Landslides force dismantling of Frank Lloyd Wright Jr’s celebrated glass chapel: ‘It’s a crying shame’ | California

For 73 years it has reigned, unique and serene, on a high plateau overlooking the Pacific Ocean: the Wayfarers Chapel, Frank Lloyd Wright Jr.’s mid-century reinvention of what a church could be.

The photogenic, see-through sanctuary framed in a canopy of redwoods was loved long before it became Instagram famous. Jane Mansfield was married there Brian Wilson too. Last Christmas Eve, two weeks after the chapel was set for National Historic Landmark, it took three services to accommodate everyone who showed up to spend the holiday with the chapel’s regulars. No one knew it would be the last.

Wayfarers Chapel is being dismantled this month, an urgent attempt to save the structure’s irreplaceable redwood, steel and stone components after a devastating landslide. By dismantling it now, before it becomes too warped and broken to ever be reconfigured, chapel leaders hope to give it a second life someday on a stable footing. They still don’t have the money to rebuild, but they are doing what they can at this critical time: they are spending nearly half a million dollars on sorting.

The Palos Verdes Peninsula, the land mass where the chapel has been since its opening on Mother’s Day in 1951, has long been a geological anomaly. Delayed landslides have warped roads and cracked foundations there for decades. But at the beginning of February, historically atmospheric river storm system hit Los Angeles County, sending the peninsula’s landslides into gear. Torrential rainwater seeped into the many layers of brittle shale beneath the chapel, eventually pooling on an ancient deposit of volcanic ash called bentonite, which acts like malleable clay when wet. The rock foundation of the chapel began to slide on this liquefied bentonite toward the ocean at an astonishing new rate of about seven inches per week. No structure could withstand that kind of torque for long, certainly not one made mostly of glass. Shattering glass was a concern, along with a disheartening crack in the chapel’s cornerstone.

When the delicate disassembly is complete in a few more weeks, the chapel will sit in storage—perhaps for a few years—until a new home can be found. “Everybody was crying,” said Katie Horak, part of the conservation team Architectural Resource Group, the company in charge of the dismantling. “We’re in this business because we love buildings like this. This is the mourning of a holy place.

The Wayfarers’ emergency highlights the vulnerability of beloved cultural sites in an era of extreme weather. Scientists predicted that global warming would create more supercharged storms, but across disciplines they were shocked by the speed of these disasters has sped up. “It’s unfortunate that this happened,” said Mike Phipps, Rancho Palos Verdes city geologist. “This landslide has been observed for the better part of 40 years – I can map how it moves and it has never behaved like this. Rain is the culprit.

While news reports prioritize the immediate loss of life and homes after megastorms, conservationists are asking for more attention to another kind of loss: the destruction of heritage sites that represent some of humanity’s most powerful memories and traditions.

“It’s really hitting home now,” said Jim Lindbergh, senior policy director for the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation, which oversees places threatened by climate and administers local subsidies to protect them. “We’re finding that there really isn’t a place that isn’t vulnerable in one way or another.”

A chapel inspired – and threatened – by nature

Last Sunday morning, 30 Wayfarers regulars gathered in a borrowed sanctuary a few miles from their spiritual home. It was dark and cool inside—a traditional Episcopal church with thick brick walls and stained-glass windows. The congregation, accustomed to worshiping with 360-degree views of blue skies, circling hawks, redwoods, ferns and hummingbirds, left the back doors open for additional light. The Rev. Dr. David Brown, pastor of Wayfarers Chapel for the past 18 years, stepped forward and welcomed his “Wayfarers crowd.”

“What a week, what a year…” he began, spending a few minutes updating everyone on the deconstruction. Later, when he asked for individual prayer requests, an older parishioner asked him to pray for their chapel. He did so by asking God for “glimmers of hope on this journey.”

