Montclair Presbyterian Church – photo courtesy of David Wakely.My father worked at DMJM for twenty years, and, after missile silos, auto dealerships, post offices, and condominiums, he ultimately worked on a church. Maybe that’s where it began. As a kid, I went to construction sites and watched Los Angeles grow up. I do recall the church project as one that made him happy.
My mother was a true Southern California seeker. She was very social, made friends with movie stars, and carted me to a number of churches. We finally settled on Westwood Hills Christian Church in the shadow of UCLA, in part I think because General Omar Bradley’s family attended. In high school, I followed the girls and guitars to a Christian group called Young Life. What was memorable was their summer camp, 100 miles north of Vancouver at the mouth of the Princess Louisa Inlet—a stunningly transformed resort at the mouth of the fjord bordered by a narrow, tidal river. In the morning, you would look up from your bowl of Cheerios to see grizzly bears whack salmon out of the water. Timber architecture, god, girls, guitars, and grizzlies—it was an amazing experience of the power of place.
While few architects I have met are overtly religious, all understand that a building—perhaps more accurately, a space—can have great spiritual power. Don Olsen, noted architect and professor at Cal, told a class I was in once about an epiphany he experienced in the Hagia Sophia. For him, it was a completely individual awakening having to do with scale and his place in that volume and an overwhelming sense of infinity suggested by the expansiveness beyond the low dangling lamps. Yet his experience was related to the place, and in a way that others could share in, as well.
Left, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Belvedere, photo by David Wakely; right, St. Matthew Lutheran Church, Walnut Creek, photo by Mark Luthringer.Religious institutions don’t typically select an architect because of his or her faith. They want a design that meets a budget, and they want somebody with whom they can endure a long project, somebody who can bring many parties to the table and keep them engaged. They understand their faith but are less clear on how to reflect that in physical terms, involve donors, staff, committees, and congregants and keep them interested, not to mention how to get a permit.
Sometimes the committees are very secular: a meeting begins with coffee, a status report, and, unless someone is angry or frustrated, nothing spiritual is mentioned at all. Sometimes they are full of faith, opening with a round of prayer that can seem almost competitive. My favorite clients mix business with faith and intellectual rigor comfortably and naturally. At the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, just about everybody involved was an ordained Jesuit priest. Being an educated bunch, at any point in a meeting they might diverge into an evidently humorous round of Latin quotations that could go above a door—relating simultaneously to the story of Christ, the ridiculous cost of the project, and their frustration with the building department. Design mattered to them, and they were acutely aware of the history on which they can draw. Their architecture connects strongly to their theology and their mission. Working with them felt a lot like going to a college where there was a room full of professors and I was the only student.
Most architects end up specializing in particular building types by chance. In my case, it fortunately began at William Turnbull’s office, with Saint Andrew Presbyterian Church in Sonoma. It was a rural area, so Bill and Mary Griffin designed the building to recall the local barns yet clearly be a church—a marker of faith. The gabled building was simple, elegant, and economical—sort of wine country Gothic.
Then a master plan project for the Episcopal Church of Saint Mary the Virgin in San Francisco came into the office, and I was project manager. They had three buildings, including a church building dating back to the 1890s and a parish hall next door that was in bad shape. You had to walk through all their Sunday school rooms to get anywhere, and none of the floors of the buildings lined up with each other. After I was “graduated” from Turnbull’s practice (it was a bad year), I started a firm with Tomas Frank, and we finished the project together with the mother office. We turned the parish hall upside down by putting the meeting room upstairs under a big skylight, and renovated the sanctuary minimally—new floor, lighting. At that point, we had completed two or three churches and were therefore experts.
Faith can find a home in surprising places. We helped a Unitarian congregation assess several possible sites in and around Santa Rosa. “Site shopping” was fun in the rolling hills of Sonoma County, where it was easy to imagine an idealized rural sanctuary. Until they added in the cost of parking and access and transport. They settled on a vacant 1980s multiplex downtown, which was perfect. It was a sustainable reuse of a structure that seemed destined for them. Committee members marveled at the serendipity that, with very little change, the “United Artists” sign could transform into “Unitarian Universalist.” The building was also inexpensive—the market for used multiplexes was not big. And a 2,000-space city-owned parking structure ten feet away was free on Sundays. The closeness of the parking was a sign from … someone.
Like many of our projects, Montclair Presbyterian Church started out as a seismic rehabilitation— and an opportunity to remedy forty years of deferred maintenance. The sanctuary, a fragile and dated A-frame building, had a wood ceiling and a brick wall behind the pulpit that folks really didn’t like (many could tell you the exact number of bricks in that wall). They were an active congregation and wanted something reflecting their sense of dynamism. Plus, it was The Church That Ate Sound, and they had a spectacular music program. We replaced the old plywood arches with smaller pieces of steel and covered up the wood decking with articulated sheetrock, which brightened the space visually and acoustically.
