Architecture

Medieval Masterpieces Inspired by Swedish Mystic Still Dazzle in Montco

February 18, 2020 | by Samuel Newhouse

The medieval majesty of Bryn Athyn Cathedral in Montgomery County is an unexpected sight to behold. | Photo courtesy of Larry Lamb

“Of all the works of art created by the hands of men, there are none that seem to live, through the human spirit that breathes within their every part, as do the marvelous churches and cathedrals of the Middle Ages,” wrote Raymond Pitcairn, part of the family that founded Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, in a 1920 letter. He attributed that quality to the guild system, where artisans’ and crafts-peoples’ lives were deeply intertwined with their projects. “The varying minds of many men whose labor was inspired by love and joy abounding in their work are written in these monuments of Christian art, which may be likened to great symphonies in which a multitude of voices join in sublime and mighty harmonies, full and rich, and well-nigh infinite in their variety. All other architecture is by comparison inadequate and elementary.”

Pitcairn, working with hundreds of workers over nearly 40 years, sought to create structures attaining this level of luminosity in a tiny town called Bryn Athyn, just 15 miles north of Philadelphia in the Huntingdon Valley. The Bryn Athyn Historic District consists of a Gothic Revival cathedral built during World War I and Glencairn Museum, a castle built during the Great Depression, a Beaux Arts mansion from the Gilded Age and a second mansion, currently used as office space. The precision of craft, quality of materials, and blend of design principles resembles few other pieces of American architecture.

“The main part of the cathedral is clearly a Gothic Revival influence, but as the construction goes on, it veers into some weird Romanesque Revival, a little bit of Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, and a mish-mash of style that we just refer to as ‘Bryn Athyn style,’ because I don’t know how else you describe it,” said Warren Holzman, a blacksmith who teaches at Bryn Athyn College.

Bryn Athyn Cathedral, completed in October 1919, and Glencairn Museum, completed in December 1939, were designed without a traditional architect. Instead, design was hashed out and created in a Ruskinian dialogue between Raymond Pitcairn and onsite shops of stonemasons, blacksmiths, woodworkers, and stained glass artists.

Aerial view of Bryn Athyn Cathedral under construction, 1924. | Image courtesy of Academy of the New Church Archives, Swedenborg Library, Bryn Athyn College

These workers had an essentially unlimited budget and created by hand every piece of the cathedral and castle. They worked off of three-dimensional models co-created with Pitcairn, who lacked formal architectural training, but had obsessively studied medieval art, architecture, and construction methods. For materials they used the then-newly discovered Monel metal, a naturally occurring alloy composed of nickel with some copper that never corrodes, massive quantities of Javanese teak wood, and stone from across the country.

“The cathedral itself is such a jewel-box in terms of all the handwork that’s on display there, from top to bottom, it really is otherworldly,” said Tim Andreadis, a specialist in 20th-century design at Freeman’s Auction House in Philadelphia. “It seems when you first encounter it that it bears this relationship to these other traditions, but because it’s this kind of bricolage, borrowing in a sense from all these architectural styles and all these different craftsmen, it is a purely 20th century creation.”

 Roots of Bryn Athyn

Bryn Athyn was founded in the 1890s on land bought by Raymond Pitcairn’s father John J. Pitcairn Jr., both for the family and their Philadelphia-based sect of Swedenborgian Christianity (also known as The Church of New Jerusalem).

John Pitcairn, a wealthy industrialist who in 1883 had founded the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, was a close associate of Reverend William Henry Benade, the minister of a Swedenborgian sect based out of a church on what would become the corner of Cherry and Lambert Streets between 21st and 22nd Streets.

Philadelphia in the 19th century was one of the centers of religious activity inspired by Emanuel Swedenborg, a successful Swedish inventor, statesman, and philosopher who in his mid-50s, began experiencing visions and spent the rest of his life writing out an interpretation of the Scriptures. His books include descriptions of a vivid afterlife, communication with angels, and describe all religions as reflections of the same divinity. Most of his work was published anonymously, but, after his death, followers cropped up all around the world.

