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. 

The chapel didn’t close to the public until February of last year, in part because the stark reality of the situation had not truly sunk in. 

Jim Lawrence understood earlier than many that the chapel would have to come down. Lawrence is the president of the Swedenborgian Church of North America, the quietly influential denomination founded during the Age of Enlightenment that built the chapel in the late 1940s. Lawrence, a polymath whose chief area of study is theology, is also an architectural historian. He’d known this day was coming. The church’s small but devoted congregation had trouble accepting it. 

“Before the slide got too dramatic, a lot of the local attendees, the people there on the ground, including some of the staff, were the last converts to ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’” Lawrence said. “Some of us were pretty fast to say there’s no way we can feel safe here again. This is not exactly a gothic cathedral with 10-foot walls. If there is one drawback to building with glass, landslides are it.”  

It seems obvious to say a glass chapel could not survive a landslide, but then again, the entire history of the Wayfarers Chapel was founded on an audacity bordering on the outright holy. According to Lawrence, architect Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., after taking the commission, did not signal just how unusual his design would be through any notes or public remarks. It wasn’t until the redwood beams, expansive glass, and stone bell tower rose atop the bluff that anyone understood that with the Wayfarers Chapel a new kind of architecture had arrived. 

“He just simply came up with this radical, transparent glass chapel,” Lawrence said. “….The vision that Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. had for using crystalline architecture to such a radical extent — nothing ever before had been done like that.” 

Likewise, nothing like the Wayfarers Chapel had ever been taken apart. Preservation now meant deconstruction, with the vague hope that the chapel could one day be reassembled. Horak and her firm, the Architectural Resources Group, had previously done documentary work on  the building, first a decade ago when they were commissioned to produce a plan for the future rehabilitation of the structure. More recently, ARG did the extensive documentation needed to have the Wayfarers Chapel declared a National Historic Landmark, which it was officially designated in December 2023. It was because of this work that Horak reached out to the Wayfarers community when she heard that the chapel was in imminent danger. 

“Do you need some help?” she asked. 

And that is how Horak and her team found themselves at the chapel, helping contractors disassemble old growth redwood beams and panes of glass under the looming deadline of an accelerating landslide.

“Because we had done all that work before, we had a huge research file on the building,” she said. “We knew the building forward and backward, so it enabled us to act really quickly and not have to familiarize ourselves with the building. We had all that already in our toolbox.” 

A strange mix of feelings pervaded the deconstruction site. 

One was reverence. Horak and her team poured over the drawings Lloyd Wright had made and the historic photos of the chapel’s construction. Taking apart the building piece by piece yields a way inside the vision of its creator. 

“Wayfarers Chapel,” Horak later wrote on the ARG website, “is Wright’s masterpiece.” 

Another was love. The disassembly attracted media attention from around the world. Thousands of people had a direct connection with the chapel, either through wedding or simply wayfaring, which was the animating intention when the chapel was built, as a place to commune the natural forces of the world, a brief spiritual respite from the buzzing world of the road below. 

“People have such a connection to Wayfarers Chapel for so many different reasons,” Horak said. “We obviously came to it because we love historic architecture, which is what drew us to this field to begin with. But not a day went by when we were working on the chapel when someone I know, a client or a friend or an acquaintance, didn’t reach out to me. Like my dentist, who heard me on the radio. He said, ‘Oh my gosh, I was married there. That building means everything to me.’  

“That building means so much to so many people. So we kind of carried that with us, just like, ‘We have to save this place.’” 

On the day the last piece of Wayfarers Chapel was taken down, labeled, and sent to storage, another set of complicated feelings emerged, a sense of a mission accomplished tinged with sadness, loss, and uncertainty. 

“Once the last structural bent came down, there was this tremendous release of emotion,” Horak said. “Because we could finally take a breath, like, ‘Okay, we got it all down.’ And we all just kind of sat there stunned. There were definitely tears. It was really an emotional thing for us.” 

The purpose of disassembling the chapel was to preserve it so that it could one day be reconstructed at another site. But it wasn’t like the chapel could go just anywhere. The vision, shared by the Swedenborgian church and Lloyd Wright, was of a sanctuary that dissolved the barrier between those who came to worship at the chapel and the wild beauty of the bluff on which it sat. 

