A Wayfarer Vision: The Iconic Chapel Rises Again
Resurrection from the rubble The dismantled Glass Chapel awaits its resurrection, with help from the City of Rancho Palos Verdes, the U.S. Coast Guard, and its many supporters. by Mark McDermott Last July, Katie Horak oversaw a project unlike anything she had ever worked on in her professional life. She had devoted over 20 years to the preservation of historic buildings. Now, she and her team were taking apart, piece by painstaking piece, one of the most iconic buildings in the history of architecture. The Wayfarers Chapel had to go. It was a counterintuitive act of preservation. The Portuguese Bend Landslide Complex — heretofore considered a slow moving phenomenon, beginning in the 1950s and moving a few inches a year, at most — was accelerating disturbingly. The land under the chapel moved five inches in December 2023. Now it was moving six to nine inches a week. The building not only had to be disassembled, but it had to happen in a hurry, or the historic chapel might be damaged beyond any hope for restoration. “Of course, we wanted more time. We just didn’t have it….Things were actually being damaged as we were working, so we didn’t really have a minute to spare,” Horak said…
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