Review: Build Something Modern: Ireland’s Modernist Mission in Africa, by Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley, directors

Abstract

Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley, directors Build Something Modern: Ireland’s Modernist Mission in Africa Still Films, 2011, 70 min., http://www.volta.ie/films/build-something-modern A melding of images and colors, voices and rhythms: that’s the impression one is left with after viewing Build Something Modern: Ireland’s Modernist Mission in Africa , a film documenting the Irish architects who, from the 1940s to the 1960s, designed churches, schools, and hospitals for missionary religious orders in Africa. Eschewing a narrator, the collage-like film moves back and forth through interviews with architects and priests, reworked archival footage, animation, experimental presentations of drawings and photographs, accompanied by a distinctive sound track. The different parts come together to leave the viewer with an overall impression, rather than a fully coherent position. The film begins and ends in 2010 in the company of the Kiltegan Fathers, a group of elderly missionary priests now returned to Ireland. We spend time with them at their home: St. Patrick’s Missionary Society in Kiltegan, County Wicklow, a 1950s building designed by Pearse McKenna, one of the Irish architects discussed in the film. Here we learn about the wave of missionary priests and nuns who left the young, recently independent Ireland for an Africa itself experiencing the end of colonialism, emerging independence, and the tensions such transitions bring. If this was a time in which Ireland and the Catholic Church were closely intertwined, it was also a period of tremendous change in the church, consolidated by the modernizing reforms of Vatican II in the early to mid-1960s. The architecture examined in Build Something Modern embodies this moment in modernity. One of the architects interviewed, Dr. Richard Hurley, wittily characterizes McKenna’s pre-1963 modernist church designs in Africa as “old wine in new bottles.” Hurley discusses his own Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Eldoret, Kenya, designed following the “huge change in ritual and worship” codified by Vatican II, whereby priest and people were brought closer …