Too big for its name, the Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago is a good and interesting building that could have been a great building. It's a stately mess, a missed opportunity, a wonderfully odd building fallen out of a time warp or an alternative universe and taken solid form - which is exactly true.

This church is a major landmark on the road-not-taken.

The whole University of Chicago campus makes me happy. Wander around, you'll see an extensive Gothic wonderland, the way a campus should be, so thickly ivy-covered that at least one of the stone buildings (Eckhart Hall, I think) looks like a chia pet. It's a beautiful, well-landscaped, master-planned campus of 35 buildings with fancy Gothic accessories like corbels and explanatory stone ornament and gargoyles, and intricate interior oak woodwork and hammer-beam ceilings and ivy, lots of ivy.

So yeah, the Rockefeller Chapel is surrounded by this. The entire campus gives me a sneaking sense of dislocation, as if this was an east-coast facility transplanted here, these historical accessories lending a sense of history which is respectable and phony at the same time, like those parts of the Yale campus that were freshly built in the 1920s then burned and chipped and acid-etched to produce a similar sense of age and manufactured authenticity.

In the context of the campus, the Chapel and its 207-foot bell tower were always meant to be the central feature, the natural focal point, the heart of the Gothic wonderland.

According to the AIA Guide to Chicago and the U of C web site, this church is piled together from Indiana limestone and the masonry is load-bearing. There's no steel structure underneath. Those Gothic arches and buttresses, they're holding the building up. The foundations go 80 feet down into bedrock.

The Chapel was commissioned in 1918 (with John D. Rockefeller's final gift to the University), started in 1925, and dedicated in 1928. The architect Bertram Goodhue died in April 1924. Somewhere along the line the basic design changed. That tallest tower, the 207-foot campanile, was originally meant to stand above the crossing, towering right above the church. Due to money pressures after World War I, the planned tower was re-imagined eastward, towards the lake, to stand beside the main structure at the Eastern transept as a cost-cutting move, a significant change in the presence and symmetry and massing and impact of the church.

Was this big move done before or after the architect died? Don't know. Reasonably the building is mostly creditable to Goodhue, partly to his longtime artistic collaborators who worked on this, and partly to his remaining design team, guys called Mayers, Murray and Phillip. Had the architect lived, I think this "Chapel" would be a far more impressive and cohesive building.

The year 1918 comes at a weird moment in church architecture and also a weird moment in Goodhue's carreer. The long backstory of Gothic architecture is a long trial-and-error struggle with the physical limitations of stone to create maximum clear-span spaces, to get the thinnest possible columns, introduce the most sunlight, and to get high. That's where pointed Gothic windows came from, that's where flying buttresses came from, there's an entire medieval mystical engineering history. Gothic shapes come from necessity. Style and structure, they were always joined at the hip.

Okay, but during the years 1890 - 1900 Louis Sullivan and the cadre of fellow Chicago architects successfully worked out the impact of the Steel Crisis all just a few miles north of here. The technical limits of masonry had always imposed formal building constraints. By 1890 with steel, and the elevator, all those historical constraints were suddenly gone; none of the historical precedents were much help; this new freedom created a technical and stylistic crisis, a crisis of we-got-what-we-always-wanted-so-what-the-hell-do-we-do-now?

During the same years Bertram Goodhue had started his career as a church architect. Inspired by traditional Gothic cathedrals, he got famous working in a disciplined Gothic Revival style with his (fondly hated) partner Ralph Cram. There's a big dilemma here, at the turn of the century during the Steel Crisis, if you can imagine yourself a church architect for a moment, about choosing the least-phony thing to do. Neither of your choices is particularly attractive. Nobody much cares what an apartment building or office tower looks like, but people do care what a church looks like. They care a lot. Do you adopt a smart and cost-effective steel frame underneath, and apply stonework to the outside, like appliqué, to make it look like everybody expects it to? That doesn't… seem very honest, and a steel frame doesn't come out to the right basic shapes. Or do you ignore the latest building techniques and build with stone, and push the limits of load-bearing masonry using the most modern math and engineering, knowing that when the building is finished, nobody but a fellow purist can tell the difference? That doesn't seem very smart, and it's way more expensive.

The purist second option is what "Gothic Revivalist" means, and that's why it's significant that the Rockefeller Chapel has load-bearing masonry. The largest cathedral in the world, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, was designed by Ralph Cram and begun in 1892 and is, amazingly, a masonry-supported structure. The St. Louis Cathedral, the Byzantine-style "new" cathedral on Lindell, dates from 1907 and is one of the first steel-structure cathedrals in the world.