The Cherry Street Church, which stood on Cherry between 21st and 22nd Streets, was occupied by the New Church in the mid-1800s. The building was razed by the end of the 19th century. | Image courtesy of Academy of the New Church Archives, Swedenborg Library, Bryn Athyn College

Scotsman James Glen first exposed American audiences to Swedenborg with a 1784 lecture at Bell’s Bookstore on 3rd Street. 34 years later, the cornerstone for the first Church of New Jerusalem temple was laid at the corner of 12th and George (now Sansom) Streets. A Swedenborg-inspired sect called the Bible Christians arrived from Manchester, England, claiming Swedenborg also preached vegetarianism and abstinence from alcohol to the dismay of their American brethren and set up their own church in 1822 on 3rd Street above Girard Avenue. Around 1854, when the Church of New Jerusalem began another church at Broad and Brandywine Streets, a dispute over the placement of the cornerstone led Benade to leave, beginning the path that eventually led to Bryn Athyn.

In 1889, Pitcairn bought farmland in Montgomery County near Alnwick Grove Park. In 1897, he moved Benade’s church complex, including a school, north from its Cherry Street location, renaming the area Bryn Athyn. The name, ‘Bryn Athyn,’ is intended to mean hill of cohesion or unity in Welsh. It was later revealed that Athyn is a neologism added to Welsh dictionaries by an overly creative lexicographer, but the name stuck.

“They move up to Bryn Athyn, they move up to Huntingdon Valley, it’s farmland, there’s nothing up there. They buy it to get away. And of course, it catches up with them,” said Chris Barber, a minister and teacher at the Academy of the New Church, which Benade, Pitcairn and others founded in 1876. “There’s always been this kind of almost Swedenborgian retreat, where we have so much to read and so much to study, where, in a sense, the early church was definitely trying to get their footing and some of that seemed like getting distance. It was also in the hope of having distinctive life.”

Creating a New Medieval Church

After buying the land in the Huntingdon Valley, Pitcairn Jr. built Cairnwood, a Beaux-Arts mansion for his family to live in. It is a fine example of Gilded Age architecture, but seems almost traditional compared to what came next. “He decides he’s going to build the greatest monument of the Swedenborgian faith that he can muster, and that’s the Bryn Athyn Cathedral,” Holzman said.

A worker designing a model of a detail of the Cathedral, 1915. | Image courtesy of Academy of the New Church Archives, Swedenborg Library, Bryn Athyn College

When Pitcairn started the cathedral in 1913, architect Ralph Adams Cram, an expert in Gothic Revival, was leading the design. They decided, at considerable expense, to set up a guild system of artisans working onsite, in part to achieve authenticity by building in the Gothic way, inspired by the writings of John Ruskin, William Morris, and a somewhat sentimentalized vision of the Middle Ages. After Pitcairn died in 1916, his son Raymond, who was trained professionally as a lawyer, took over and began intervening in the design and tweaking details of the project. This led him to eventually fire Cram and take over the project.

“They built this thing without the guiding vision of an architect. They did this by expanding the model shop,” explained Holzman. “Everything they did after that started out as a small plaster model and just got bigger and bigger until they were full-size mockups in stone, wood, metal, until there was consensus and Raymond was pleased with what he saw, and then it was executed. So that was done for the rest of the cathedral. And that is how Glencairn was built.”

As a designer, Pitcairn worked closely with his craftspeople and required them to follow certain rules of design such as that no single component of the cathedral repeat itself, apparently to reflect the diversity of God’s creation. “There are 124 doors in the cathedral,” Holzman said. “Every one of those doors has unique strap hinges, a unique lever and unique set of bolts and nuts that bind all the hardware to those doors. It was a very deliberate effort to reproduce nothing a second time.”

Workers pose with a Bryn Athyn Cathedral clerestory window, 1915. | Image courtesy of Academy of the New Church Archives, Swedenborg Library, Bryn Athyn College

The cathedral was also designed to include “refinements,” or intentional imperfections–curves and skews along what traditionally would have been straight lines–to authentically recreate the slightly crooked style of authentic medieval churches. In 2014, the late art historian Andrew Tallon used a Leica Geosystems C10 laser scanner to measure these “refinements” down to the millimeter. The cathedral’s nave expands in the middle and narrows at each end. The central path almost imperceptibly ascends to the altar. The 150-foot tower of the cathedral narrows as it ascends. The interior walls over the altar expand before meeting in arch, in what Pitcairn called an “attenuated horseshoe curve.” To intentionally capture in a stone structure what scholars today consider naturally occurring shifts in the stone and mortar of centuries-old churches required the workers to develop complex new construction methods. Inward-facing stones in the widening arches were cut trapezoidally to create the desired effect, according to Tallon.

