St Martin-in-the-Fields

The beauty possessed by this church is as much to do with the neoclassical architecture of James Gibbs (1726) as it is with the renovation lead by the then vicar, Reverend Nicholas Holtam between 2005 and 2007. It was Reverend Holtam who organised a competition that would be an exceptional opportunity for any artist: to design a window that, in his words, “successfully animates light”.

This light now pours through the church as it passes through an astonishing window by the Iranian-born artist Shirazeh Houshiary. The etched glass and steel fretwork is an exquisite fusion of the old with the new, or as Rebecca Geldard of The Guardian described the window in 2008, “[a] reworking of the ultimate symbols of Christianity and modernism — the cross and the grid”. As it is channelled through the clear, monochromatic window, light bathes the interior and lifts everyone and everything within. This complete lack of colour provides an overarching purity to the space — a purity that would be hard to achieve from conventional stained glass. Despite having been shattered during World War II, this window has resolutely been brought back to life not merely as the intended focal point of Gibbs’ interior, but as a window onto an otherness well beyond glass and steel.  

Filed under   Places