How many dollars does it take to change a light bulb? Well, if
the defunct bulb you’re replacing has been illuminating the Third
Church of Christ, Scientist in downtown Washington, you could be
looking at a bill of up to $8,000. That’s because unscrewing a
blown bulb in that concrete monument to impracticality is
tantamount to a construction project. According to one church
official, you’ve got to build scaffolding just to reach some of the
bulbs.
Why should anybody care about the Christian Scientists’
maintenance budget? Because their light bulbs, along with the rest
of their building, are at the center of a series of issues from
property rights to the separation of church and state that may be
coming soon to a courthouse near you.
If you haven’t yet had enough of Washington and religion this
campaign season, take a stroll a couple of blocks north from
Lafayette Square to 16th and I Streets, where one of the country’s
least
welcoming houses of worship sits in sight of the White
House.
If at first you don’t at first recognize the Third Church of
Christ, Scientist, as a church at all, don’t be embarrassed; most
people probably mistake it for a fortress intended to protect the
president’s house against a tank assault. It’s a largely windowless
octagonal tower made of raw, weathered concrete, and it’s
surrounded by a sterile “plaza” that seems to have been emptied to
keep the line of fire clear. The site inspires few people with a
sense of spirituality.
That includes its own congregation, which has always disliked
the building and dearly wants to be rid of its ugliness and its
crushing costs, but which has been prevented from replacing the
structure by Washington’s local preservation authorities.
Not that the church is either old or historic. It was designed
in 1971 in an effort by the Christian Science church to establish a
signature architectural presence in the heart of the capital. (The
office building surrounding the “plaza” was part of the project,
too.) The church tapped I.M. Pei’s firm for the design; Araldo
Cossutta, who was also responsible for the city’s unloved L’Enfant
Plaza, was the architect.
IN TERMS OF FULFILLING its function, the project misfired. It’s
uninviting to the community not only because it has the feel of a
bunker, but because its front door is, by design, hidden. The cold
plaza is generally avoided by the church’s neighbors.
The sanctuary seats 400, though the active congregation has
shrunk to some 50 worshippers. The building’s concrete exterior is
already deteriorating, and the maintenance costs are overwhelming.
Money that would be better spent on the church’s mission, members
say, is eaten up by the building itself.
So why has the city’s Historic Preservation Review Board
unanimously declared the Third Church of Christ, Scientist to be an
official D.C. landmark, preventing not only its demolition, but
even its unauthorized alteration? Because, it turns out, it is a
sterling example of the mid-century school of design known as
Brutalism.
Admirers of Brutalism include numerous architecture and design
specialists, and some of these persuaded the preservation board
that when it comes to raw concrete and the rejection of ornament,
the church “is in a league of its own” and must be preserved.
That action has drawn harsh criticism, especially from
Washington Post Metro columnist Marc Fisher, who called the building
“antagonistic to human spirituality” and an “example of a failed
and arrogant architectural experiment.”
Defenders of the building have dismissed Fisher and others like
him as design philistines, and regard the whole issue of the
building’s aggressive ugliness as an irrelevant matter of taste.
“Preservation isn’t always about whether we like and not like
buildings,” one of the board members observed before she voted to make the church a
landmark. “You can learn enough to have an appreciation for
it.”
WHETHER AN APPEAL to expertise in Brutalism trumps philistinism,
along with property rights, spirituality, and the church’s own
sense of its religious mission (and thus the First Amendment)
remains open both to debate and to legal action
Federal law protects churches from local preservationist
enthusiasms. Many congregations are cash poor, and are often housed
in old buildings that may be appealing and arguably historic, but
which they cannot afford to maintain. Forcing such congregations
into a preservationist box may, as one lawyer told the
Post, inhibit the congregation’s religious expression.
Whether that scenario describes the situation of this church will
probably be decided in court.
Meanwhile, Brutalism’s preservers remain vulnerable to the
ironists. That’s because the church is question is exactly the kind
of building that energized the city’s grassroots preservation
efforts in the first place. Of course, the activist
preservationists of decades ago were hardly seeking to save such
buildings as this church; many were seeking to prevent them from
being built at all (at least in an urban context).
In Washington, citizens disturbed by the rapid proliferation of
faceless buildings — and their often-deleterious effect on city
life — established a group called Don’t Tear It Down. That was in
the 1970s, in fact, just as the Third Church of Christ, Scientist
was settling onto its corner.
The appeal that Don’t Tear It Down used in its early days was
explicitly about prevention. Its handbills portrayed D.C.’s
redevelopment in terms of a visual choice, contrasting comfy, old
Victorian edifices with the warehouse-like buildings that were
replacing them. “This?” it asked over an image of an ornate old
facade, “or This?” The latter alternative was illustrated by a
building that looked like a giant tissue box. You might say that
Washington’s preservationists were once the very philistines that
they are now warning us against.
Of course, many of the buildings that earlier preservationists
embraced were deeply disliked when they were new.
Nineteenth-century Washingtonians, for example, were dismayed to
learn that the just-built Old Executive Office Building on
Pennsylvania Avenue was fireproof. It was inevitable that the kind
of architecture decried by preservationists of the 1970s would
eventually have its own passionate defenders, and that
preservationists would have to take their arguments into
account.
Nevertheless, the idea of preservation has made quite a journey
in hardly more than a generation. It’s not that it has risen to
power from the street; that happened long ago. What’s striking is
that preservation can now urge its constituency to contemplate the
street from a Brutalist perspective.
Charles Paul Freund is a Washington
writer.