The City of Rancho Palos Verdes had worked closely with church leaders throughout the process of disassembly, and promised to help find a new site. But RPV has only seven miles of coast, most of which is fully built out. The other challenge was that the price tag for reconstruction was $25 million to $30 million. The Swedenborgian church, meanwhile, was fielding offers from across the nation, many which offered beautiful new sites for the Wayfarers Chapel, and several which also offered to pay the full cost of reconstruction. 

Robert Carr, a Rancho Palos Verdes native who became a highly influential software developer in the Bay Area after going to school at Stanford, had come into the Swedenborgian fold after getting married at the denomination’s church in San Francisco — which is also a National Historic Landmark and features what many believe to be the largest indoor fireplace in the region. When he learned of the Wayfarers Chapel’s crisis, he offered to step in to help. Longtime executive director Dan Burchett retired after the chapel was disassembled, and Carr stepped in as administrative director. The primary task he focused on was finding a new home for the chapel. 

“Using satellite maps, and being a native of Palos Verdes, I found every piece of empty land on the Peninsula that might be possible,” Carr said. 

Burchett, before he retired last year, expressed something more than mere hope that a site would be quickly found. He believed the entire process of dismantling the chapel offered spiritual lessons, as would its eventual revival, which he regarded as almost a certainty. 

“It’s going to be a miracle as it happens,” Burchett said. “It will be like the phoenix rising from the ashes. It is very much a spiritual reality that we are looking at, even though most news coverage has to do with the tragic loss of an iconic Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. structure, a national historic landmark that celebrates nature and spirituality coming together in one place.” 

Reverend David Brown, the lead chapel minister at Wayfarers Chapel, expressed this belief even more succinctly.   

“There’s always a crucifixion before resurrection, right?” he said. 

One day last summer RPV City Manager Ara Mihranian reached out to Carr. 

“Robert,” he said, “to my mind, perhaps the ideal site might be the site that we call Battery Barnes.” 

Carr was very familiar with it. He’d looked at it on satellite maps and had even walked the grounds. Battery Barnes is a 3.9 acre site that was used by the U.S. Army to house an artillery battery intended to cover the northern entrance to the Catalina Channel during WWII. It was named after Col. Harry C. Barnes, who led the 30th Artillery Brigade in a key offensive in France during WWI. The site has been largely unused for over a half-century, and is owned by the United States Coast Guard. It sits between RPV’s Ken Dyda Civic Center, to the east, and the Point Vicente Lighthouse, to the west. In contemplating its long-term plan to upgrade the Civic Center —  which is also a former military installation, part of the Cold War era Nike missile launch site — City leaders had reached out to USCG in hopes of obtaining a land transfer for both Battery Barnes and the Point Vicente Lighthouse, which is unmanned but still serves navigational functions. 

Rancho Palos Verdes Mayor David Bradley said the vision is to link the lighthouse and the chapel. 

“We’ve been talking to the Coast Guard for probably five years about the long term solution for both of those properties,” said RPV Mayor David Bradley. “Battery Barnes, which is completely encircled by city property, has been something that we’ve been looking to get turned over to the City to be able to incorporate it into the rest of the Civic Center. When Wayfarers Chapel had to be disassembled, we started thinking, ‘Wow, a National Historic site rebuilding on a piece of federal property that could be co-used, or repurposed, to house it.’ And just absolutely an iconic piece of property that would be overlooking the lighthouse, bringing both those iconic pieces of architecture, the lighthouse and the chapel, together into kind of a one site picture. It’s so exciting.” 

Both the City and the Wayfarers Chapel leadership agreed that they’d found the ideal future home for the chapel. 

“It quickly emerged as the best possible site, for many reasons,” Carr said. “One of the most important being that it allows us to duplicate almost identically, and in some ways, maybe even better, the topography of the original site.” 

One of the goals, Carr said, has been to preserve the chapel’s National Historic Landmark status. 

“One of the criteria for preserving that status is to try and not only preserve the building, but to reassemble it in a location that has many similar attributes,” he said. “So Battery Barnes gives us a steep east-west hillside, almost a bluff, where we can place the chapel on an east-west orientation,  right at the eyebrow of that hill, at the very edge or top of the hill. And that’s identical to the situation that we had at the heritage site.” 

The site also would preserve the intrinsic power of the original site, with its majestic perch above the Pacific Ocean. This is in keeping both with retaining landmark status and the spiritual purpose of the Wayfarers Chapel. 

