For 73 years it reigned, unique and serene, on a high plateau overlooking the Pacific Ocean: the Wayfarers Chapel, Frank Lloyd Wright Jr’s midcentury reinvention of what a church could be.
The photogenic, see-through sanctuary framed in a canopy of redwoods was beloved long before it became Instagram-famous. Jayne Mansfield was married there, Brian Wilson too. Last Christmas Eve, two weeks after the chapel had been designated a National Historic Landmark, it took three services to accommodate everyone who showed up to spend the holiday with chapel regulars. No one knew it would be the last one.
This month, Wayfarers Chapel is being dismantled, an emergency attempt to save the structure’s irreplaceable redwood, steel and stone components in the wake of a devastating landslide. By taking it apart now, before it’s too twisted and broken to ever reconfigure, the chapel’s leaders hope to give it a second life someday on stable ground. They don’t have the cash yet for a rebuild, but they’re doing what they can at this critical moment: spending nearly half a million dollars on triage.
The Palos Verdes Peninsula, the land mass where the chapel has sat since opening on Mother’s Day in 1951, has long been a geological anomaly. Slow-motion landslides buckled roads and cracked foundations there for decades. But in early February, a historic atmospheric river storm system hit LA county, sending the peninsula’s landslides into overdrive. Torrents of storm water infiltrated the many layers of brittle shale beneath the chapel, finally pooling on an ancient deposit of volcanic ash called bentonite which acts like malleable clay when moistened. The chapel’s bedrock started sliding on that liquified bentonite toward the ocean at a startling new rate of about seven inches a week. No structure could withstand that kind of torque for long, certainly not one made largely of glass. Shattering panes were one alarm, along with a dispiriting crack in the chapel’s cornerstone.
When the delicate, piece-by-piece dismantling is finished in a few more weeks, the chapel will sit in storage – perhaps for several years – until a new home is found. “Everyone has cried,” said Katie Horak, part of a preservation team from Architectural Resources Group, the firm tasked with the disassembly. “We’re in this profession because we love buildings like this. It’s the mourning of a sacred space.”
The Wayfarers emergency highlights the vulnerability of beloved cultural sites in an age of climate extremes. Scientists predicted that global heating would create more supercharged storms, but across disciplines, they have been shocked by how the pace of these disasters has sped up. “It’s a crying shame this happened,” said Mike Phipps, Rancho Palos Verdes city geologist. “This landslide has been monitored for the better part of 40 years – I can plot how it’s moved, and it’s never behaved like this. Rain is the culprit.”
While news reports prioritize immediate loss of life and homes after megastorms, preservationists are pleading for more attention to another type of loss: the destruction of heritage sites representing some of humanity’s most powerful memories and traditions.
“It’s really hitting home now,” said Jim Lindberg, senior policy director of the non-profit National Trust for Historic Preservation, which monitors climate-threatened sites and administers local grants to help shield them. “We’re finding there’s really no place that’s not vulnerable in one way or another.”
A chapel inspired – and threatened – by nature
Last Sunday morning, 30 Wayfarers regulars gathered in a borrowed sanctuary a few miles from their spiritual home. It was dark and chilly inside, a traditional Episcopal church with thick brick walls and stained-glass windows. The congregation, accustomed to worshipping with 360-degree views of cerulean sky, circling hawks, redwoods, ferns and hummingbirds, left the back doors open for extra light. The Rev Dr David Brown, pastor of Wayfarers Chapel for the last 18 years, stepped forward and welcomed his “Wayfaring crowd”.
“What a week, what a year …” he began, spending a few minutes updating everyone on the deconstruction. Later, when he asked for individual prayer requests, an older parishioner asked him to pray for their chapel. He did, asking God for “glimmers of hope along this journey”.
Wayfarers Chapel began a century ago as the dream of two women, Elizabeth Schellenberg and Narcissa Cox Vanderlip, both devotees of a Christian denomination dedicated to the ideas of 18th-century scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who believed humans could connect deeply to divine love and wisdom through nature. The concept inspired American renegades from Johnny Appleseed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called Swedenborg “a colossal soul”. By the 1920s, the ladies felt it was high time to build a national memorial to the theologian.
