Spires in the Sun
The Carpenter Gothic Episcopal Churches of Florida
By Johnathan Rich and Phil Eschbach
St. John’s Cathedral Bookstore, 572 pages, $75
Spires in the Sun is a five-pound masterwork. Technically, it is extremely focused, limited to the 39 small, wood-frame churches built in the 19th century, by Episcopalians in Florida.
But the book also offers a window into universal truths. Humans have always sought ways to draw closer to God. We also know how to build things. We all live in our time, but we also have a sense of history. We can, we have, made things that bring these realities into built form. This book shows a focused and complete exploration of how a people in a time created buildings that manifested both faith and architecture.
The book is a comprehensive, 18-year labor of love. It is an exceptional case study, derived by the efforts of Jonathan Rich and Phil Eschbach, cradle Episcopalians—Rich being a man of words (as a lawyer) and Phil a man of images (photographer). Eschbach is from a nine-generation Florida family, and when his neighbor, Jonathan Rich, was in line at the post office in 2014, they discovered that they shared a passion for churches—especially these churches. Both had attended Episcopal schools, but they were not “churchmen” when they met. Personal predilection and abilities made for a decade-plus discovery into far greater realities.
The result of this discovery is a book that guilelessly reveals the humanity in how we experience architecture and religion.
Pretty pictures, or arcane history factoids, or validation via liturgical expression are what we are good at when we collect these things for ourselves. But if you can feel the spirituality of now (and then), the ingenuity of the creation of a thing, but more the simple hope in faith a church embodies, then personal passions become connections to who we are, and this book will fascinate you.
The heft of the book is complimented by the austerity it celebrates. Rather than solely a picture book that has captions to locate, name, and give context to its subject matter, or an illustrated history that uses text to explain time and place and people, or even an architecture study with drawings and technological descriptions, Spires in the Sun is all three of these ways we think of our culture, simultaneously.
All 39 churches follow the words of contemporary British architect Frank Wills: “No church should be pretty: it should be simple, or modest or dignified or rich or gorgeous: but there should be never anything puerile about it, to lower its tone, or degrade its character.”
Those words may describe the aesthetic of the book’s focus: Carpenter Gothic architecture, which melds craftsmanship and the local culture with spiritual intent. The Carpenter Gothic movement in architecture used its allusion to Medieval culture to recreate a sense of history in the 18th and 19th century. The use of Gothic aesthetics was communicated as an architectural rulebook, a canon of shape and details. But more in this book, each church is treated as a story—with its evolution, accretion of added parts, and sentinel truth given a history that becomes part of a regional language. Old photos and drawings mesh with Eschbach’s photographic art to tell these 39 stories.
The context of the era—the Second Great Awakening, a transcendentalist time, the Antebellum South—is sewn throughout the book, as are the people who manifested these cultural touchstones. Things like scissors trusses, symmetry and balance, the mono-material of wood with added bits of color, are consistencies these architects used and are clearly presented. The consistency of buildings with whitewashed exterior and usually natural wood interiors, and the stained glass of both simple pattern and exquisite complexity, are clearly revealed in this comprehensive study. The histories of these local icons become compelling stories—some are moved, destroyed by hurricanes, added onto, and the builders, rectors and patrons are all described—and their words often quoted.
Beyond the tools of expression of these simple, careful, handcrafted buildings, the most powerful baseline continuity of Spires in the Sun is the purpose of all the effort of their builders: To come closer to God. Buildings answer problems—protect us, facilitate our work, even form our community. But buildings also embody hope, and here, in this book, these buildings manifest our faith in the greater reality of God in every life. Religion is often an imprecise effort to connect to the divine, and buildings often are about the builder or designer expressing beauty that is at the core of our humanity. But as these buildings convey, there is also a beauty in our guileless effort to go beyond ourselves.
I am a Yankee architect of contemporary aesthetic sensibilities and designs, and it is clear to me that this book’s detailed and clear format, when combined with its extraordinary depth, is not only a gift to the region, but more to the American culture. There could be 1,000 books like this in as many places, but it takes the extraordinary passion and skill of Rich and Eschbach to manifest our humanity in a book.
Spires in the Sun sets a standard and offers an example of how we can celebrate our history, architecture, and culture that goes beyond the Instagram format that dominates today’s expectations.
Duo Dickinson, an architect based in Madison, Connecticut, has designed more than 1,000 projects, including homes and churches.
