History
Following a tragic fire on Halloween night 1939, Rev. Burris Jenkins contacted architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design a new home for Community Christian Church. It was to be a “Church of the Future,” which to Wright meant a design that rejected with historical forms and ornament instead reflecting the interior function. The sinuous form was modeled on a non-rectangular grid and clad entirely in gunnite, a liquid concrete, on both the exterior and the interior. In lieu of a traditional steeple, Wright envisioned a Steeple of Light formed by four beams shooting from the roof into the sky. It would be fifty years before technology caught up with Wright’s vision and the Steeple was installed. Eighty-five years after Community Christian Church opened on January 4, 1942, it remains a unique and iconic architectural expression.
Architect
Frank Lloyd Wright is one of America’s best-known architects. Over the course of his seventy-year career, he prepared plans for more than 1000 buildings. These included residences, schools, offices, and religious buildings. He also designed fixtures and furnishings for many of his projects.
While many of his designs were never built, his portfolio of 400 completed projects documents a prolific career that was unmatched in creativity and innovation. Wright not only explored new uses for conventional building materials but also reconceived the organization of space sparking a new architecture for the twentieth century.
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In the first phase of his career, Wright brought us the Prairie Style, a uniquely American design expressed by long, low masses with wide overhanging eaves and open interior plans. This form harmonized with the landscape of his Midwestern home. His later work experimented with building forms and materials to create uniquely American designs.
Architecture
Opened in 1942, Community Christian Church illustrates Wright’s experiments with architecture. Hearkening back to his earliest designs, his design was inspired by the shape, topography, and natural materials of the site. The low horizontal forms and wide eaves responded to the irregular shape of the lot and were typical of the Prairie Style houses that Wright designed just after the turn of the century.
By the late 1930s, however, Wright was in a very different phase of his career and interested in experimenting with new building technologies. While he had long been fascinated with the geometric module as the organizing basis for his designs, this was the first time he employed a non-rectangular grid, opting instead for an equilateral parallelogram. He had also become interested in cantilevered forms, as exemplified by Fallingwater. Lastly the design allowed Wright to experiment with the fluid properties of concrete in the application of Gunnite as the cladding material on both the interior and exterior of the building. Wright had begun experimenting with all three of these features in the 1930s, but this was the first time they were applied to a non-residential building.
Religious Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright is one of America’s best-known architects. Over the course of his seventy-year career, he prepared plans for more than 1000 buildings. These included residences, schools, offices, and religious buildings. He also designed fixtures and furnishings for many of his projects.
While many of his designs were never built, his portfolio of 400 completed projects documents a prolific career that was unmatched in creativity and innovation. Wright not only explored new uses for conventional building materials but also reconceived the organization of space sparking a new architecture for the twentieth century.
​In the first phase of his career, Wright brought us the Prairie Style, a uniquely American design expressed by long, low masses with wide overhanging eaves and open interior plans. This form harmonized with the landscape of his Midwestern home. His later work experimented with building forms and materials to create uniquely American designs