Midcentury Landmarks at St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict
A Minnesota photographer visits hallowed architectural grounds
Photos and text by Andrea Rugg | September 18, 2025
St. John’s Abbey Church with its celebrated banner bell tower. Photo by Andrea Rugg.
SPOTLIGHT
Before all the buzz around the film The Brutalist, I had often thought about visiting St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, to photograph the iconic 1961 abbey church and surrounding buildings designed by Marcel Breuer. Director Brady Corbet has said the film’s architect protagonist was partly inspired by Breuer.
This summer, I finally made the trip to one of the largest Benedictine abbeys in the Western Hemisphere, on the campus of St. John’s University. The first thing you see, even from a distance, is the massive bell banner. Sometimes likened to a sail, it rises above the trees as a striking monument that announces the abbey church behind it. The structure frames the entrance and echoes the church’s horizontal shape in vertical form. Rather than hiding the bells inside a tower, Breuer suspended them in an open void within the bold concrete form—a dramatic play of positive and negative space. It’s breathtaking.
Photos 1–6: The Abbey Church interior with its folded, board-formed-concrete sidewalls and ceiling, freestanding, cantilevered balcony, and expansive, honeycomb-patterned wall of stained glass. Photos 7–11: The “banner” bell tower from several angles. Photos 12 and 13: The interior of Alcuin Library with its concrete tree-like structural supports. Photos 14–18: St. Patrick Hall and St. Boniface Hall, two dormitories on the west side of campus. Photo 19: New Science Center, with the Peter Engel Science Center in the right foreground. All photos by Andrea Rugg.
The church’s steel-reinforced concrete ribs eliminate the need for supporting columns, making it one of Minnesota’s largest column-free buildings. In the sanctuary, the effect is cavernous, almost like standing inside a giant whale.
Each Breuer building on the grounds maintains a cohesive design language. The interior of Alcuin Library (1964) astonishes with its branching concrete “trees,” both functional and beautiful. The facades of the Breuer-designed dormitories (1967) on the western edge of the campus play with geometric voids and solids in inventive ways. While I lingered on photographing the abbey church, I also shot the New Science Center (1998), designed by CSNA Architects and Rafferty, Rafferty and Tollefson (now Architecture Advantage) to harmonize with the adjacent Peter Engel Science Center (1965).
Photos 1–5: The east- and north-facing exteriors of the College of St. Benedict’s Benedicta Arts Center (BAC). The original building is clad in brick while the 2006 expansion is wrapped in white gypsum stucco and double-anodized aluminum panels whose reddish bronze hues capture the darkest, reddest tones in the variegated brick. Photos 6–8: The BAC’s beloved Escher Auditorium backs up and opens up to a small proscenium theater in the addition so that the stage can be viewed from both sides. Photos 9 and 10: The tranquil garden courtyard is a popular spot in the late spring and early fall. All photos by Andrea Rugg.
A few miles away, at the College of St. Benedict, I enjoyed photographing the Benedicta Arts Center, a 1964 brick-clad gem with a modern wing completed in 2006, both designed by HGA. The theater in the original building, Escher Auditorium, has a soaring interior with two balconies and richly colored paneling. The art center’s new old and new architecture shape an inviting garden courtyard.
After photographing these architectural landmarks across the two campuses, I know I’ll return—three trips weren’t enough to capture it all.
Special thanks to College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University public relations director Michael Hemmesch and technical director Colin Jarrell for their assistance.
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