Wayfarers Chapel began a century ago as the dream of two women, Elizabeth Schellenberg and Narcissa Cox Vanderlip, both worshipers of a Christian denomination dedicated to the ideas of 18th-century scholar-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who believed that people could connect deeply with divine love and wisdom through nature. The concept inspired American renegades from Johnny Appleseed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called Swedenborg “a colossal soul.” In the 1920s, the ladies thought it was high time to build a national memorial to the theologian.

Vanderlip had money—she donated the 1.4-hectare (3.5-acre) site in Palos Verdes—and began looking for an architect. The project was interrupted by World War II, but in the late 1940s it landed in the lap of Lloyd Wright, the eldest son of “organic architecture” visionary Frank Lloyd Wright. Lloyd was trained as a landscape architect, so he was already oriented towards combining natural and structural elements. Before he began painting for the chapel commission, he took a road trip to see the famous redwoods of California. Looking up through their arched branches, he felt as if he were already in a sanctuary, and this gave him the idea to design a radical departure from traditional church buildings, which he felt felt like tombs.

“The concept was for life,” he told the leaders of the Wayfarers before he died in 1978. “Endless life, endless space, not the grave crypt. I think we achieved that.”

Since then, the popularity of the chapel has only grown. After the lifting of the Covid lockdown, the landmark attracted close to half a million visitors a year, even if they were not particularly religious.

“They would walk into that space and say, ‘I don’t know what I believe, but I feel something,'” Brown said. “The secret sauce was a real-time effect that worked on this deeper level—it was a place to pause, reflect, and tap into the transcendent.”

Such powerful memories and a local community that hasn’t given up on Wayfarers Chapel could help provide momentum to see it resurrected someday. For now, John Cruikshank, the mayor of Rancho Palos Verdes, says the city is working with chapel leaders to find a stable location nearby to store the chapel pieces — one possibility being a former Nike missile site about 3 miles away.

Chapel Leaders have stated they have “$5 million in savings from past wedding favors” to apply to a potential refund, and GoFundMe page they created in February raised nearly $75,000 It’s a start, but restoration architects estimate the cost of an exact reconstruction would be about $20 million, a daunting gap for a small congregation.

Brown said he is encouraged by the way Notre Dame has raised funds from around the world as it recovers from its 2019 structural fire. There are other examples of climate recovery and adaptation: the historic African Methodist Episcopal Church of St. James in Mayfield, Kentucky, was remodeled after a storm in 2021; a a long-cherished beacon on Martha’s Vineyard was lifted, railed and moved back from the edge of an ocean cliff; and most recently, the National Park Service received $20 million from the Inflation Reduction Act to resource protection from the effects of the climate within the park boundaries.

What we carry forward

The common thread in successful conservation efforts is the tenacious involvement of local people, determined to protect from the climate what they value.

Marcy Rockman, a former National Park Service climate change specialist who now helps heritage sites and local groups adapt to the dangers of a warming world, says we urgently need to talk about how to prioritize irreplaceable intangibles. such as local wisdom, which is deeply connected to specific places as well as material artefacts. She tells the story of visiting fellow conservationists in Scotland trying to help a coastal community protect itself from rising sea levels. Their blunt approach stayed with her: “They said, ‘We can’t hold back the sea. We can’t keep things as they are. But we can help you move forward with some of the highlights of this place. What would you like it to be?’

It’s a perspective that resonates with architect Liz McLean, another member of the ARG team working on Wayfarers. On one of his first trips to the chapel, she received a surprising message from her college roommate, whose father had died unexpectedly. McLean stopped, still in shock and grieving for her friend. She gathered herself and walked over to the glass shrine.

“Her father was in the Navy and here I am at a place called Wayfarers Chapel on the oceanfront. Those things felt somehow connected,” she recalls. “And I continue to feel moments like that when I’m on the site. I think it is a spiritual place that is meant for all people.

She is currently working with contractors on the best way to take care of the chapel’s broken cornerstone, how to cut it, clamp it tightly so the crack is contained, and store it for repair someday. It’s a practical matter, but she knows how much depends on clarifying the details at this point in the story.

“We can do everything we can to keep the tangible,” McLean said. “And then try to recreate the conditions for those intangible moments sometime in the future.”