“The Palos Verdes coastline is a truly spectacular way to experience the beauty of the created world, the beauty of the natural world —  to see how the Earth has been shaped by the ocean over the eons, to see how the waves are crashing on the rocky promontories,” Carr said. “It’s all part of the expansive feeling you have when you’re at the chapel, this opportunity to reflect on humanity’s place in nature, and each of our own places in nature, in the created world, and what does that mean to each of us?” 

Mihranian said the Battery Barnes site was first identified by the Civic Center Advisory Committee as part of a vision to make a new civic center that could serve as a broader locus for community gatherings. Ideas that had been discussed as part of that vision included an amphitheater and a cafe. And while such amenities are still part of the City’s long-term hopes, the current costs of maintaining infrastructure —  most essentially, PV Drive South — in the face of an ongoing landslide means that improvements to the Civic Center itself won’t happen anytime soon. Bringing Wayfarers Chapel to the site, however, would not cost the City anything, and would achieve the goal of creating a more broadly serving community center. 

“There’s the opportunity for significant synergies between Wayfarers Chapel and the RPV City Hall complex,” Carr said. “They are very anxious to improve the complex, to redevelop it. They have a draft Master Plan that’s very exciting, and it was already calling for a private partner to operate some facilities. But they didn’t know who that private partner would be, and Wayfarers Chapel, we’re excited to play that role, being part of the larger complex where we would help to create critical mass in terms of reasons that compel somebody to come visit that City Hall hilltop. Once you get there, it is spectacular. But right now, there’s not that much to do up there.” 

“Wayfarers Chapel, during our 75 years at the heritage site, for all practical purposes we were operating something you might almost consider as a public park,” Carr said. “You know, free parking, beautiful viewpoints in the middle of beautiful landscaping, water fountains, bathrooms and a National Historic Landmark glass chapel that is stunning to see and most people have never experienced anything like it. We provided a visitor center where you could stop in and ask questions. And a lot of times the questions were kind of like, ‘How do I get to Terranea?’ ‘How do I get to Marineland?’” 

Other synergies include shared parking that Wayfarers could provide the City, and integration with the trail system operated by the Palos Verdes Land Conservancy. But the larger opportunity that both he and the Wayfarers Chapel board of directors are enthused about is that the prospective new site would give them more ways to serve the community. 

“One idea is that we could design and develop our portions of the site so that school groups could benefit from doing trips and spend a couple hours at the Battery Barnes site, where there might be a variety of activities, including a redevelopment of the actual concrete bunkers to include some museum-like displays and exhibits on important topics that are little understood or remembered, like the history of military fortifications in the Palos Verdes coastal area, or the history of the Japanese farmers that figured so prominently in that area, both before and to some degree after World War II,” Carr said. “We could have exhibits on those topics. And the fact that the Battery Barnes is surrounded on virtually all sides by permanent nature preserve land means that the we can integrate the site with the trail system and could potentially work with the Land Conservancy to develop good interpretation displays as part of our visitor center to help encourage people to both understand the nature preserve land, value it, and and use it.”  

Alas, there is a catch, one very significant if. 

“We don’t own the property,”  Mihranian said. “It’s federal land. The City owns everything around it. What complicates this whole process is the Coast Guard owns the properties. As a federal agency, they’ve got to go through the divestiture process in order for it to be even considered as surplus property. And then the City has to be identified as eligible for an acquisition transaction for it to be transferred over to the City, for us then to enter into some sort of agreement for Wayfarers to be located there. There are a lot of boxes that need to be checked.” 

That federal process can take many years. But Bradley said the City has identified a possible way to fast track the process. Last year, Congresswoman Nanette Barragan helped solve a somewhat similar problem, writing language into the National Defense Authorization Act that enabled a land transfer from the U.S. Navy to the City of Lomita, saving Little League fields that due to a new Navy policy would have no longer been financially feasible. The City of RPV has asked Congressman Ted Lieu to write similar language into the defense authorization this year, which would enable the relatively quick transfer of the Battery Barnes site. 

Bradley is convinced this will work. He believes the Wayfarers Chapel will rise again sooner rather than later. 

“We need to get the Coast Guard property turned over,” he said. “I think that is a 12 to 18 month process. And then the Wayfarers Chapel board is going to need to raise the funds to construct, so I would say an accelerated timeline would be 24 to 36 months before we would really see it rise from the rubble. I don’t want to be overly optimistic, but if things come together, that is very doable.” 

