Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception (1973)

20 Pine Street (intersection of Cherry & St. Paul Streets), Burlington, Vermont USA • Corner detail: Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception (1973).

According to UVM's Historic Burlington Project: In 1973, shortly after the devastating fire, the congregation of the Cathedral of Immaculate Conception decided to rebuild their church. Prominent New York architect Edward Larrabee Barnes was selected to design the new cathedral. Barnes is known for his wide range of geometric civic, educational, and ecclesiastical structures that respond heavily to building site and local building materials. His monumental yet simple structures combine formal order and careful detailing to result in powerful and effective buildings.

Inspired by H. H. Richardson’s Billings Library at the University of Vermont, Barnes’s design draws upon local references to the library building through the exterior banding of glazed green and dark brown brick, while accommodating the challenges of a declining Catholic population in the community. The new, angular, five-sided church was designed on a smaller-scale to seat 450 people in the sanctuary and oriented on an east-west axis to capture sunlight at sunrise and sunset.

Barnes collaborated with prominent Vermont-based landscape architect Dan Kiley to design the site. Kiley is noted as being one of the most important landscape architects of the 20th century, having worked and studied under notable Warren Manning and later Walter Gropius at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He became of the first modern landscape architects in the country using geometric and ordered forms in landscapes, often collaborating with contemporaries Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn. His works include numerous public spaces, often designing plazas, but despite the popularity of his work during the 1970s, Kiley’s built landscapes are being lost, altered, and redesigned at an alarming rate.

Kiley sited the building in the center of the city block reorienting the main entrance to be located off Pine Street, instead of Cherry Street. Kiley also used Barnes’s angular design for the new Cathedral to dictate new circulation patterns and vegetation throughout the site. The building sits within a grove of 123 honey locust trees (Gleditsia triacanthos) that align to the exterior angled façade of the Cathedral, while two sidewalks parallel the trees and criss-cross the site. The historic bell was salvaged from the ruins and placed in a free-standing steel belltower at its former location of the corner of Cherry and St. Paul Streets, serving to recall the former Cathedral building that burned. On March 13, 1977, the new Cathedral reopened to parishioners, and was dedicated two months later on May 26, 1977.

Today the Cathedral and surrounding landscape remain unaltered from their 1970s appearance. However, in June 2006 the city of Burlington approved a feasibility study regarding a new public transportation facility located along St. Paul Street, which would effect the Barnes building and Kiley landscape. Since the transportation center is currently in the initial design phase, awareness about the building and landscape are being raised, in hopes of designing a facility that is compatible with the adjacent landscape and minimally obtrusive to the Barnes and Kiley design.

☞ Part of a series of photos documenting my new home & neighborhood, in the heart of Vermont's largest town: Burlington 05401. • After almost a dozen years in rural Cornwall, 40 miles to the south, I have moved to one of the true outposts of optimism, on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain (the 6th Great Lake).

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Taken in: United States / Vermont / Burlington (show map)

Taken on: November 29, 2009

Tags:

2.color•glazed.brick

two color

Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception

1973

church

architecture

Edward Larrabee Barnes

Dan Kiley

20 Pine Street

Burlington, Vermont USA

Burlington

Vermont

USA

Chittenden County

05401

Don Shall

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Sets appears in: • • churches • • sunsets more » • + Burlington, Vermont USA • Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception (1973) « less

Groups appears in: • Vermont People and Places • Buildings/Architecture more » • Churches, Chapels, Domes, Mosques, Temples, Shrines and Monaster • Architectural details and decorative elements « less

Camera: Canon PowerShot S3 IS, f/3.5, 1/10 sec, 12.9mm, ISO 3 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon PowerShot S3 IS
Aperture:	f/3.5
Exposure Time:	0.1 sec (1/10)
Focal Length:	12.9mm
ISO:	3
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Red-eye reduction
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	QuickTime 7.6.3
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