Pitcairn also had his glass workers spend years studying medieval stained glass he had bought on trips to Europe to learn how to recreate it. He employed a Harvard professor to translate a 12th century text by Theophilus on the art of creating pot metal glass. They spent years mixing chemicals and oxides to get the right colors. When I visited, the altar was bathed in ethereal purple light–the effect of sunlight filtered through red and blue stained glass.

Virtually all of the metalwork in the cathedral and the castle is Monel, which was originally discovered in ore in Canada and is most commonly used today in machine rooms on naval vessels, as it almost never ages. Man-made Monel was purchased by Pitcairn for Bryn Athyn craftsmen to work with. “There’s nowhere else in the world where that much of it was used in one building,” Holzman said. “For the first 40 years they used it exclusively. No iron, no steel, a few bits of bronze. Every hinge, every latch, every lock, every screw, every switch plate, every bolt, every guardrail, every grip-rail, every screen–it was all Monel.”

Mildred Pitcairn and child inspect a Bryn Athyn Cathedral pinnacle, 1915. | Image courtesy of Academy of the New Church Archives, Swedenborg Library, Bryn Athyn College

Inside the cathedral the quality and color of the stone changes from floor to wall to pillar to trim: sandstone from Ohio, granite from Massachusetts, and limestone from Kentucky are just some of the types of stone used. Eventually they found a granite quarry right in Bryn Athyn, which was used for exterior stone.

“The use of architectural refinements—the Cathedral of Bryn Athyn was, to my knowledge, the first in the world to have had them incorporated—along with the guild-style construction process, in which artisans were assembled to work under the supervision of an on-site architect, is precisely what sets Bryn Athyn apart from its many Gothic Revival peers,” Tallon wrote. “The fruit of a highly unusual construction process, as nearly antithetical to modern practice as the Middle Ages is distant from the present, it speaks the language of medieval architecture with a degree of idiomatic subtlety rarely achieved elsewhere.”

Building a Castle

Work continued on the cathedral for about a decade after it opened in 1919. After that project was complete, Pitcairn turned to creating a home for his own family: Glencairn. Today it is a museum where some of the Pitcairns’ collection of more than 8,000 artifacts from around the world are on display. The building reflects an even more idiosyncratic amalgamation of architectural styles–part Beaux-Arts home, part castle, part medieval European chapel. “Look at Glencairn. I have no idea what that is,” Holzman said. “I’ve never seen anything like what that evolved into.”

Raymond and Nathan Pitcairn on the roof of Glencairn during construction, 1935. | Image courtesy of Academy of the New Church Archives, Swedenborg Library, Bryn Athyn College

On the first floor, a comfortable 19th century living room with hardwood floors adjoins the stone-lined “Great Hall,” with a floor-to-ceiling mosaic, massive stained glass recreations of the windows at Chartres, some of Pitcairns’ medieval stone sculptures on display in various corners, and a comfy couch, carpet, and bookshelves. Visitors who take the tour can see the Philly skyline from the observatory upstairs, more relics of ancient civilizations Pitcairn collected, and the family chapel, a small stone room with a mosaic ceiling depicting a tetramorph of the Apostles around a solar centerpiece tiled with gold. “The quality of the medieval art is absolutely stellar. It’s one of the best collections of medieval art in the United States,” said Susan Leibacher Ward, an art history professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. “If you look around, you will see other Gothic Revival churches, you will see other houses like Cairnwood, but the actual Glencairn building is unique.” It is difficult to accurately capture all the details of craft in Glencairn and the Bryn Athyn Cathedral, even for craftsmen who have worked there for years.

“The cathedral and Glencairn are just so unique in their construction and their aesthetic style–it’s not been copied anywhere,” said Drew Nehlig, the historic buildings project manager at Bryn Athyn. “He [Pitcairn] wanted a lot of the best material you could get. He wanted to build a building that would stand through the ages, and he loved the uniqueness of all those different materials. For us, it would have been a lot of fun to spend a day with Raymond Pitcairn. It would have been a lot of fun even to meet the craftsmen that were here, just to hear the story of ‘How did you get that there? How did you do it?'”