“I keep saying, this is the phoenix rising out of the rubble — not the ashes, but the rubble,” Bradley said. “It is just so exciting to see a path forward.” 

Lawrence, the Swedenborgian president, has for the last year been referring to the Wayfarers Chapel as “the Phoenix Church.” Both he and Carr believe that the new site will actually be better than the original Wayfarers site. Beyond the broader community service it could offer, Carr also notes that this part of the coast offers a wilder and in a sense more true sense of nature relative to the more traditionally man-made landscaping at the former site, which included English Ivy, a manicured lawn, and mostly non-native trees and plants. 

“The trees became very beautiful but were not necessarily native. There wasn’t much of a chance to get out and experience true nature,” Carr said, marvelling that by contrast perhaps no single view in Los Angeles County offers a glimpse at more native species than at Battery Barnes. “There will be much more opportunity to experience nature that is true to the area.” 

Lawrence keeps thinking of a quote from John F. Kennedy: “‘Crisis’ is composed of two characters in Chinese: one for danger and the other for opportunity.” 

Lawrence has also been thinking about an exchange between Rev. Joseph Worcester and the architect A. Page Brown that occurred sometime around the end of the 19th century. Worcester was the founder and first pastor of the Swedenborgian church in San Francisco, and though he was a Harvard educated theologian, he was also influential in his architectural beliefs, particularly among the nascent Arts and Crafts movement that would indirectly influence Lloyd Wright. Worcester believed architecture could help harmonize man with nature. The San Francisco church, for example, included a roof that left its timber exposed, and bark left on many of the supporting beams. 

“Joseph Worcester was trying to push all of these things, like the bark left on, and all kinds of ways to do things for this aesthetic effect,” Lawrence said. “And Brown, at one point, expostulated, ‘But this is not architecture!’ And then Worcester makes his famous reply, ‘I care nothing for the canons of architecture. The building must teach its lessons.’” 

The Wayfarers Chapel, both in its 75 year existence at its former home, and now in its journey through the underworld and hopefully to the former artillery bunker site, teaches lessons. 

“The whole idea of helping finish an evolution of a nuclear Cold War installation and a World War II gun emplacement, helping evolve that into very much of a swords-into-plowshares kind of story, of now becoming a place of beauty and self-reflection, celebrating the rites of life, such as weddings, baptisms, memorial services, serving school children, serving the RPV community by enlivening the City Hall complex — that’s very, very meaningful to me,” Carr said. 

Lawrence’s thoughts on the spiritual lessons of the Wayfarers Chapel are too extensive to be easily summarized, but in keeping with Swedenborgian thought, he sees what has occurred as an expression of nature. 

“Nature is violent,” he said. “Nature has all kinds of upheavals, and life down here on planet Earth is not an easy go. It’s not an easy go for any species, and there’s all kinds of mismatches and powers between the species that live on Earth, including Homo sapiens and the powers that run the environment that sustains everybody. So there’s something about the awesome challenge of living fruitfully, making our way against the current oftentimes, that is muscle building. So you find that a lot with spiritual teachers. All the great traditions have something about how there is a reason why it’s hard to evolve. If it wasn’t hard, we would kick back.”  

Which is to say that there is no growth without pain, and that perhaps the destruction of the original site is giving way to a more fully grown version of the Wayfarers Chapel. 

“There is also a truism in nature that every life form has a life cycle,” Lawrence said. “And that’s true of the human being, at least from a physical level. When I sit in the chapel, I’m thinking often of the beauty and the challenge of being in this little project called life. So there’s that piece of spiritual lessons from nature, and the challenge, the storms that come through, the natural disasters that come through, This, too, is part of life. You can have long seasons of great harvest, and then you can have the devastations of climate. And how do you handle both of those?” 

Horak, the preservationist, has walked Battery Barnes site and tried to look at it through Lloyd Wright’s eyes. It was an almost startling experience, because the contours of the land cohered so well with Wright’s vision for the chapel, much as it does with Swedenbordian theology. 

“If he had been working with this site, which is similar but different, how would he have done it? And he would have been so pleased with this,” she said. “The views, the natural landscape, the flora of that site, the little clearings,  are all so beautiful. You could just imagine the chapel there, and the new spaces it will create. You can really see it. It could not be more perfect.” Pen