Victor Cordella: Timeless Beauty in Architecture

A prolific Polish American religious architect from Kraków, Victor Cordella (Wiktor Kordela, 1872–1937), designed thirty-five churches in the upper Midwest. Embellishing skylines across the Great Plains with onion domes and baroque steeples, Cordella's architecture reflects the emerging national consciousnesses and religious conflicts of Slavic migrants at the turn of the twentieth century. Despite his vast and distinct body of work, Cordella died impoverished, was buried in an unmarked grave, and has remained virtually unknown. Over the past few years, a team of community researchers, priests, and academics has been working to recover the full scope of Cordella's oeuvre—not an easy task, considering the scant archival trail the architect left behind. The resulting publication, Victor Cordella: Timeless Beauty in Architecture, is a slim architectural guidebook that builds on Geoffrey Gyrisco's academic studies on Cordella.1 It provides new information on his public and private commissions with essential travel information that will be appreciated by historians, architectural enthusiasts, and pilgrims alike.This study of Cordella is particularly valuable as very little is known about prewar Polish American religious architects, such as Thaddeus Badowski (Cleveland), Bernard Kołpacki (Milwaukee), and Leonard Schmidtner, né Kowalski (Milwaukee). In part, this is because Polish American church architects were few and far between. Parishes most often contracted non-Polish architects (e.g., Worthmann & Steinbach, Adolphus Druiding, and Joseph Molitor), and hired Polish contractors with ties to the congregation to execute the construction. Infrequently, churches were designed by priests or parishioners.2From an academic perspective, the volume makes an important contribution by documenting the extent of Cordella's extant and demolished works. In addition to Polish parishes, Rusyn, Slovak, Ukrainian, French Canadian, and Greek congregations entrusted Cordella to design churches that would meet their economic constraints and national aspirations. Religious architects faced many challenges when working with diasporic communities, including ecclesiastical politics, limited budgets for working-class congregations, and designing in a variety of architectural traditions. Considering the internecine nature of Slavic religious conflicts in the United States, Cordella's ability to consistently obtain work from competing ethnic groups and opposing factions was nothing less than miraculous.Based in Minneapolis, Cordella's architecture is imbricated in some of the most heated Slavic religious debates, notably the conversion of Rusyns to Russian Orthodoxy at St. Mary's Church in Minneapolis. Plagued by conflicts with the Americanist bishop John Ireland over language, culture, and clerical celibacy, Rev. Alexis Toth led the congregation to embrace Russophile pan-Slavism, leaving the Roman Catholic diocese to join the Russian Orthodox Church. When the congregation decided to build a larger church following a fire in 1904, it was an opportune moment to put the congregation's stance into bricks. Looking eastward, Cordella selected Dormition Cathedral in Omsk, Russia, as a model. Compared to the original, however, I would like to note that Cordella did not wholly adopt Russian architecture; rather, he combined an Orthodox-style footprint and silhouette with classical architectural features, blending the East Slavic and Roman traditions. Indeed, while Cordella worked across national styles, none of his completed projects could be classified fully as Russian revivalism. Before St. Mary's, Cordella had proposed a Russian revival church for another Rusyn congregation in 1897, but it remained unbuilt, gesturing toward the limits of Russophilia among the American Rusyn diaspora. Even at St. Mary's, tensions remained high over the congregation's increasing pivot towards Russia and a splinter group left to establish a new Greek Catholic parish (St. John the Baptist) nearby. Yet, when the splinter parish decided to build a rectory and larger church, they again commissioned Cordella, proving the architect's ability to successfully navigate community divides.Contrary to the assertion of the title, the beauty of Cordella's architecture was not “timeless” but rather rooted in the specific experiences of each migrant group and their socio-religious assimilation within American society. When it was expedient to build in national styles during key periods of identity formation, Cordella employed signifiers such as Cossack baroque domes for a Ukrainian congregation and Polish Renaissance spires for Silesian migrants. As clients progressively integrated both into Roman Catholicism and mainstream American society, Cordella adapted to demands for the prevailing architectural trends, designing his last three churches in the popular Lombard Romanesque style promulgated by architects such as Edward T. P. Graham in Boston.Victor Cordella offers a glimpse into the immense insight that further study of Polonia's visual culture stands to provide. The case of Cordella reveals that congregations instrumentalized architecture toward political and social goals and that comparative study of Slavic diasporic groups is paramount to appreciate broader conflicts with the Roman Catholic Church. Polish American churches represent the community's most significant architectural achievement, and yet they remain poorly understood in their historical and political context. As Polish churches continue to close, face demolition, and unsympathetic adaptation, community documentation efforts like this one will be increasingly critical to secure even the most basic information on this crucial and quickly vanishing aspect of Polonia. Without timely investment in our historic churches, we risk losing an essential primary source for Polish American history forever. Fortunately, as this volume recognizes, public history projects, including signage in churches, pamphlets, and lectures, can help to build a network of community support. Documentation and valorization of Polish American religious architects like Cordella is an essential first step toward a greater understanding and more secure future for these magnificent buildings.