Dealing With The Brutalist Church

Has anyone suggested force?:

In Washington, D.C., about two blocks from the White House, there's a Christian Science church that looks more like a concrete fortress than a house of worship. The Third Church of Christ, Scientist — or the Third Church — is a hulking mass of raw concrete. There's one window, no steeple, and its bells are suspended from a slab of concrete that juts out from the side.

...LaVerne Hill, who works nearby, says she's loathed the place for years.

"It's awful," she says. "It looks like they just dumped a bunch of concrete down here and shaped it into a box."

Which is, in fact, what the architects did. The building was designed by Araldo Cossutta, who worked with I.M. Pei. It is a classic example of Brutalism, which was popular in the 1950s and 1960s but fell out of favor in the 1970s.

...Darrow Kirkpatrick, a longtime church member, says the building sends precisely the wrong message.

"We think it says, 'Stay away.' Something goes on in here that they don't want to get outside, which is exactly wrong for all Christianity. We don't think the architecture conveys taking the Word to the people."

...The congregation wants to tear down the building and build another, smaller church. But it can't.

In 1991 — unknown to the church's members — a group of preservationists applied to have the Third Church designated a historic landmark. From that moment, the congregation couldn't touch the building. Last year, the city made it an official landmark, and now the Third Church is suing to have the status removed.

Kirkpatrick says the restrictions infringe on their freedom of religion.

"Nothing expresses a church's religious exercise more than its architecture. And this architecture does not express our theology and our exercise. Brutalism is not our religious expression," he says.

..."Buildings go through these vicissitudes of time," says Ott. "The city is about preserving a historical construct, and we have to be cautious. It may be considered ugly today. Will we consider it as ugly in 50 years? We do not know."