DECEMBER 2007 » RECENT PROJECTS

Reconstruction: A New Chapter

By Eve M. Kahn

You might think carved stone would give out after 800 years of exposure to weather and occasional wars and fires, plus thousands of miles of travel by mule, rail, ferry, truck and freighter. But not these ca. 1200 walls.

They originally sheltered Cistercian monks in Spain's Guadalajara province, and now they shelter monks in California's Tehama County. They constitute the oldest building west of the Rockies, one of the oldest in the U.S., one of three medieval Cistercian houses of worship in America and the only one still used by actual Cistercians.

"It's almost hard to comprehend that these stones are hearing the same liturgy that they heard when they were first carved," says Patrick Cole, head of Arcademe (pronounced Arka-demi), an architecture firm in Chico, CA. His office, with Sac-ramento contractor Sunseri Associates, is reassembling the Spanish masonry as a chapterhouse for a community of 26 monks who spend their days praying and harvesting walnuts, prunes and grapes.

Their 586-acre home, the Abbey of New Clairvaux, was set up in 1955 on an estate in Vina (pronounced vine-uh) where Leland Stanford had planted California's first vineyards in the 1880s and later ran a brandy factory. The monks have added half a dozen unassuming gabled buildings to Stanford's brick barns. But because of New Clairvaux's resurrection in progress of the 12th-century chapterhouse, architecture buffs are now descending on the place. (It's open for tours, tastings of ac-claimed wines made with the abbey's own grapes and overnight retreats for followers of any faith. For details see www.newclairvaux.org.)

The chapterhouse's limestone components came from the vast holdings of Wil-liam Randolph Hearst, who purchased them in 1930 at Santa Maria de Ovila monastery near Madrid. King Alfonso VIII had found-ed the community in 1181, as a Christian bastion for a region recently freed from the Moors. At the monastery's ca. 1500 peak, the chapterhouse adjoined a church, refectory, cloisters, sacristy, treasury and bodega (a combination storeroom and dorm). By the early 1800s, only four monks were rattling around there, and the state secularized the place. The neighbors moved livestock into crumbling Cistercian halls; tiled roofs collapsed and timbers and woodwork were torn out.

Hearst paid a Madrid-based American antiques dealer about $90,000 for most of the monastery walls. A hundred local laborers spent months dismantling them (only the bodega remains onsite today) and craning the salvage onto trucks. By the time a flotilla of 11 freighters delivered it to San Francisco's harbor – a few hundred miles south of a California mountaintop where Hearst hoped to incorporate the stones into a 61-room, $50-million mansion designed by Julia Morgan – the whole Cistercian adventure had cost the media baron about $1 million.

Morgan planned to reuse the chapterhouse as the mansion's vestibule, the church as a swimming pool (with a diving board in the nave) and the refectory as an armory. But even before the ships arrived, Hearst ran out of money, due to the Depression. He sold the stones to the city of San Francisco for a paltry $25,000. Their packing crates ended up stacked in Golden Gate Park alongside the de Young Museum, awaiting transformation into a Morgan-designed Museum of Medieval Arts.

That attraction was meant to rival the Cloisters in New York, NY, which also contains a Cistercian wing (as does an Episcopal church in North Miami, FL, another wayward offspring of a failed Hearst attempt at reconstruction). The San Francisco plan never gained momentum. Arsonists burned the crates a few times, then set fires amid the oily eucalyptus leaves around the naked stones. Dye marks that Hearst's technicians had applied, numbering the carvings for reconstruction, vanished in the flames.

In 1955, Abbot Thomas X. Davis arrived in San Francisco, sent by a Cister-cian abbey in Kentucky to found New Clairvaux. A fellow Cistercian toured Father Thomas through Golden Gate Park and pointed out the sinking Hearst relics. The abbot never forgot that sight: as he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2000, "I resolved during the drive north to New Clairvaux to someday bring the stones home, where they would be loved and cared for on Cistercian soil." After all, as he pointed out to the Chico News & Review in 2002, Ecclesiastes tells of "a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together."

He kept gently and insistently petitioning city agencies to turn the Spanish artifacts over to New Clairvaux. Plans were instead floated to use them in transit stations or seismic reinforcements for Golden Gate Park's Legion of Honor. Park landscapers meanwhile hauled away dozens of carvings, which fortunately mostly ended up scattered in noble spots such as a fragrant-plant garden for the blind and an AIDS memorial garden.

In 1994, the de Young finally approved the abbot's request. As the museum's director told reporters, "We've had 75 years to put the monastery back together and we couldn't get it done." Shipping carvings to New Clairvaux, he added, "is the closest we've come to properly and respectfully displaying these stones." Twenty trucks brought them to Leland Stanford's brandy barns. Architect Patrick Cole and contractor Phil Sunseri had already worked for the monastery for decades, taking on small projects: a refectory, a guest center and dorms. Once the stones arrived, both men took trips to Spanish Cistercian sites, including the remains of Santa Maria de Ovila. "I wanted to get a real sense of what we were after, what the sense of space should be like," Sunseri recalls. Cole eventually designed a new shell for the chapterhouse plus adjacent cloisters: "I keyed in on the concept, the essence of what I'd seen in Europe, and adjusted it to New Clairvaux's program."

New Clairvaux has obtained virtually all of the Golden Gate Park stones that could be identified as chapterhouse parts. "We just had to figure out where they fit into the jigsaw puzzle," says Cole. The team measured chunks with calipers and protractors, fed the data into CAD, and then clicked and dragged until the outlines matched up. "We eventually realized," Cole adds, "that we had nearly half of the building, and 90 percent of the examples we needed as templates for repeating pieces we were missing. We're only still missing the portal capitals; we have photographs to work from but we'd much prefer the real thing. Tell anyone who knows where those might be to email me, I'm serious: Patrick@arcademe.com."

Raw material for new stones has come from TexaStone Quarries in Garden City, TX. The team of European-trained stonemasons includes Oskar Kempf of San Rafael, CA, and Frank Helmholz of Oregon House, CA (the latter spends a few months a year in Egypt working on Ramses the Great sites). Hydraulic lime mortar seals the new carvings to their ancestors – "our only concession to modernity is that we're using packaged lime, not making it ourselves," Cole notes. The walls are rising on a three-ft.-thick, steel-reinforced concrete foundation mat with a poured-in-place frame beam. "That could collect any earthquake force. The entire building will move as one unit," Sunseri says. "This is seismic zone 3."

New Clairvaux has so far received more than $4 million, mostly from individuals but also from nonprofits including the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and National Trust for Historic Preservation. The abbey needs another $3.5 million or so to complete the chapterhouse plus an adjacent atrium, cloister, entrance building, plaza and parking area. (Donation forms are available at www.sacredstones.org.)

As the chapterhouse takes shape, Cole says, "Everyone who stops by to see it is awed. Even if they've been to the great cathedrals of Europe, they've never seen one under construction, as the 500-pound stones are cut and hoisted and set. It's been a spiritual joy working on such a meaningful project, as a gesture toward honoring the divine." TB

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