Unity Temple

Judged on plan, structure, purpose and site. The corner piers carry the roof, hold the stairs and carry the air: take them away and the room needs columns, the galleries need stairs elsewhere and the walls need windows. The busy street compels the light from above, the blank walls shutting out its noise; it compels the side entrance, and the entrance compels the cloister beneath the galleries. A congregation gathered to hear one speaker compels the galleries; the double purpose of worship and service compels the joining hall. What yields to the subtractive test: the cast ornament of the exterior capitals and much of the wood-strip pattern within; an interior of Unity House ordered more than required; and the four like faces of the block, for which an economy of building is a builder’s reason, not the room’s.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Disclosure in space is credited as fully as in words. What can be stated, and holds: liberal religion is not a procession toward an altar but a meeting of persons round speech, in light that carries no image; and worship and the service of others are one institution, entered by one door. The building says this in plan. There is no nave, no altar, no east and no aisle; the congregation sits round the speaker in tiers and sees itself; light falls equally on all from a ceiling of glass; the two blocks share a hall and an inscription. It discloses, too, a congregation in a noisy suburb withdrawing inward and upward rather than presenting a spire to the street. It stands at the bar, not above it: the inscription states the theology before the building enacts it, and the room’s meaning, once seen, is single.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Elevation is in the passage and in the room. It comes on entry: from the bright terrace into the low, dim hall, then into the cloisters under the galleries, then up a few steps into a room that opens to its full height and fills with warm light from above, as deliberate a compression and release as any building on the desk below the summit. It comes in the ceiling, the grid of amber coffers glowing like a field, and in the clerestory, which lets the sky in above the heads of the galleries. It recurs with every entry and with the light of each day. Height is bounded: the room is not large and its register is one, warmth and gathered calm; and the exterior, a closed grey block on a street, gives mass and gravity but little elevation, and many have found it forbidding rather than grand.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Two archetypes are built into plan and section, not applied. The first is the temple as a cube under heaven: a square room, a Greek cross within it, closed to the world and open only to the sky, the light from above the one sign of what is above; the name is chosen and the building makes it load-bearing. The second is the threshold rite: descent, darkness and a low passage, then ascent into light, and a departure toward the speaker and out by another way. The particular stays particular: an Oak Park parish, a budget, a congregation that sings and listens. What holds the axis below the bar is depth. Here the sky is a screen of diffused glass, the meeting house a gentler archetype than the cosmic one, and the myth most fully built is the humane one of the inscription, a period’s conviction more than an archetype.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance is twofold: the American Protestant church of the nineteenth century in Gothic or Romanesque dress, spire, nave and pointed windows, the congregation’s own burned church among them; and Wright’s own path, the Prairie houses and above all the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo (1904 to 1906), whose lit central court, galleries and corner stair towers this building takes over. The departure: no spire, no nave, no pointed arch, no window to the street; the church a cube of bare poured concrete, a material then of factories and footings, left exposed on a sacred public building; the entrance turned away from the street; interior space made the substance of the building. The stake was real and was paid: an untried finish, a tight budget overrun, cracks and leaks. Larkin had made the turn in plan two years before; this building made it sacred.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The form changes how worship is lived at every step. Arrival is made a rite: one leaves the street, enters low and dark and rises into the room, so that coming to worship is a passage and not the crossing of a porch. Sitting is made a gathering: no one sits far from the speaker, and the congregation in its galleries is part of what each member sees. Light is made equal: none comes from a side, none picks out an altar. Leaving is made a meeting, the congregation going out toward the minister. Worship and the parish’s social life share a door and a hall. Substitute a nave and a spire and almost all of this is lost: the procession, the hierarchy of front and back and the street return. Held below the summit because Unity House lives its purpose less distinctly than the temple, and the side entrance has always been hard for a stranger to find.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Evidence over promise: about 118 years of return and a substantial literature. The building has yielded to history, most fully in Joseph Siry’s monograph, which reads it through the congregation’s liberal theology and its budget; to formal analysis of the interlocking squares and the cross axis of the plan, from Hitchcock onward; to architects, Louis Kahn above all, whose served and servant spaces and whose First Unitarian Church at Rochester (1959 to 1969) answer it; and to conservation, where its restoration made it a case in the repair of early exposed concrete. The questions stay open: how far it is the first modern building, as Wright claimed, or a Prairie building in concrete; how much it owes to Larkin and to Japanese and classical sources; whether its reality is the space or the mass. Held lower because the room, once lived in, is clear.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Published since 1908 and in the Wasmuth portfolio of 1910, so force and reach are scored together. The field is American and European building of the century’s first decade, and church building in particular. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: interior space treated as the material of architecture, the building composed of interlocking volumes, the service structure housed in hollow piers, monolithic concrete made a finished architecture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through the Wasmuth publication it reached the Dutch and German avant-gardes, Robert van ’t Hoff’s concrete villa at Huis ter Heide (1915 to 1919) its clearest answer, though the line runs through the portfolio of a whole decade as much as through this building; in America it shaped Wright’s later public work and, at length, Kahn. In church building it found few direct followers.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole: plan, section, the two blocks, the hall, the light and the interior scheme are Wright’s and in place, and they have outlived the conditions that made them, the Oak Park parish of 1905 and the Prairie decade, as a model studied and answered for over a century. The use survives without a break: the congregation that commissioned the building still worships in it, which few buildings on the desk can claim. The fabric is charged: an exposed concrete shell that cracked and leaked from early in its life, whose concrete, roofs, finishes and services were repaired, reinstated and renewed in a restoration completed in 2017. Presence is real among architects and modest beyond them. The figure is the foot of the usual range for a building of its age with form whole and use unbroken, held there by the fabric.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. In the room the command is of the first rank and load-bearing: the roof set on four piers so that the walls can be closed and the light can come only from above; the piers made hollow to hold the stairs and the air; the galleries placed so that a congregation of hundreds sits near one voice; the light controlled by two layers of glass, the coffers and the clerestory, so that no glare reaches the floor; the proportion of a small room made to read as tall. The concrete was poured in place and left exposed, its aggregate washed. The costs are the maker’s: the roofs leaked, the concrete cracked and spalled, the junctions of slab and wall let in water and the reinforcement corroded. The exterior ornament is cast more than built. Command of the room outran command of the weather.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the closed concrete mass seen from Lake Street and the glowing amber grid of the ceiling seen from a gallery seat; weight and light, outside and inside. They obey one law, the square and its subdivision: the cube of the block, the square of the room, the Greek cross within it, the grid of the coffers, the squares of the leaded glass, the rectangles of the wood strips, the cubes of the lamps and the square capitals of the piers. The law holds from the massing to the pew end, and across the cross axis into Unity House, an oblong built of the same squares and joined by a hall of the same order. What bends it: Unity House is quieter and governed more by the oblong than by the square; the spheres of the lamps sit a little apart; and the street front takes its form from what it refuses.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Orders held: the sacred, as worship of God under light from above; the congregation as a community, gathered in tiers and in view of itself; the service of others and the parish’s social life, in Unity House; education, in the Sunday school; the city, as the street the building turns from and the suburb it serves; and the natural order, as daylight and the hours. The cross axis and the shared hall integrate them, so that they are held and not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, labour, the state, history except as the congregation’s own, death, with no burial and no memorial in the fabric, and individual consciousness. A parish church holds a congregation’s week, not a world, and the figure describes the form.

Score: 7.4 / 10