You never know what you’ll learn from a church project. A member of the Montclair building committee came to our office one day unannounced and very agitated and asked, “How can we talk about church and not talk about God? Sometimes I think even our ministers are afraid of God.” He was a landscape contractor by trade but had a degree in divinity and had clearly been thinking about this a great deal before coming over to finally let it all out. He started describing how the diagram of a church represents our spiritual progress through life. The narthex is birth, the dark tunnel through which we emerge into the community. Then we’re together in the sanctuary—human and flawed, but together as the body, and we move towards the light—the sun, literally enlightenment, at the chancel. That was the clearest story about church design that I’d ever heard.
While churches typically teach us to love our neighbor, their neighbors don’t always love them. The main reasons are parking and noisy kids. But because you can’t eliminate either of these, cranky neighbors sometimes focus on design. So context is no longer a formal argument, but a wedge issue.
In Walnut Creek, we were asked by Saint Matthew Lutheran Church to come in after an unhappy first attempt to create a youth center with GE modulars. We saw the neighbors coming with pitchforks and torches, so we looked for ways to tie the church explicity to its suburban neighborhood. Instead of extending an institutional-scale building, we proposed several smaller blocks, each of which recalled the design and scale of the Eichlers nearby—and we enclosed those noisy kids. It was a simple, clear gesture that showed that the church was serious (this time), about being sensitive to its neighbors. The pastoral leadership was strong—a surfing senior pastor (his automobile license plate read “SurfRev”), and former high-tech executive pastor (license plate “TechRev”) wanted a process that involved their immediate community as well as the larger community around them. After construction was over, a few neighbors even came over to say how well it turned out. It’s a truism, but many voices really make a project stronger.
We like to think of ourselves as modernists in the Bay Area tradition. We like strong lines, formal rigor, glass, the warmth and craft of wood. But sometimes a building asks for something different. That’s happened a few times recently, and it’s been an education. In Ross, we are working on a new parish hall for St. Anselm’s Church. They have a 1908 sanctuary that is an attractive and richly trimmed Tudoresque pile. Like good Bay Area modernists, we went into the first presentation with something respectful in massing but with a decidedly Sonoma coast bent. But in the middle of the meeting, we paused and said, “Why fight it? What if we really run with that 1908 spirit of joyful, historicist enthusiasm?”
You could feel the whole committee relax, and we embraced mannered half-timber, eclectic in the spirit of Ernest Coxhead. Everything in Ross is a revival of one kind or another. We had a corner folly window that drew some attention. In one meeting, a design review commission member—another architect—looked at us knowingly before the vote to approve, and shared that of course the windows are eyes into the soul of the building. Our building committee chair, a very senior executive at a very big bank, turned to me with an incredulous look and asked, “Is this normal?”
Dharma Publishing, before and after, photos by Goring & Straja Architects.In downtown Berkeley, my partner Tom Beil recently transformed a former auto shop nestled between two historic Ratcliff buildings into a Buddhist printing plant—from the 18th century. That got some raised eyebrows, too, but it relates to what is going on inside. You go to school convinced you are going to follow the righteous path of modernism, and one day you find yourself presenting an eggplant purple and saffron orange Tibetan façade remodel to the Landmarks Commission.
Communities of faith come together for different reasons. One might be trying to quiet the passions of the heart and the imagination. Another connects to a tradition that makes sense of history and family and life and death, giving real structure to lives. Another is intellectually engaged, drawing a line of reasoning that goes back through generations of scholars and lines of academic inquiry and philosophy. Yet another might focus on fellowship, creating closeness and connectedness and community through joint commitment/faith/duty. All of these afford avenues to begin designing and thinking about a space.
We ended up designing churches partly by chance. But I think one of the reasons it works is that, although I’m an irreverent person by nature, I admire and am respectful of people and peoples of faith. And from designing a few, we’ve come to understand how facilities serve and reflect the mission of a faith community. I think each group we work with is also comforted to hear from us that they aren’t as lost at sea in the process as they think they are. We can tell them, “Look, you’re right in there with all the others. This project will work. We’ve seen it happen again and again. And praying can only help.”
Author Jim Goring, AIA, is still a practicing architect in the San Francisco Bay area. With partners Tom Beil and Andre Straja, he is a principal at Goring & Straja Architects, based in San Francisco and Milan.
Originally published 4th quarter 2010, in arcCA 10.4, “Faith & Loss.”
