Description

Founded in the last quarter of the 19th century, Eureka Springs is a small health resort in northwest Arkansas. Thorncrown Chapel stands on a stony sloping site beneath the maple and oak trees of the Ozark Mountains, some 3 kilometres from the hotels and resort guests. The dimensions of the building – 18.28 metres long, 7.31 metres wide, 14.63 metres high – suggest a hall and processional church. And indeed, a central aisle runs the length of the building, with rows of pews to the left and right; at the end a low podium with two pulpits but no altar.

The distinctive spatial qualities of the chapel, which is particularly popular for Christian marriage ceremonies, are not so much determined by its straightforward plan and section. Rather, the impression of a large but light roofed-over shelter – more precisely, an impression of transparency and perfect camouflage – derives from the omnipresence of its material and construction. In all directions, they allow one’s view to pass from forest to building and out again to the forest. In all directions, they blur the boundary between inside and outside. In all directions, nature and culture blend into a single intertwined scaffold of trunks, beams, twigs and bars that appear as if they could continue growing indefinitely, getting ever longer, wider, higher.

Almost all the materials used for the chapel come from the immediate surroundings of the Ozark Mountains. The painted grey pinewood of the walls and ceiling, the rough-hewn natural stone of the floor and parapet walls, the clear plates of glass between the columns: all were brought piece by piece on foot to the site, in order to impact as little as possible on the site. A lower row of larger and an upper row of smaller crosses, formed from the left and the right by rows of crossing bars, are attached to the columns of the side walls and support each side of the roof. Each cross consists of five parts: four beams which meet at a diamond-shaped steel crosspiece. This hollow element forms the crossing of each of cross.

Thorncrown Chapel, like the rest of the architect’s oeuvre, is influenced by the organic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. It shares a transparency reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright Junior’s Wayfarer’s Chapel in Palos Verde, California, built in 1951. Although farther removed, it also relates to the vertical linearity of the high space of Saint Chapelle in Paris, but without relegating the construction to the outside, as is typically the case for the High Gothic period. Finally, the Thorncrown Chapel refers to an American tradition of romantic transcendentalism, inspired by the likes of 19th century authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau who sought to find a new harmony between nature and culture.

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Originally published in: Rudolf Stegers, Sacred Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2008.