Plaster model of Glencairn with an early tower design, 1928. | Image courtesy of Academy of the New Church Archives, Swedenborg Library, Bryn Athyn College

There are other Gothic Revival and Gilded Age properties around America, like Hammond Castle in Gloucester, Massachusetts and the Guggenheim’s Falaise mansion on Long Island. There are even other communities built by and for artisans, like Rose Valley in Delaware County or Arden, Delaware. There are other obsessively built homes in the region, like Fonthill Castle or the Wharton Esherick Museum. But nothing captures and embodies all the intricacies and ornateness of craft that one finds at Bryn Athyn. Two factors which may explain that are the nearly limitless funds the Pitcairns were willing to devote to these projects and the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, the unique religious figure whose visions they were trying to articulate. Even Raymond Pitcairn’s collection of ancient religious artifacts from Mesopotamia and Egypt was driven by Swedenborg’s assertion that all of their “individual truths are mirrors that reflect the Lord,” as he wrote in True Christianity.

“In a certain sense, you’re stepping back in time, in this case to this reconstructed idea of what a Swedenborgian church is,” Andreadis said. “This is a time when people are bolting together skyscrapers all across the globe and here you have this project emerging in the suburbs of Philadelphia to kind of harken back to a non-existent perceived past, and so it’s a portal, in a sense.”

A Still Living Faith

The New Church is just one of several Swedenborgian sects around the globe, others of which have tried, like medieval church builders, to celebrate the visions he articulated in real world structures. The Wayfarers’ Chapel south of Los Angeles, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, is probably the other most renowned Swedenborg-inspired structure.

Glencairn Museum today. | Photo: Samuel Newhouse

The teachings of Swedenborg are not as widely known or followed today as they were in the 19th century. But today, Bryn Athyn is also home to one of the most visibly resurgent communities of Swedenborgian thought. Off the Left Eye, a YouTube channel created by the Swedenborg Foundation, is filmed in studios across the street from the Bryn Athyn Historic District. The group has racked up some 17 million views on their educational and plainspoken expositions on Swedenborg. This level of popularity is unusual for anything Swedenborgian and was totally unexpected, said the channel’s host Curtis Childs, who lives in Bryn Athyn.

“It all comes down to Swedenborg himself and the concepts in there. It’s always been this thing that is very powerful to people and yet remains really obscure,” Childs said. “Now, we just get these comments all the time about how this has become the defining thing in their life. Often, I’m shocked at the impact it has.”

Next June, Childs and the Foundation are inviting fans of the YouTube channel to their first-ever conference in Bryn Athyn. “I want to marry the ideas and the space-experience,” Childs said. “Everybody is hungry for some kind of spiritual or philosophical or some kind of serene, deep experience, yet sometimes people have trouble accessing that because they can’t find the right framework to allow the ideas in. “I want to take those spaces and see, ‘Can we take people on a journey that’s both in the mind and in the body?”

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About the Author

Samuel Newhouse is a writer and reporter living in Germantown. His work has been featured in the Chestnut Hill Local, The Art Blog, The Secret Admirer, Star Newspaper in the River Wards, the Metro, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. 

24 Comments:

  1. David Swift says:

    Good article.Are there any Pitcairn’s living on the property?

    1. Annette says:

      I grew up, and still live near, Bryn Athyn and can tell you that no, no Pitcairns live ON the property, but they are still very much involved in and are proponents of Swedenborg and the church organization around his writings.

    2. Judah says:

      No Pitcairns on the property (they donated the buildings), but many descendants still live in the area and associated New Church congregations.

  2. Randy Silcox says:

    I worked there in the 70s, Hung one of the Moneldoors, took 10 guys to do it, was very heavy

  3. Randy Silcox says:

    We Covered all the boxwood bushes every winter also. There were never any weeds, we would weed everyday on that hill

  4. Julie Conaron says:

    No, there are not. There are many Pitcairn descendants, but after Raymond’s wife died Glencairn was denoted to the Academy and it became a museum. As a Swedenborgian from the UK, now living in the area, I am amazed at how beautiful these buildings are and the devotion given to them. Julie Conaron.

    1. Julie Conaron says:

      “Donated” not “denoted!”

  5. Joe says:

    Another son of John Pitcairn (who lived at 2008 Spring Garden Street before his move to Bryn Athyn) was Harold, who flew the first autogyro in the United States in 1930. This precursor of the helicopter was developed by Harold into the business known as Eastern Airlines. See more at https://www.baldwinparkphilly.org/piasecki-helicopters
    Harold was shot, apparently by accident, after a party at Bryn Athyn in 1960.

