. 

Graduate thesis church dedicated to Saint Benedict of Nursia and St. Alexis

Although many churches like Saint Joseph Church have good bones, even if buried beneath later folly, other churches have been designed to reflect the zeitgeist of their day, a worldly premise that intrinsically conflicts with the Catholic understanding of the Holy Spirit’s working in time. To complete the post-professional Master of Architectural Design and Urbanism degree program at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture in 2009, I generated for my graduate thesis a new, theoretical parish church of classical design. The design of the exterior and interior represents an innovative fusion of elements from two churches in Venice by Andrea Palladio, San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore, as well as one church in Rome by Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Il Gesu.

Proposed Schematic Design for a retro-chancel Rood Screen, 2020

The burgeoning need for the design and construction of chapels of Eucharistic Adoration is an expression, in our particular time, of the Church’s enduring devotion to the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, and it opens for us architects an opportunity to apply the historical patterns of church layout in ways that are not trite or ironic, but rather, accretional in layers of meaning. In one unbuilt design, I provided an early concept for a retro-Sanctuary Adoration chapel in an early-twentieth-century church originally designed in an English Gothic idiom. Working with, rather than removing, the thrust-type sanctuary platform added to the interior, the design calls for the relocation of the divisions of organ pipes from the original, disused chancel and the dedication of the space as an Adoration chapel. A wooden rood screen, inscribed with the words, "Lord It is Good for Us To Be Here," stands between the Adoration chapel and the sanctuary to embrace a tabernacle with two openings covered by a cloth canopeum, behind which is a diapered dossal that could be parted outside of Holy Mass during Adoration. A separately designated, exterior door on the Adoration chapel side of the rood screen would allow for discrete visits to the Blessed Sacrament. The freestanding altar, ambo, credence, altar rail, and sedilia are also part of the proposed design that has not yet been built.

Moveable Freestanding Altar, 2012

The journey towards making a commitment to practicing classical and traditional architecture was not a direct one for me. After experiencing the splendor of attending Holy Mass in the great churches of Milan, Florence, Siena, Assisi, and Rome, I was confirmed by the fifth grade in my intention to study architecture in college, and was engrossed in making drawings, reading books of architectural history, and studying images of famous and obscure churches from all periods. Yet, during these years, I was repeatedly told by well-meaning teachers and guidance counselors that no one practiced ‘historical’ architecture anymore. Unfortunately, I was not aware of the nascent Classical curriculum being advanced at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture during the 1990’s by the great master, the late Thomas Gordon Smith, and his former student and lifelong friend, Professor Duncan G. Stroik, both of whom later had an edifying impact on my architectural aspirations through scholastic mentorship and internship.

The Cathedral of Albi, France

When I began the six-year Bachelor of Architecture degree program at the University of Cincinnati in 1996, I set out a plan to design for my senior thesis project nothing less than a new cathedral church dedicated to Our Lady, which would entail an interpretation of Catholic traditional forms in a strain of supposed modern massing, detailing, and construction methodology. The Cathedral of Sainte-Cecile in Albi, France (13th through 15th centuries) and the (Anglican) Cathedral of Saint Michael in Coventry, England (1956-1962), by Sir Basil Spence, served as my muses as I developed an ambitious program for a new, Catholic cathedral church and urban close consisting of bishop’s residence, canonry, chancery, choir school, convocation hall, outreach center, and conference center to be located in the heart of an American city. That I ultimately chose Cleveland, Ohio for the theoretical project location had little to do 

Undergraduate thesis cathedral church dedicated
to Our Lady, 2002

with the diocese there, but rather, the superbly empty building site facing the west side of iconic Public Square. I was fully aware that chapters of canons had never been erected in the cathedral churches of the United States, which generally have a parochial character, but I envisioned a new, grand kind of American cathedral that would be administered by the customary rector, and would also include a small chapter of canons regular, led by a dean, responsible for celebrating daily Mass and the daily Liturgy of the Hours. Although I successfully completed the design of my thesis project in 2002, I continued to work on it for another five years, and refined the design of the freestanding, cruciform Sanctuary to accommodate the usus antiquior, the use of a hanging Pyx for the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament above the high altar, chancel rails and altar rails describing all four sides of the sanctuary, and a templon inscribed with the Latin words of the Credo and bearing carved images of the Apostles.

Undergraduate thesis - Cathedral nave, looking east

Undergraduate thesis - Cathedral Sanctuary, looking towards the high altar that was designed for both the Extraordinary and Ordinary Forms of the Roman Rite.

The Portal of the Theotokos and the great west doors made of cedar panels carved with images of the ancestors of Christ.

While I am grateful for undertaking this undergraduate thesis, how much more gladdened am I to have come to know of the inexhaustible modernity, relevance, and embodied creativity found in the traditions of classicism and medieval architecture. The composer, Gustav Mahler, in recalling a quote attributed to Saint Thomas More, stated that tradition is the handing down of the flame, not the worship of the ashes. This flame, in all things authentically Catholic, is taken from the Paschal fire. All of us who endeavor to fashion work modeled on the True, the Good, and the Beautiful in the liturgical arts are co-bearers of this flame that testifies, ever anew with the same zeal of the first day, to Christ Risen. By whatever strain and version of Catholic sacred architecture I dare to emulate, I seek – through the use of integrity, light, harmonious proportions, materials, ornament, and decoration – for hearts to melt and knees to bend in spite of all obstinacies, and, in the words of Leon Battista Alberti, for visitors, both devout and casual, to start with awe at all the noble things and scarcely restrain from exclaiming that this place is doubtlessly worthy of almighty God. Deo Gratias.

Rendered study sketch for a private chapel facade modeled on Carlo Maderno's facade for the Church of Santa Susanna in Rome

You may visit Daniel DeGreve, Architect's website at www.dpdegrevearchitect.com or email him at [email protected].

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