This Rockefeller Chapel we're looking at has a sister church: the Riverside Church in New York City, overlooking the Hudson. Both were commissioned and funded by John D. Rockefeller, both were started within a four year period, both have carillons dedicated to Rockefeller's mother that rank 2nd and 3rd place worldwide in the number-of-bells-in-their-carillon category, and rank as the heaviest and second-heaviest carillons (the low C, the "Bourdon", at Riverside only weights 20 tons or so) and neither church enjoys denominational clarity. Except - the Riverside Church has a steel frame under its Indiana limestone, and to me, it has problems of scale. Its buttresses are ornamental and could never support the weight of that tower. The stonework looks bland and the proportions are off. It looks…. phony.

(By the way, that's still a live dilemma, building a church that's true to its own structure, but also true to people's perceptions and expectations of churchiness. That explains a lot of weird-ass modernistic churches, trying not to be phony. Phoenix is full of 'em.)

As to Goodhue, first of all, okay, first of all, and this makes me a little angry, it's lazy and stupid to describe Goodhue as a 'neo-Gothic architect'. After a couple of decades practicing his traditional Gothic Revival fundamentals, Goodhue pitched a mean changeup with the Byzantine / Romanesque 1912 St. Bartholomew's on Park Avenue in New York, which demonstrated his style versatility. He broke up with Cram. Then in 1915 he swerved dramatically left into Spanish Colonial for the fair buildings in San Diego. Around 1920 he synthesized all these and a few more exotic influences (like Moorish and Egyptian) into a masterful and highly personal style for his best three or four structures, increasingly simplified, with increasingly plain surfaces, his mature big-league style that sits outside of all these sloppy and fatuous categorizations like 'Art Deco'. This is an intellectual error, this pigeonholing. Goodhue, like Sinatra, mastered and then transcended these stylistic categories, maturing into his own category.

Okay. Whatever.

There are about 70 stone human figures on the Rockfeller Chapel. I think it's a beautiful, weird, uncanny, powerful effect to have human figures rising out of the stonework, but, honestly, trying to spot all 70 on this façade begins to seem pointless after, oh, about 15. There are really too many sculptures and inscriptions and coats of arms and lots of other crap going on.

There are various English-language inscriptions carved into stone ("Thy Kingdom is an Everlasting Kingdom") or painstakingly forged into iron hinges of giant wooden doors ("Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary"), but they don't seem that serious or informative. There's lots of iconography. On the four faces of the 162' level of the tower, the Passion of the Christ is told in symbols, from the Annunciation (lily) and the Nativity (star), there's Flight into Egypt (pyramid and Sphinx), there's the cup of the Last Supper in rays of glory, the story circles back around to the east, the Crucifixion represented by the cross, the Resurrection by the peacock. Winged dragons up there somewhere too.

The 70 stone figures range from Plato to Jan Hus to generic personified "Scientist" (with scientific vial) and generic personified "Philosopher" and "Learning" and "Service" and "Day" and "Night", to Woodrow Wilson and Dante, to two outstanding young University of Chicago students who met an early death. At the top of the tower stand Erasmus, Thomas á Kempis, John Bunyan, and Thomas Aquinas. Across the top of the façade, in a kind of chorus of heavenly figures, stands Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, Zoroaster, Plato, St. John the Baptist, Christ (top, middle), St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Athanasius, St. Augustine, St. Francis, Martin Luther and John Calvin.

Goodhue believed in artistic collaborators. This is another thing he brought over from his love of church architecture, a conviction that the arts have to work together, in a tight collaboration, that architectural ornament and color should be completely integrated with the spatial rhythm and message of the building. Goodhue worked intimately with his collaborators, making sure, for instance, that the mosaics were visible and lit, that the patterns of detail complemented each other, that light and color led the eyes towards the strengths of the design. Every building has a sort of voice. The best of Goodhue's work not only has a strong clear voice but a specific coordinated message, an understandable story, which is powerful and a little spooky. That's true of the Los Angeles Public Library, true of St. Vincent's, true of the Nebraska State Capitol.

It's almost true of the Rockefeller Chapel. All the parts are here, but it's a misfire. Goodhue's favorite collaborators worked here: mosaicist Hildreth Meiere, and the brilliant sculptor Lee Lawrie, who designed the façade sculpture up to 30 feet from the ground (the most visible pieces; above that, it was Ulric H. Ellerhusen's work). The composition needed more heat, more tension and discipline, more intellectual force, more visual contrast, more whatever-it-was that Goodhue took with him when he left.

But, y'know, like any other gift from an alternate universe, it's hard to dislike.