The scope exploded. Cram produced a new set of designs that would involve tearing up much of what had already been built. The budget also exploded. Tapping on Franklin Roosevelt, the cathedral launched a new funding campaign featuring Cram’s designs, and by 1923 they had raised another $6 million ($90 million in 2019’s dollars). Heins & LaFarge had planned an eclectic church: romanesque on the inside, gothic on the outside, and byzantine at the crossing. Cram unapologetically shifted the design towards the gothic: pointed arches, no more paintings and mosaics, and a much higher nave. In 1941, just a week after said nave was finally completed, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. A year later Cram died. Work stopped for thirty years.

The Accretive Building

Cathedrals are distinct from typical megaprojects in a very important way: an unfinished Cathedral is by no means a failure.

As Dr. Atif Ansar, a professor in major project management at Oxford, frames it, most infrastructure projects (the dams and bridges that are focus of Ansar’s research) are binary. They are done, or not; a 99% complete bridge is not very useful. Cathedrals, one the other hand, are not binary. The aspiration may be much larger, but in essence, a single room could act as a cathedral. Salisbury cathedral took a full century to build, but services commenced almost immediately in a temporary wooden chapel. At St. John the Divine, the congregation used the crypt for the first services in 1899, just seven years after construction commenced. Cathedrals, Ansar posits, are accretive – they gain value as they are built, “like a beehive.” Accretive buildings pose a challenge for the iron triangle, because the scope is, by nature, open-ended; the project will never be complete.

Accretive projects are everywhere: Museums, universities, military bases – even neighborhoods and cities. Key to all accretive projects is that they house an institution, and key to all successful institutions is mission. Whereas scope is a detailed sense of both the destination and the journey, a mission must be flexible and adjust to maximum uncertainty across time. In the same way, an institution and a building are often an odd pair, because whereas the building is fixed and concrete, finished or unfinished, an institution evolves and its work is never finished.

Accretive buildings accrete because institutions constantly expand and add to their buildings, but the iron triangle does not help to understand this growth. Yes, the scope of an accretive building grows, and as it grows, so too do the budget and the schedule – but for institutions, something that evolves, lasts, and commands an ever-larger budget is often deemed a success, not a project gone amok.

The drawn-out schedules of cathedrals could then be less about their failure as construction projects than their durability as institutions. That may indeed be why a Cathedral is often invoked, metaphorically, by institution builders. For example, Gay Talese wrote that the only child of New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs, Iphigene Sulzberger, loved to tell the story of a medieval traveler who encounters three stonecutters at work. The traveler asks them what they are doing. The first replies, "I am cutting stone." The second, "I am making a cornerstone." And when the same question is to put to the third? "I am building a cathedral." Iphigene would bring the point back to The New York Times: its staff had not signed on for any particular task, but instead to be part of a mission. They were not there to cut stone, they were there to build a cathedral.

The Spatial Triad

Elena Giovannoni and Paolo Quattrone tackle this relationship between buildings and institutions in a paper about another notoriously incomplete cathedral, the one in Siena.

Giovannoni and Quattrone looked at the minutes for 127 meetings of the Siena General Council between 1259 and 1357 as it discussed plans for their city’s cathedral. Over the course of the century, the council navigated among many different constituencies, including one that wanted to put the main entrance in the basement (and dig out the entire floor to that level). At its most extreme point, in 1339, its members embraced a plan that would build a new nave perpendicular to the existing cathedral, turning the existing structure into the new building’s transept, making this cathedral the largest in the world. Construction was halted nine years later; only one wall of the unfinished expansion still stands, sheltering a parking lot.

Looking through the minutes, Giovannoni and Quattrone contend that the persistent state of physical incompletion of Siena’s cathedral allowed for the organization to accommodate the competing agendas of its stakeholders. 700 years later, the organization in charge of the cathedral’s construction, the Opera, is still at work. The uncertainty of the future – a shifting scope – can, in fact, be a management tool. For St. John the DIvine, the Diocesan archivist Wayne Kempton put it plainly: “In a way it’s nice the cathedral is not finished, because it gives you all sorts of options.”

Instead of the iron triangle, Giovannoni and Quattrone use French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s ‘spatial triad.’ Lefebvre posits three different kinds of space: conceived, perceived, and lived. Conceived space is space as a means of political control, as the architects and planners would have it. Perceived space is what actually is. Lived space is what space could be, when re-appropriated by those who use it. Lived space is, as architecture critic Kate Wagner puts it, the space of “projections, dreams, utopias, experience.”

Though it has three parts, the spatial triad is really more of a simple tug of war between conceived and lived, with the building in between. That is to say, a building is never simply a building – it is a constant battlefield between what it should be and what it could be, played out across what it is.

The construction of St. John the Divine, then, may be better understood not as a struggle to manage scope, but a quest to navigate between these forces.

One of the first parts of St. John the Divine to be built was the group of seven “Chapels of Tongues” radiating out from the choir, each dedicated to a major group of immigrants. By 1928, a fundraising pamphlet showed that the cathedral’s understanding of its donor-stakeholders had evolved, organizing them rather militaristically into ‘divisions.’ In the nave, for instance, each bay featured a stained glass window to be funded by a division: The sports division, the press division, and yes, the military and naval division.