    1. Matthew Allen says:

      Harold passed away on the night of his brother Raymond’s birthday party. It was a large gathering and Harold was the orator for the evening. After returning to CairnCrest, Harold’s castle, he was found slumped over his desk apparently shot by a Savage pistol he was cleaning Accidentally.

  6. Sherrie Connelly says:

    Wayfarer’s Chapel’s architect was Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright’s son.

  7. michael says:

    by any measure not a Christian religion at all

  8. A Christian Religion through & through , it needs to be studied , before judgements are made.

  9. F. Caracena says:

    As followers of Jesus Christ, the one and only visible God, you would not call them “Christian.” Then how do you define the term?

  10. Neville Jarvis says:

    Michael, I would be most interested to know exactly (and I mean exactly) what you consider determines ‘a Christian religion’ to be just that.

  11. Jenifer McDonald says:

    My grandfather August Gunkel was one of the stained glass artists
    Thank you for this story
    Jenifer O’Neill McDonald

  12. Tom Andrews says:

    This is a great article. I lived in Bryn Athyn off and on for a number of years, and even resided in Cairncrest for a year as a kind of caretaker. Every time I visit these buildings I marvel at the work and vision that went into them. They beckon to another era. Having relatively recently discovered the influence of William Morris and the nineteenth century Arts and Crafts movement, I understand better that aspect of what Raymond Pitcairn was doing. But there is really no way to appreciate these buildings fully without a study of Swedenborg’s work which influenced these buildings so fundamentally. There is a robust book store now located at the Bryn Athyn Cathedral for those interested. Among many other books by and about Swedenborg that one can find there, there is a wonderful book on the construction of the Cathedral, with superb pictures, by E. Bruce Glenn: Bryn Athyn Cathedral: The Building of a Church. Now in its 2d edition. Finally, I don’t know who “Michael” is (comment Feb. 20, 2020), but he doesn’t know much about Swedenborgianism if he can say what he says.

  13. Barb Gulick says:

    Are these buildings open to the public?

    1. Douglas Nadel says:

      Yes, the Glencairn Museum is open (or was, before COVID). I’ve taken a tour of the area, too. And Cairnwood is rented out for events. Great place just to walk around, too. Check their website glencairnmuseum.org

  14. Carolyn Hernandez says:

    My daughter is getting married at the Bryn Athyn Cathedral in April 2020. Excited to see the inside and the grounds.

    1. Matthew Allen says:

      I will look, these are a few photos of different craftsmen in groups. I am a Pitcairn by my mother on Raymonds side of the family.

  15. April Davis Dean says:

    My great grandfather was one of the artists who designed & made the beautiful door knobs & other metalwork from monel. His name was John Walter & he & Raymond Pitcairn became friends & my grandfather started sending his 3 kids to the school in Bryn Athyn which is where I grew up.Do you have a picture of all the craftsman with thier names on it? If so, I’d love to see it.

  16. Very interesting and informative article. The Bryn Athyns complex has been important to me since I first heard about it in 1972, when I was going to what is now the Abington campus of Penn State. Back then, the Pitcairns still lived at Glencairn. There was an urban legend about them being interbred freaks – and it wasn’t wise to be found on their grounds after dark (my music professor played violin at the house for gatherings and squelched those stories…). So glad these places have been saved, unlike Whitemarsh Hall not too far away, which I could see from my bedroom window growing up.

  17. Jennifer Cole says:

    In very fact, one of Swedenborg’s works, given to him to write down by the Lord, is entitled, True Christian Religion. If one knows the history of the Christian church, one knows that in early times, Jesus Christ was considered the one God of Heaven and earth, and the incarnation of the Divine. It fell away from this after the Nicene Council, and divided God into three persons. The teachings of the New Church explain how He is one in essence and in person, and that the reference to Father, Son and Holy Spirit describes three aspects of the Divine, as we humans, made in His image, have a soul, a body and our activity or usefulness in this world and the next. I think most people do understand that we are Christian. But there are even some New Churchmen who would say we aren’t, if by what you mean is a belief in three Gods, and a belief in the doctrine of the Atonement.

  18. Eric Hyer says:

    My great great grandfather was an active member in the church. I think in the late 1800s. William Henry Benade. I was just looking for history about him.

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