It's Over for Burlington's Kiley / Barnes’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception
Demolition in Burlington, VT, has begun on the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, designed by landscape architect Dan Kiley and architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. The site was first designated a Landslide at-risk site in 2006, when it was threatened by the then-proposed Downtown Transportation Center, which also resulted in its inclusion in the report Landslide 2012: Landscape and Patronage. That designation was updated in October 2018 when it became clear, following declining attendance and financial difficulties, that the site would likely be sold. Despite a lawsuit, the Vermont State Supreme Court upheld the sale and earlier this month, the four-week-long demolition process began as workers with heavy equipment started stripping the copper siding from the deconsecrated cathedral and leveling the site.
The cathedral was completed in 1977. At the time, Barnes and Kiley were at the forefront of the Modernist Movement, both having studied with and been influenced by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at Harvard. The two had a long-standing working relationship and had collaborated previously on several projects—among them the Osborne House, VT (1954), and the W.D. Richards Elementary School, Columbus, IN (1965). Kiley and Barnes would later go on to produce several significant designs, including that for the Dallas Museum of Art, TX (1983), and housing for the Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, IN (1984). Kiley’s previous ecclesiastical commissions included collaboration with Eero Saarinen on the design for North Christian Church in Columbus, IN (1964), one of Saarinen’s most important works.
Barnes’s and Kiley’s challenge was to develop the one-square block site so that it integrated the cathedral with downtown Burlington while insulating the structure from the surrounding commotion of the city. They placed the cathedral in the center of the property, surrounded on three sides by a grid of 123 uniformly spaced locust trees. A towering steel campanile stands alone at one corner of the site, while the surrounding trees screen the building itself. Linear geometry plays a strong role in the design; straight concrete footpaths, and geometric lawn panels mirror the sharp angular construction of the cathedral’s distinctive five-sided sanctuary. Kiley often used the grid to structure his designs as seen here in his placement of the locust trees. Early in his career he was inspired by the Parisian work of André Le Nôtre whose classical ideals Kiley incorporated with his own streamlined approach to create his matchless design aesthetic.
Similar to his work on the Miller House Garden (Columbus, IN) in the 1950s, the placement of trees in the cathedral’s landscape creates a rare spatial experience for visitors, elongating and extending the viewer’s sense of boundary that yields a site feeling distinctly removed from its urban setting despite being situated at a busy intersection. Barnes’s and Kiley’s close collaboration could be seen, in part, in the interplay between color and form—the cathedral’s low, dark-green, glazed brick walls and soaring copper roof juxtaposed against the light-green foliage and dark trunks of the locust trees. Viewed together, structure and landscape blend harmoniously to create a peaceful and inviting public space that anchors the center of downtown Burlington.
Longtime historic preservationist, architectural historian, and advocate Devin Colman said of the recently commenced demolition: “In the end, the owner was able to use the former religious status of the property as a means to avoid the city’s standard development review processes and regulations. There are no approved plans for redevelopment of this site once the building is gone, leaving a vacant block in the heart of Burlington’s downtown.”
Jane Amidon, co-author with Dan Kiley of Dan Kiley: The Complete Works of America's Master Landscape Architect, and Professor of Landscape Architecture and Director of the Urban Landscape Program College of Social Sciences and Humanities, College of Arts, Media and Design, Northeastern University, said: “The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception was an elemental Kiley garden with misleading simplicity: a bigger bosque set on a smaller site than many of his iconic works, its volumetric grid of 120+ honey locust never failed to pull the eye and foot in from Burlington’s adjacent streets and outward from the cathedral. The destruction of any site produced by Kiley designing with and gaining inspiration from his closest collaborators is notable and this one, one of his only built works in Vermont drawing on both modernist and regional sources, is a particular loss.”
While the appreciation for the Modernist landscape architecture of Dan Kiley and other practitioners has grown over the past quarter century, uncertainty still exists about the future of this built legacy. Two museums with Kiley landscapes—the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO—will be undergoing expansions. It’s unclear what will happen to those landscapes. Museums, as we’ve seen over the years, are not always the best stewards of their designed landscape legacy.