Vanderlip had money – she donated the 1.4 hectares (3.5 acres) Palos Verdes site and started looking for an architect. The project was interrupted by the second world war, but in the late 1940s, it landed in the lap of Lloyd Wright, eldest son of “organic architecture” visionary Frank Lloyd Wright. Lloyd had trained as a landscape architect, so he was already oriented toward marrying natural and structural elements. Before he started drawings for the chapel commission, he took a road trip to see California’s famed redwoods. Gazing up through their arched branches, he felt like he was in a sanctuary already, and it gave him the idea to design a radical departure from traditional church buildings, which he said felt like tombs.
“The concept was for life,” he told Wayfarers leaders before he died in 1978. “Infinite life, infinite space, not the burial crypt. I think we achieved that.”
Since then, the chapel’s popularity has only grown. After Covid lockdowns lifted, the landmark drew nearly half a million visitors annually, even if they weren’t particularly religious.
“They’d walk into that space and say, ‘I don’t know what I believe, but I feel something,’” said Brown. “The secret sauce was a real-time effect that was operating on this deeper level – it was a place to pause, reflect and touch the transcendent.”
Memories that powerful, and a local community that hasn’t given up on Wayfarers Chapel, could all help provide the momentum to see it resurrected someday. For now, John Cruikshank, mayor of Rancho Palos Verdes, says the city is working with chapel leaders to find a land-stable spot nearby to store the chapel’s pieces – one option is a former Nike missile site about 3 miles away.
Chapel leaders have stated they have “$5m in saved funds from past wedding services” to apply toward a potential rebuild, and a GoFundMe page they set up in February raised nearly $75,000. It’s a start, but restoration architects estimate the cost of an accurate reconstruction would be in the ballpark of $20m, a daunting gap for a small congregation.
Brown said he was encouraged by the way Notre Dame has raised funds from around the world as it recovers from its 2019 structural fire. And there are other examples of recovery and climate adaptation: the historic St James African Methodist Episcopal church in Mayfield, Kentucky, was rebuilt after a 2021 windstorm; a long-treasured lighthouse on Martha’s Vineyard was lifted, set on tracks and moved back from the edge of an ocean cliff; and most recently, the National Park Service received $20m of the Inflation Reduction Act to protect resources from climate impacts within park boundaries.
What we carry forward
A common thread in successful preservation efforts is the dogged involvement of local people determined to climate-proof what they treasure.
Marcy Rockman, a former National Park Service climate change specialist who now helps heritage sites and local groups adapt to the dangers of a warming world, says we urgently need to talk about how to prioritize irreplaceable intangibles, such as Indigenous wisdom that’s deeply linked to specific places, as well as tangible artefacts. She tells the story of visiting preservation colleagues in Scotland who were trying to help a shore community protect itself from sea level rise. Their frank approach stuck with her: “They said, ‘We cannot hold back the sea. We cannot keep things as they are. But we can help you carry forward some of what matters most about this place. What would you like that to be?’”
It’s an outlook that resonated with architect Liz MacLean, another member of the ARG team working at Wayfarers. During one of her first trips to the chapel, she received a surprise text from her college roommate, whose father had passed away unexpectedly. MacLean pulled up, still in shock and grieving for her friend. She gathered herself and walked up to the glass sanctuary.
“Her dad had been in the navy, and here I was, in a place called Wayfarers Chapel on the ocean. Those things felt connected somehow,” she remembers. “And I keep feeling moments like that whenever I’m on the site. I think it’s a spiritual place that was meant for all people.”
She’s currently working with contractors on the best way to attend to the chapel’s fractured cornerstone, how to cut around it, strap it tight so the crack is contained, and store it for repair someday. It’s a practical matter, but she knows how much rests on getting the details right at this moment in history.
“We can do our best to preserve the tangible,” MacLean said. “And then try to recreate conditions for those intangible moments sometime in the future.”