A corner of a foreign field

The story of the Italian Chapel in Orkney has been told many times, and I have nothing to add to it except my own response to being there. For those unfamiliar with it, it is two corrugated iron Nissen huts placed end to end, and converted into a Catholic chapel by Italian prisoners of war. They arrived in Orkney in 1942, brought there to build four barriers between the islands in order to protect British warships moored in Scapa Flow from German submarines. Under the Geneva Conventions, prisoners of war are not allowed to aid the war effort, so their work was justified by building roads on the barriers, to make it easier for the civilian population to move between islands. The Italians cast thousands of huge concrete blocks which were dropped into the sea to form the barriers.

The hundreds of Italians living in Camp 60 on the tiny island of Lamb Holm were keen to improve their barren environment and, when not casting concrete, laid paths in the camp and planted flowerbeds. The British commandant, who got on well with his prisoners, agreed to give them a building they could use as a chapel. Led by Domenico Chiocchetti, who in civilian life was a church painter and craftsman, a gang of prisoners scrounged or recycled material, lined the huts with plasterboard, and painted an elaborate interior entirely in trompe l’oeil. At the entrance, they built an ornamented Italianate neo-classical portico from concrete (there was plenty available). After the prisoners returned home in 1945, the rest of Camp 60 was flattened, but the chapel was spared. A preservation committee of Orcadians was formed in 1958 to maintain it. Chiocchetti returned in 1960, and again in 1964, to carry out restoration work on the interior.

Before I visited Orkney last year, I regarded the Italian Chapel as an interesting phenomenon, but merely kitsch of no great importance. But I found being there to be a moving experience. Not directly because of the architecture, but because of its social history, the story of men captured in North Africa, transported thousands of miles to the cold north, put to hard labour, yet motivated to improve their own lives, and in particular to construct a bit of Italy on a small uninhabited island off the north coast of Scotland. At the same time, I was moved that Orcadians should accept and cherish this foreign import surrealistically inserted into their landscape. The Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown wrote ‘We who are brought up in the Calvinistic faith, a faith as austere, bracing and cold as the winds that trouble Lamb Holm from year’s end to year’s end, can hardly grasp the fierce nostalgic endeavour that raised this piece of Italy, of Catholicism, out of the clay and the stones.  The Italians who fought weakly and without hope on the battlefield because they lacked faith in the ridiculous strutting little Duce have wrought strongly here.

More directly related to urban design is the thought that the Italian Chapel is an almost ludicrously literal example of the Decorated Shed, Robert Venturi’s antithesis to the attempted purism of the Modern Movement in architecture, which he illustrated in the book Learning from Las Vegas (reviewed on p.12). He defined the Decorated Shed as being ‘Where systems of space and structure are directly at the service of programme, and ornament is applied independently of them’. Inherent in the idea of the utilitarian shed with the fancy front added to it, as shown in Venturi’s drawing, is the distinction between front and back, now a fundamental principle of urban design, but something the 20th century Modern Movement architects tried hard to eliminate. To Chiocchetti and his colleagues, the plain, inexpressive box of a church with an elaborate façade facing the street, was a familiar element in the towns they had grown up in. It’s ironic of course that, as in so many other post-war urban settlements, the built context of the Italian Chapel was demolished, and it survives as an exotic freestanding object in a windswept landscape, its distinction between front and back no longer making much sense.